Introduction: Whose Life Is It Anyway?
You cannot tell always by looking
what is happening.
More than half a tree is spread out
in the soil under your feet.
Teenagers have always been a challenge. One parent observes, “Life with a teen can be compared to wrestling with an octopus.” Some have suggested sending them on a prolonged six-year camping experience. If only it were that easy. People often say that the first step toward recovery is to admit that you have a problem. Your problem is that there is no simple escape plan. You will raise your teenagers, and with a little luck, you and your teens will live to tell about it.
For many of us who have survived these years, the dread of adolescence dominates any discussion about parenting. Only after the ritual commiserating do we share the joys of adolescence. In fact, as parents of our now-adult children, we continue to talk about our own parenting skills. We admit that we might be sharing too much information (TMI) about what we didn’t know then, couldn’t quite understand, and should have (in our offsprings’ opinion) done differently. And now two of our children are raising their children, our grandchildren. But that’s a topic for another book.
While the challenges of parenting teens are nothing new, today’s context looks drastically different. Teens are growing up in a landscape where they are digitally connected every single moment of every single day and night, fully justifying our name for them: iTeen. iTeens are buried under their web of digital networks. These digital connections not only redefine how to maintain emotional connection with your kids, but also redefine privacy. For iTeens, there is very little privacy in the way that we historically have defined it. At the same time, parents are expected to set protections and rules around social media. We somehow have to help our teens to understand that, without boundaries, the information they so easily share lasts forever. Their data are like plastic bottles; they never go away.
iTeens may appear sophisticated because they are digital natives, yet they are unsophisticated in many ways because they have been so sheltered. Their play has been monitored and overscheduled. They aren’t on their own, and they have little unscheduled downtime without a screen. This can have an impact on imagination, problem solving, and the ability to deal with free time, which they too often label as boredom.
This new tech reality presents a fundamental shift that separates the experience of today’s teens from that of previous generations. It is difficult for parents to maintain authority and stay connected emotionally to their teens with the onslaught of unfiltered information, constant stimulation, and instant access iTeens thrive on. It is difficult for parents to have face-to-face conversations in this world of longer work hours, shortened attention spans, and 140-character tweets and texts. Deep relationships don’t develop and can’t be sustained in a millisecond. Parents and teens try to connect during a series of transitions, interrupted conversations, and planned activities. For these reasons, parenting during these times can seem a daunting task.
The iTeens we discuss in this book are millennials, people born between 1980 and 2000, more than 80 million in all, according to data from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (2012). They are also known as the click generation (click on it); all growing up during the technology age. They are the children of baby boomers, the Me Generation. Their mothers and fathers include yuppies, soccer moms, and helicopter parents, adapting to the age of technology—some better than others. Together the two generations (kids and their parents) are coping with stagnant wages, the shock of having seen the worst recession since the Great Depression, and concerns about whether economic recovery can ever bring the return of enough middle class jobs. Some teens may not be able to live the lifestyle they were fortunate to have lived as children. Their parents are coming to terms with the possibility that they may not be able to retire but will just get progressively more tired. This combination of events often creates a fragmented world for teens. We suspect they are growing up less optimistic than their parents were.
Raising children has always been about teaching meaningful values and skills and about providing opportunities for children to be self-confident, self-reliant, and resilient. In the past, the slow pace of social evolution made these tasks easier. Values, skills, and the basis for self-confidence were somewhat static. Teenagers have always challenged authority, which is part of their developmental “job,” but family and community have traditionally kept them in check. Only in the past 150 years has the pace of change become rapid enough to notice in real time.
Today parenting has become less about teaching children what is genuinely important for them to learn and more about trying to ensure their happiness. What teens want in the moment has become more important than what they need to become productive and resilient adults. In some ways, the balancing act of the relationship has tipped away from the parent to the child. Many parents currently want to be friends with their children, and this new desire dilutes the essential and unique role parents play.
We learned many lessons from the first books we wrote about teens and, subsequently, from the books we wrote about parenting adult children. Combining our careers—one of us is a clinical social worker, the other an educator—we have been analyzing successful and challenging parenting for, between us, 80 years. We have focused on teenagers for over half of that time, beginning with our own children. (We each have an adult son and an adult daughter.) We have learned that, although the global and American societies are changing rapidly, many parenting tasks remain mostly unchanged. The what remains the same; the how is different.
What are the lessons we have learned? We believe communication and connection are essential to creating a lasting and loving relationship with our children; you can’t be friends with your children when they are teens. This doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the same things and share much in common, but parenting is very different from a friendship. A friendship requires being on a level playing field. We hope you are never at the same stage of development as your teen.
We also believe in a long view of parenting, which means you have to pace yourself—when you can. All of the research indicates that teens are not fully developed until their midtwenties, so what was once a discrete developmental stage now goes into adulthood, 6 to 10 years later than anticipated. We have learned that overparenting (hovering over kids’ every move and shielding them from difficulties) can sustain dependency and hinder self-esteem, prolonging this already-extended period of adolescence. Growing up is an incremental journey—a marathon and not a sprint!
We have learned that you can use some characteristics of adulthood as a framework for parenting teens. These characteristics require tools that can be intentionally taught so that teens can become resilient adults.
We have also learned the hard way that our job is not to make kids happy; that’s their job. However, we provide an important safety net for children to be able to make mistakes, learn from them, and develop a deeper, more authentic self-confidence. Teens need to know that we are there and that we love them unconditionally, but our job is not to fix everything for them. Our job is to give them increasing responsibility so they can become self-reliant. Unfortunately, and typically, our job sometimes degenerates into a fight of wills, and teens don’t feel supported, they feel nagged. Duct tape seems to be the only answer. The mother of 14-year-old Henry remembered how this goes, starting with her attempt at a helpful reminder:
“Henry, don’t forget to call Grandma to thank her for your birthday present.” Henry sulked and shrieked, “Mom, you’ve reminded me three times this week about calling Grandma. Let it go already! You don’t think I’m responsible, so you bug me about the same things over and over again.” Before I could utter a word in my defense, Henry gave me the silent treatment and then continued to lash out angrily that he was perfectly capable of remembering to call his grandma. It’s amazing how quickly an innocent interaction ignites into a full-scale war. And do you think he called Grandma?
Once they become adolescents, teens think we become dumber by the minute. It’s hard for us ever to be right. At the same time, teens want and need our approval. This need evokes contradictory messages, because our children believe adults are clueless about the things that matter most to teens; parents’ experiences are outdated, and their interest is suspect. Even though adolescents perceive their parents to be Neanderthals, parents have to keep their messages coming. As often attributed to Mark Twain, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
Long View of Parenting
Society once looked at the teen years as an isolated period of development. But this is no longer true. The teen years are currently described by mental health professionals and sociologists as part of the continuum of children growing up. The teen years blend into the pre-adult years, which then lead to children becoming emerging adults. At some point, they ought to carry the title “adults” without any extra descriptors. However, many conditions in society stand in the way of an easy transition into adulthood.
These shifts in family life have resulted in significant societal changes. For example, the Affordable Care Act now allows children to be covered under their parents’ health insurance until the age of 26. Same-sex marriage has provided a legal validation for families that once was reserved only for a heterosexual couple and their children. A growing percentage of 20- to 30-year-olds hold poorly paid or unpaid internships or jobs without benefits. Paying off higher education loans, well into middle age, means moving back home, experiencing greater financial dependency on parents, and delaying milestones such as buying a home, having children, and establishing neighborhood roots (Davidson, 2014).
The age at which our children can support themselves, let alone a family, has reached a new high in the last two decades. In fact, an astonishing 85 percent of college seniors planned to move back home with their parents after graduation (Dickler, 2012). This is affected further by high unemployment—nearly 15 percent for those aged 20 to 24—which has made finding a job difficult. Young people also suffer from unrealistic expectations that often don’t match their skills and job availability. And without a job, there’s nowhere for these young adults to go but back to their old bedrooms, curfews, and chore charts.
Understanding these changes, along with the long view of parenting, creates new expectations for both parents and teens. Parents should expect a prolonged period of adolescence, giving more guidance on an array of issues that earlier generations handled without much parental input. Parents must intentionally teach and provide experiences for teens to develop grit and perseverance, which means allowing them to own their successes and failures. Parents also should expect to build with their teens the foundation for a lifelong relationship with mutuality and connection. The perspective we offer in this book is predicated on this long view of parenting, and the new brain research supports this view. Teens don’t understand consequences until they reach their midtwenties.
In addressing these new changes, it is helpful to recognize that certain experiences also remain the same during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Some of these common experiences include becoming your own person, forming peer relationships, developing job and career skills, and beginning to determine a purpose and path for future life, perhaps with a partner.
All of us remember that after, during, and immediately preceding our teen years, we expected to cast off childhood and assume an instant adult identity. This, of course, is a fairy tale. iTeens need parents who can help them become the adults they want to become. This is hard when clear markers such as graduation from college or even marriage no longer define the notion of an adult. Teen years are a time, as Carol Dweck (2007) discusses in her research, when mastery takes time and mistakes are good. As parents, we want to be careful not to overly praise or push kids in ways that make them afraid to risk making errors or taking wrong turns. These short-term disappointments are, in fact, perfect opportunities for learning and building resilience. Being a teen means using time to explore what one is passionate about while developing essential skills that will serve throughout one’s lifetime.
We will use the characteristics of maturity we have learned from our experiences to give parents of teens a road map to guide their children. This is not a time to opt out. This is a time to support, observe, and be available.
Tools for Building Characteristics of Maturity
Think about the teen years as an apprenticeship. What do teens need in order to become productive and successful adults, however they choose to define success? To identify these characteristics, we have worked backward. We have researched successful adults, held focus groups, talked with and listened to experts, and added our personal experiences as professionals and parents. We have determined that, for a teen to become a productive and resilient adult, the following six behavioral characteristics are essential:
1. Persistence and grit
2. Self-management and impulse control
3. Personal responsibility and self-reliance
4. Empathy and self-awareness
5. Boundaries and setting limits
6. Cultural competence/accepting differences
In this book, we provide strategies and stories to develop these behavioral characteristics as we discuss the issues that confront teens. We provide a how-to book rather than a what-not-to-do book. Following are some of the topics we address:
The landscape of teenagers
Entitlement and its impact on building self-reliance and self-confidence
The characteristics of maturity that parents of teens can use as a guide in raising healthy, competent, and resilient children
Current brain research, including the relationship of brain development to teen behavior and risk-taking activities
The impact of gender differences
The impact of popular culture on teens
The impact of social media on teenage behavior
Teens’ experiences and challenges at school
The relentless and extensive consequences of bullying and harassment
The importance of friendship for teens
The qualities of a perfectly imperfect parent
Building a foundation for healthy connection
The long view of parenting
Teenage success requires emotional clarity and resilience. Parental success requires knowledge, affirmation, and community. We have used our focus groups to discuss meaningful parenting and to validate its effectiveness. We provide you with strategies to create household and community environments that enable teens to learn to identify feelings and build emotional intelligence. Using these skills inoculates teens so they are better equipped to handle inevitable failure and loss.
Teenagers require substantial resilience to navigate this challenging developmental stage in an increasingly demanding world. Research demonstrates that the ability to be resilient can be learned, and we provide parents with strategies to build resilience. By teaching resilience and providing opportunities to practice it, we can change a child’s life trajectory from risk to success, and our children need to learn this ability from the adults in their families, schools, and communities.
Using Fuzzy Logic for Parenting
In the mathematical concept of “fuzzy logic,” uncertainties and discrepancies become routine yet clearer and decipherable in time. Parenting teens could be described in similar terms. The process doesn’t follow the time frame for the scripted linear logic of a 30-minute TV sitcom. Another analogy is the archetypal discussion with kids about sex: one talk doesn’t provide them with all of the information they need to make responsible choices. That goal takes a collection of talks in response to different developmental needs, along with positive role models who help to guide children to responsible decisions. As parents, we have to provide many healthy messages over the span of our children’s growing up and hope they incorporate those messages into their perception of the world and decision making. Our job as parents is to communicate our values and beliefs while separating our struggles from theirs; to provide opportunities for our teens to develop what we call “a broader integrated identity,” as defined in the next paragraph; and to help them heal when necessary.
A broader integrated identity is one in which a teen’s sense of self is not completely dependent on any one interest or thing. Having a more expansive sense of self allows teens to stay centered and more secure in response to having less-than-stellar athletic skills, surviving a fight with a boyfriend or girlfriend, getting a low grade on a history exam, or not being invited to a party. These experiences are part of life; some of them happen to everyone at one time or another.
Barbara, the mother of 22-year-old Alison, explained how she and her husband helped their daughter develop a broader sense of self in the face of academic difficulties:
Alison struggled so much with reading that in ninth grade they put her in special-education classes in our large, urban high school. When we first discovered her dyslexia, we were relieved, because the discrepancy between the bright girl we knew and the girl in the special-education classes finally made sense. The most important lesson we learned during this period was that the only way to save her self-image was to find something other than academics where she could excel.
For Alison it was dance. When she performed in front of an audience, she came alive. She was a different person—secure, confident, and creative. Alison lit up on the stage. This was an area where she could be competitive, and it provided her with another “self” that she could rely on when she was feeling unsuccessful at school. The self-confidence she gained from dance spilled over into other parts of her life, including, over time, doing well in school. She could draw upon her success in dance to help her define, in a positive way, who she was.
Alison’s parents refused to let her be pigeonholed by only one category of her life. They understood the importance of finding their daughter’s passion and supporting her. The more opportunities we provide for our kids to experience their own competence, the more resilient they become.
Another important component to raising teenagers is being available to them. Staying close to your child may prevent risk-taking behaviors. The closer you are, the more opportunities you have to empower them. Contrary to the popular belief that little children need their parents more than adolescents do, we know that these years also require attentiveness and close supervision.
What we have learned from talking to many, many parents is that their desire to stay close to their children during the teenage years is universal. They just don’t always know how. In writing this book, it is our intent to present parents with a practical guide to further understanding the emotional dimensions of their teens and increasing their children’s competence and connection.
Your family has operating principles and values that are unique to you and parenting styles that affect what works and what doesn’t. We encourage you to be deliberate about including the principles and values specific to your culture and heritage. Helping your teens develop a strong sense of self requires building confidence and pride in their background. Having self-confidence increases the resiliency of teens and their sense of well-being as they address the trials and tribulations of their age.
Often, you won’t know in advance what specific methods will work with your iTeen. However, by remaining engaged and constantly trying, you will become more knowledgeable about what works for them and when. Even with those strategies that do work, you will need flexibility, variety, and a sense of humor to move ahead with your teen during these demanding years. Don’t despair; if you stay involved and connected, you will also build your own stories of precious and memorable moments.