Resisting the Entitlement Trend
Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?
The Changing American Family
Over the past few decades, we have experienced enormous cultural shifts, which have expanded and altered the definition of the American family. The changes stem from a whole host of factors, including greater career opportunities for women, more divorces, legalization of same-sex marriage, emergence of households with single parents or two working parents, new patterns of immigration from non-European countries, defunding of support programs, and the impact of media, technology, and popular culture.
Just as the definition of family has changed, so have our ideas about what is best for our children. Child-rearing beliefs vary and change over time. Each generation tries to correct the mistakes it believes its parents made. Currently many parents emphasize happiness over temporary childhood discomfort, which can result in our children’s increased sense of entitlement. Parenting experts are researching the consequences of praising children regardless of what they do or how they perform and how this leads to a loss of motivation, fear of failure, unhappiness, and a sense of entitlement (Gottlieb, 2011).
Several parenting strategies can encourage a child’s sense of entitlement (Mogel, 2010). These include overpraising, overinvolvement, overprotecting, becoming bailout specialists, parental indulgence, and a general absence of rules and clear boundaries. Also significant is a child’s expectation of instantaneous gratification, fueled by technology and 24/7 social media. This chapter takes a closer look at what causes entitlement and why it is a problem. It also identifies parenting strategies that are more appropriate and can correct the problem. Finally, it introduces some principles for taking a “long view” of parenting, which is required by the changes in society and shifts in parenting philosophy that together have stretched adolescence beyond the teen years to the early twenties.
Excessive Praise and the Courage to Fail
Many experts express concern that when parents demonstrate approval that isn’t really authentic, it robs their teens of incentive and motivation. Kids know when approval is meant to make them feel good but isn’t based on real accomplishments. It’s important for teens to feel that they actually have earned approval. iTeens may give up because in trying just a little, they feel they have done enough. In fact, some teens have learned to expect praise for even the smallest effort. When these teens encounter obstacles, they often give up rather than fail. We have all heard the conventional wisdom that failure is an opportunity to learn and to try harder next time. There is, however, a real consequence in never trying for fear of failure. When you frame your life around success alone without experiencing failure, you stifle growth and the endless possibilities of new opportunities and experience.
Many parents fall into the trap of giving their children the star treatment by excessively complimenting their talent and intelligence. Parents have been guided for decades by the conviction of mental health professionals and educators that praising children will create confident kids, and that this confidence in turn will enable kids to tackle difficult tasks. These parents believe that telling children they are smart and capable will be an automatic self-fulfilling prophecy and help build their children’s sense of self. They worry that if they don’t give their children enough positive feedback and attention, the kids will become insecure and unhappy. But in fact, overpraising and neglecting to let our children fail is being done at the expense of facilitating self-reliance and motivation.
Will, a high-school freshman, decided not to try out for the junior varsity football team after he dropped the ball twice in the first practice. He was used to success, and initially he had taken it for granted that he would be on the team. When he didn’t play his best during the first day of tryouts, he couldn’t tell himself that one bad day is just that: one bad day. Instead of focusing and practicing more, he gave up and decided he wasn’t good enough. This is the dark side of too much unwarranted praise and not enough persistence to try harder. It creates a child who gives up too quickly when things get tough. Fifteen-year-old Mark described a similar feeling about his performance in school: “I feel the pressure of having to live up to the label my family puts on me. I am the ‘smart one.’ I find myself looking for shortcuts to succeed, for fear of falling short. I have too much to lose if I get a bad grade, and I want to please my parents, even if it means cheating.”
Too often parents treat their children as if the kids are the sun, moon, and stars combined. Consequently, their kids begin to believe it. Because many parents expect their kids to be outstanding in everything, anything less than stardom becomes unacceptable for both the parents and their children. In fact, according to an editorial in the New York Times, “Some high schools have 10, 20 or 30 valedictorians, along with bloated honor rolls and a surplus of graduation prizes. Many kids at all grade levels are ‘bubble-wrapped’ in a culture that doesn’t praise effort nearly as much as it does accomplishment” (Bruni, 2013). As a result, the students have an unrealistic and inflated sense of their own success.
This widespread emphasis on kids being special and maintaining this unrealistic expectation of success contributes to what Madeline Levine, author of The Price of Privilege, calls the “mass delusion” of communities in which parents assume their child is destined to be in the Ivy League. Levine lectures to high-school parents, telling them, “A majority of your children are average,” pausing as a chorus of sharp inhalations drain the air out of the room. “And, guess what? So are you” (Shulte, 2014).
Lisa, now a mother of a 12-year-old, revealed, “I was mortified when my parents wanted to include a highlight film of my tennis career with my college applications. I was a good player, but no Serena Williams. My parents believed I was so gifted that I never really developed a realistic sense of my playing ability. Living under their microscope made me hesitant to try other sports.” Lisa’s experience makes sense. When you’re expected to be special, it’s hard to accept making mistakes, which in turn prevents you from trying new things.
Some parents engage in excessive approval because their identities are tied to their children’s performance and achievements. Parenting is not an alter-ego sport. As psychologist Wendy Mogel likes to caution, “Our children are not our masterpieces” (Gottlieb, 2011). Too many parents confuse their own needs with their children’s.
Constant praise and inauthentic approval do not necessarily result in self-confident children. When the value of hard work is not reinforced, genuine self-confidence and self-reliance are difficult to attain. Parents who praise every activity, every piece of writing, and every drawing do their children a disservice. Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times, “There are sports teams and leagues in which no kid is allowed too much more playing time than another and in which excessive victory margins are outlawed. Losing is looked upon as pure trauma, to be doled out gingerly” (2013). A middle-school basketball coach said,
This season my team started out like the Bad News Bears; they were just not very good. But after a month of hard work and practice, they finally jelled as a team and played their hearts out every time they had a game. The last game of our season we were up by a significant amount of points, and the other coach asked me to tell my best shooters to go easy in order for his team to save face. It put me in a tough position and went against everything I taught my players. What kind of message is that for my students and the ones on the opposing team?
The “everyone gets a trophy” philosophy is based on empty praise and the false notion that kids are so fragile they could be damaged by not feeling special. Often, kids are rewarded for just participating without any greater reward for determination, resolve, or actual achievement.
As a result of parents’ excessive praise, teens may either pursue perfection or avoid challenge. In pursuing perfection, they are constantly trying to get it right, to stand out and to be considered special. Parents’ goal for their children should be to have a realistic sense of themselves and their skills and abilities, which allows them to learn what it takes to succeed and how to do it. This doesn’t mean that you don’t encourage your children or provide them with opportunities to demonstrate their skills. Rather, it means that children will benefit when parents can accept them for who they are.
However, not all praise is bad. What works is to applaud effort and actual accomplishment. When you say things like “You really tried hard at that” and “That was such a good idea,” you are praising the effort and real achievement. Praising effort is good because it rewards children for staying involved and trying hard. But unwarranted praise comes with unintended surprises and consequences.
Hovercraft Parenting and Overinvolvement
Hovercraft parenting is overly vigilant and hovers overhead like a drone. Parents swoop down in an attempt to protect their teens from hitting bottom or failing at an activity. The paradox of showering your teens with attention in this way is that it doesn’t allow them to learn to be accountable for their behavior. It bears repeating: kids need to fail. When we protect our children from natural consequences, we ultimately increase their sense of powerlessness and sense of entitlement. Alicia, a high school freshman, said:
Frankly, I’m scared of my shadow, and I blame my parents. They see danger everywhere. My friends take the bus to the mall, but my parents won’t let me go with them. This summer I want to be a mother’s helper, and they think caring for a neighbor’s child is too much responsibility. I feel like a shrink-wrapped kid. If their surveillance doesn’t let up, I’ll start lying and say I’m at my friend’s house when I’m somewhere else.
Hovering and overdoing prevents the development of self-reliance in teenagers, even though it sometimes stems from a real threat and from efforts to keep a child safe. The mother of 17-year-old Megan recalled,
When Megan was younger, she had awful stomach cramps, and I dragged her to doctors until she was diagnosed with celiac disease. It broke my heart to see her doubled over in pain, and I did everything I could to make her comfortable. Since her diagnosis, I’ve been as vigilant as a hawk, not only making sure that her diet is gluten free, but using a separate toaster for bread with wheat to prevent cross-contamination. My husband is telling me to back off and let Megan be in charge of what she eats. He believes that she’s been old enough to take charge of her diet for quite some time and should have this experience before she leaves for college. While I know he’s right, I continue to struggle to hold back, especially when Megan smiles and says, “Mom, you make it best; can you do it?”
Years before the college application process begins, some parents place tremendous emphasis on building an effective résumé for college. These parents put together their child’s college application very early and intentionally. College admissions officers report being able to spot applications that reveal that parents had their child spend every summer in a program geared to wow the admissions officer. As a result, too much time is spent curating a résumé, and too little is spent on developing life skills. Consequently, teens are anxious about whether they can take care of themselves, yet at the same time, they enjoy the benefits of their parents overdoing for them.
A mother with a different perspective offered, “I want to make sure that when my daughter starts college, she is not one of those ‘bat-out-of high-school’ kids, the ones who had everything arranged and scheduled for them. These kids are massively unprepared for living on their own.” Remember, if you’re hovering, you’re not allowing your children to learn how to take care of themselves. Development is an incremental process. Teens have to build the base skills before they can excel. The analogy here is a baby learning how to crawl and then walk. The effort progresses one movement or one step at a time.
Another catchy term for overinvolved parents who try to eliminate every barrier from their teen’s path is “snowplow” parents. These parents respond to the increasing educational demands by taking responsibility for the work. Science projects are now produced by PhD parents, and term papers are cowritten with journalist parents. One father said,
Andrew attends a private school that attracts international students. For his eighth-grade science fair, Andrew did a great job of demonstrating electrical charges by making puffed cereal jump in the air. My wife and I thought this was a great idea; it met the requirements of the fair, and most importantly, he could do it himself. One of his classmates was the grandson of a high official in Kuwait. The palace engineer completed his science project. It was no surprise when he won first prize. The parents all remarked, “Our kids didn’t lose to an eighth-grade classmate; they lost to the country of Kuwait!”
When parents are overinvolved, it’s no wonder that grown children have difficulty making their own choices and accepting the consequences of their mistakes. Author of The Blessings of a Skinned Knee and parenting expert Wendy Mogel observes, “The extended adolescence results in college deans referring to overprotected kids without the ability to handle their problems with roommates or laundry as teacups and burned out, dazed survivors of bewildering boot camp as krispies” (2004). Because the effect of parental overinvolvement may stifle teenage development and growth, we need to understand fully how parents can foster maturity during the teenage years.
Many parents who thought they’d have more self-control feel a lot of pressure from other parents to jump on the hovercraft. Have you experienced a pang of insecurity when listening to your friends talk about what they’ve planned for their kids? Kate, the mother of a high-school junior, revealed her anxiety:
I’m not an overly anxious mother, so I wasn’t prepared for being so intimidated by the number of college visits my friend had scheduled for her son. I thought my son would just make arrangements with some of his buddies that were already attending schools, hang out with them, get a sense of the place, and apply to those that were most appealing. Now I have discovered that parents have made elaborate plans to do multiple trips with prearranged interviews. I began to wonder, Is he going to college, or are we going to college? If I’m going, I’d prefer a school in a big city, but I digress. I’ve already been to school; now it’s his turn! I think I’d better get a grip, because staying grounded is going to be hard when surrounded by my friends!
Another parent offered these insights:
The best advice I got in the fall of my daughter’s senior year in high school was from the father of twins already in college. He said, “Hold on tight and fasten your seat belt. For the next six months, the anxiety from other parents will throw you off balance. Their fear spreads through other senior parents like a virus. Remember, this year will pass, and your daughter will probably be happy with the school she gets into.”
Bailout and Fix-It Specialists
We fix everything, because we can. Parents are still under the illusion that they can control and influence their children’s health and success. But failing is underrated! In fact, teenagers learn from disappointments. Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, in an interview with Lori Gottlieb for The Atlantic, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort.” He believes that if kids can’t experience painful feelings, they won’t acquire “psychological immunity.” “It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explains. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle” (Gottlieb, 2011).
We need to let them grieve and be heartbroken when they fail to make the team or when they lose their first girlfriend or boyfriend. Feeling let down, hurt, and discouraged is part of life. To become resilient, teens need to know they can survive pain and how to do it. Our job is to provide support and help them develop the coping skills to get through the difficult times, rather than making life momentarily easy by doing everything for them. None of us is comfortable when our kids are frightened, sad, or unhappy; however, we’re doing them a disservice if we deny them the opportunity to develop self-reliance and life skills. We are most effective as parents when we expect them to use their own resources to confront their fears, cope with adversity, and achieve their goals.
This approach means we take a backseat and limit our involvement to support and coaching. By doing so, we encourage teens to handle and learn from discomfort and difficult situations and show them that we have confidence in their abilities. Teaching them how to deal effectively with uncomfortable feelings actually protects them from seeking unhealthy ways to escape. Teenagers who can’t tolerate emotional discomfort often use sex, porn, alcohol, or drugs because they haven’t learned to self-soothe. Unless we want our children to turn to less healthy ways of self-regulating, we need to let them fix and bail out for themselves as much as possible. Entitlement undermines their ability to begin the task of taking care of themselves as they are able.
Parents, writers, and mental-health professionals are increasingly talking about entitlement and its negative effect on our children. American children are incredibly indulged, writes Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker. We have showered them with technology, video games, and other things, along with giving them too much influence and power. In Kolbert’s article, she quotes Sally Koslow, author of Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest: “Our offspring have simply leveraged our braggadocio, good intentions, and overinvestment,” and our children “inhabit ‘a broad savannah of entitlement that we’ve watered, landscaped, and hired gardeners to maintain.’ She recommends letting the grasslands revert to forest: ‘The best way for a lot of us to show our love would be to learn to un-mother and un-father’” (Kolbert, 2012).
One of the moms in our focus groups told us about her daughter. Jenny became interested in collecting quarters from each state when she was eight years old. To encourage her, Jenny’s dad sensibly bought her a beautifully bound book to hold the coins. But Jenny eventually grew impatient with the amount of time it was taking to collect the whole set and started to lose interest. Jenny’s father’s instinct was to complete the book by going to the bank and buying $20 in quarters at one time. Fortunately, her mom intervened and said, “If you do this, it will rob Jenny of the opportunity to find the coins for herself. She won’t get the joy of discovery as she accumulates each coin.” Mom was right to take the long view. If Dad had simply bought the coins, Jenny would have learned that she could reach her goals by complaining, giving up, and waiting for Dad to make it happen. She wouldn’t have felt a sense of accomplishment in completing the task on her own. Nor would she have had the opportunity to simply enjoy the process of collecting, which in and of itself can be rewarding. When we rush in to fix things, we squash our children’s motivation and deny them the ability to develop skills that foster confidence, grit, and self-reliance.
So Why Do We Parent This Way?
We parent this way because we are overly invested in our children’s success. Too often parents’ motivation to take charge is largely tied to their pride in their children’s successes and accomplishments and how these reflect on them. When parents jump in and do things for their children, it’s often more a reflection of their own anxiety and needs. This potentially deprives their kids of the opportunity to develop competence and a strong sense of self. When parents too frequently push and direct children, their children are less likely to develop internal motivation and persistence or take pride in their own accomplishments (Bronson, 2007).
We parent this way because we are uncomfortable setting limits and sitting with our children’s unhappiness and frustration. The father of a 16-year-old son said, “Josh tells me he’s sad and that it confuses him because he knows so well how good he has it. In fact, the worst part of his angst is his guilt about being depressed.” This dad isn’t alone. Several therapists we interviewed describe their teenage patients talking about anxiety and emptiness that they can’t attribute to clinical depression or absent parents. When nearly a third of seniors at McLean High School in Virginia say they’ve been depressed for more than two weeks because of feeling empty, unworthy, and under too much pressure, it’s a sign that parents have to stop hovering and start setting boundaries for the mental health of their kids (Shulte, 2014).
We parent this way because setting limits for teens requires more time and energy than many parents have to give at the end of a long workday. And no one wants to feel like a “mean” mom or dad. In the short term, it is often easier to surrender than to face a screaming fight with a teen. As one father put it, “I saw each disagreement as a potential tiresome battle requiring too much energy, so I rarely took a stand … whether it was just one more bedtime snack or extending curfew. Now my son is sure he can convince me to give in on anything. I understand why he thinks he has the power to sway me on any given demand, because I caved in over the years and lost the parenting war.” Only when parents can project forward and understand how the short-term compromises of today fuel the battles of tomorrow can they find the strength to set more limits and to say no.
This overly involved parenting style places a higher priority on harmony and momentary happiness. Parents who avoid this kind of conflict miss opportunities to teach the skills necessary for success and future adulthood. Children will always push against their parents’ rules, but they need the rules to bump up against so they can learn and develop. Without limits, children feel anxious and rudderless, lost at sea. When parents defer to their children, the children suffer because they fail to understand reality.
When adolescents have few limits, they have a hard time exercising control. The ability to show restraint is critical to self-discipline and maturity. It is a parent’s responsibility to provide limits. In fact, parents who don’t set boundaries may do harm. One parent commented, “I know that I’m guilty of coddling my children. My fear is that I’m preventing them from going out into the world and acquiring the basics of life for themselves. I see an unprecedented level of entitlement showing up as a lax attitude toward self-development, literacy, and the challenges they face.” Parents are often unsure how to draw the line between being too soft when their children need tough love and too withholding when their children need time-limited parental support. Limits are the antidote to misplaced entitlement.
And finally, we parent this way because we feel pressure from juggling work and family. We sometimes respond to the hectic pace of life by failing to set and enforce boundaries and rules. We don’t want to spend the limited time we have with our children teaching rules of behavior and setting limits and boundaries. Instead, we tend to avoid conflict by focusing on doing for our children and giving them what we think they want to make them happy. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wisely said, “Do you know the surest way to make your child miserable? Let him have everything he wants; … his wants increase in proportion to the ease with which they are satisfied” (Bartleby, 2001).
Why Do We Need a Long View of Parenting?
Currently, launching our teens into adulthood is more circuitous than it was in previous generations. The journey is not as fast, nor is the path as clear as it was when today’s parents were in their teens. This sociological change has developed, in part, from parents who confuse overinvestment with loving their kids. We understand that this is a difficult balancing act for parents. However, short-term parenting solutions are not necessarily going to get teens where they need to be to become mature adults.
As a result, we have identified some characteristics of maturity that will provide you, as parents of teenagers, with a road map for raising persistent, motivated, gritty, and resilient teens who are less afraid of making mistakes. The information in this book is intended to fill an information gap and help parents to see the long view of parenting. These characteristics can help parents guide their children toward adulthood so they can adapt more effectively to crisis and change. Persistent effort is a learnable skill, and to better prepare teens for the challenges ahead, parents need to shift from praising the product to praising the effort. Having a clearer understanding of where you want to go will help you become more consistent in your responses to the inevitable surprises, shocks, and potential bombshells you will encounter during adolescence. Most important, this practical guidance will better prepare your teens for the inevitable surprises, shocks, and bombshells they will encounter throughout their lives.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Laying the Groundwork for Adult Maturity
Children learn to have self-confidence by internalizing the healthy parts of the relationships they have with their parents and other caregivers. Successful parenting during the teen years may not be readily apparent until the teens become adults. However, the foundation you build is critical to your children becoming more independent over time.
It’s difficult to measure maturity, so we need standards to guide us. In Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, Daniel Goleman states that emotional intelligence consists of qualities that include self-awareness, impulse control, persistence, self-motivation, empathy, and social deftness. These characteristics enable people to become competent, mature adults.
Understanding the characteristics needed to build maturity gives parents a framework to help their teens negotiate their own lives more effectively. Demonstrating these characteristics and providing opportunities for teens to develop them is one of the great challenges of twenty-first-century parenting.
What are these behavioral characteristics?
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
Let’s take a closer look at each of these characteristics.
Persistence/Grit
While all teenagers experience anxiety and self-doubt when con fronted with a difficult task, some will give up, and others will push through their discouragement. The difference between the teens who quit and those who persevere is their ability to tolerate frustration before achieving their goal or to understand why the goal can’t be achieved. People with persistence and grit have the ability to respond to failure by trying again with more effort and focus. According to psychologist and mother of four boys Donna Shoom-Kirsch,
Parents should support and encourage their children as they learn to navigate their world. If one path doesn’t lead to a successful outcome, parents should offer alternatives and demonstrate that there are always other paths. When kids are very little, they impulsively run ahead and a parent’s role is to rein them in. As they get older, however, parents need to gradually give them more lead, even if they run into a little trouble. Our job is to say it’s okay, even if it doesn’t work, just go out there and try again. Children have to learn from their failures. (Personal communication, 2014)
This lesson remains equally important for teenagers. Fifteen-year-old Alyssa shared her experience:
When I have a computer problem, I’m like a dog with a bone and don’t give up until it’s solved. Last week I had trouble with my word processor. I desperately needed to finish a paper for the next day and couldn’t get the program to cooperate. After threatening to throw my laptop across the room, my mom told me to call Microsoft, which sent me to Apple, which sent me back to Microsoft, but I just kept asking my questions until I was satisfied. Eventually, the support person helped me figure it out. It took hours, but now it works, and I know how to deal with this problem if it ever happens again.
When parents show interest, and/or make suggestions to help teens meet a new challenge, they provide a framework or “scaffolding” that enables the young people to tackle new things without fear of failure. Patience and interest provide a safety net without parents’ taking over and doing it for them. This strategy often takes more time than parents doing the task for their teens, but this investment allows teens to develop persistence, a necessary tool for adulthood.
While frustration is part of the development of persistence, there is a balance between having too much frustration, which can lead to giving up, and enough frustration to foster tenacity and grit. Some teens respond to obstacles with insolence or rebellion. Others project the blame from their failures onto others, and many just act blasé, pretending they don’t care. Don’t be fooled, however; they care.
Teens may better learn the value of persistence if parents define success as making an effort and demonstrating improvement (putting a bit less emphasis on the end product). Sam, father of 13-year-old Lindsay, said,
Lindsay has a learning disability, and math is virtually impossible for her. We got her a tutor, and she is now working harder on math than on any other subject. But still she can’t get a B. We often let her know that we are just as proud of her C in math as her A in history, because she puts in so much effort. I believe that our pleasure in her persistence and determination keeps her from giving up. From my perspective, even if she never receives a grade higher than a C, she’s succeeded.
Fifteen-year-old Lily said it best: “My mom always told me the secret of her own academic success came from my great-grandparents, who said, ‘Everyone is about the same in terms of innate intelligence. The difference is how hard you work.’”
Letting our kids make mistakes or even fail is one of the most difficult challenges for a parent. But to do otherwise is a disservice because it denies them the opportunity to develop self-confidence. Persistent and resilient people treat failure as an opportunity to try again and do better. This is a tough lesson to learn, and it takes time and reinforcement. Children know these skills instinctively. For example, tenacity combined with intelligence teaches children to ask to be fed, to cry when their diapers are wet, to walk, to entertain themselves with toys, and to read. When children reach the age of socialization, there is a paradigm shift as they start worrying about how they look to other people and how others feel about them. This is a time when parents can make a difference. Parents can teach their children perseverance and grit by supporting them to extend themselves and take reasonable risks and allow their children to rebound from mistakes and failure.
When reasonable, allow teens to do for themselves rather than doing it for them. Resist fixing everything, because that disables them. Success is more about grit and managing disappointment than anything else. Older teens and young adults still want your approval, so they want to do things right. Approval should be more about the quality of their effort and perseverance than the outcome or product.
Self-Management/Impulse Control
Teen brains are not fully developed, and many young people don’t know how to control their impulses, so they can’t really grasp the concept of delayed gratification. They are very reactive and may not succeed at controlling their impulsivity until their midtwenties. “As any parent knows,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy, “youths are more likely to show ‘a lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility’ than adults. … These qualities often result in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions” (Ritter, n.d.).
When teenagers are anxious, passionate, or under stress, they often don’t examine the consequences of their actions. One mom gave this example:
At midnight I was awakened by a phone call from the police, and you can imagine my immediate reaction was terror. “Is this the Francis house?” the officer asked, and I answered, “Yes,” with panic in my voice. “We have a house full of underage drinkers, and your daughter is one of them.” “Thank God!” I said, so happy that my daughter Carly wasn’t found dead on the side of the road. But the officer countered with, “Ma’am, this is serious!” I picked up Carly along with her citation. They were drinking beer, laughing loudly, and blasting music in the backyard and never thought a neighbor would notice and complain. I said, “Carly, what were you thinking?!” And the real truth of the matter was that she wasn’t.
Teens are emotionally volatile, open to taking risks, aggressive, reactive to stress, and vulnerable to peer pressure. Teenagers who don’t learn to self-regulate and manage their impulses have a more difficult time reaching their potential. Middle school is the most difficult time. Things can settle down as teens move through high school, but if teenagers don’t have ways to metabolize and express their angst, they may choose to self-medicate instead.
This is a great opportunity for you and other adults in your teen’s life to be positive role models. Check in with yourself and do an honest assessment. Are you reactive? If so, be more conscious of how you behave and control your own impulses.
Also, some behavioral approaches can help your teen to have more impulse control. One of the easiest and most accessible tools for self-regulation is exercise. Exercise has been proven to help elevate mood and ease the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which makes it an invaluable resource for our teens. You can also offer stress-reduction strategies such as meditation and/or visualization to give your teens ways to self-soothe when they are stressed.
Make sure to tell your children that what feels good today may feel awful tomorrow. Although impulses are powerful, acting on all of them is not necessary and could be harmful. One mother said, “Every time I go back to the fridge for another spoonful of ice cream, I think of that old phrase: a minute on the lips is a pound on my hips. But the pleasure in that moment has a tough pull. This must be what it’s like for my son when he confronts a moment of pleasure and can’t think about the consequences.”
Be clear about your expectations for your teen, and explain why you believe they are reasonable. We recommend setting rules that make sense to your children, such as establishing a curfew that is reasonable and normal for your community. Psychiatrist David Fassler suggests that teens may display poor impulse control or negative behaviors because they don’t truly understand what’s expected of them (Miller, 2014). Rules provide opportunities for teens to develop their ability to control impulses and to create important boundaries. Without these skills, teens may feel less comfortable and able to set their own limits. Rachel, an 18-year-old, reflected on the challenge:
I think I must have been a tyrant. My parents rarely said no to me, and I always knew that I could use my baby voice and flash my dimples to get anything I wanted. Now that college is so much on my mind, I worry about how I will be able to handle living on my own. Will I be able to live on my monthly allowance and pass up a cute pair of shoes without charging them to my mom and dad? Trust me, I’m often stuck between my impulse to indulge and my fear that I have no restraint. I hope that when I have children, I’ll figure out when to say no as well as yes.
Rachel’s parents didn’t do her any favors by giving her everything she asked for, even though they apparently were financially able to do so. Their inability to balance when to indulge and when to restrict made Rachel fearful about her dependency on them and about her ability to control her own impulses.
Sometimes an important approach for practicing self-regulation is to be quiet and just listen. Listening allows for a moment of self-reflection that may let you know how you feel. Once you understand how you feel, you can better know how to cope with your emotions effectively. When parents take the time to listen and reflect on what their teens are saying, they can teach them to identify, understand, and tolerate complex feelings. By resisting the impulse to fix your children’s feelings, you can give them the room necessary to learn to self-control.
Personal Responsibility/Self-Reliance
One of the basic principles of maturity is learning to be responsible for one’s choices and actions. Accepting personal responsibility results in a more independent, competent, and self-sufficient adult. Responsibility is a process through which rights and duties become internalized, and a sense of commitment to truth and concern for others is displayed. Guiding your children toward self-sufficiency is incremental. Your role is to identify the issues and use those teachable moments so your children develop an internal moral compass and increasing awareness of the impact and consequences of their actions.
Personal responsibility is influenced by many factors, such as age, peer influences, and parental practices. Demonstrating a sense of responsibility includes the following behaviors:
Realizing one’s own unique strengths and experiences
Believing in doing more than just enough to “pass”
Recognizing the importance of behaving responsibly
Making choices through thought and reflection
Owning up to mistakes and failures
Attempting to make better choices as they become available
Parents should emphasize and reinforce to teens that they are ultimately responsible for their own lives. With this awareness, teens will avoid blaming others for adverse life experiences and the associated feelings of uncertainty and powerlessness. Parents should seek out opportunities to foster critical thinking, encourage reflection, build more self-awareness, and better understand the impact of behavior on others. To feel more responsible for their own lives, teenagers need opportunities to practice making choices, to reflect on the outcomes, and to be held accountable for their behavior.
Teens benefit from clear expectations. Familial tasks such as doing the dishes, taking out the garbage, shoveling the driveway, mowing the lawn, doing laundry, or carpooling younger siblings all provide opportunities for teenagers to feel pride in their contribution. The objective of these responsibilities is to demonstrate that the family operates as a team with each member carrying some part of the load. Providing your children with household assignments allows them to demonstrate competence and personal responsibility. Having them fulfill their obligations, and holding them accountable, builds confidence.
Empathy/Self-Awareness
During adolescence, the brain is still developing, and the accompanying changes have a major effect on teenagers’ cognition (thinking and reasoning), impulse control, and executive functioning (the mental processes that enable planning, focus, remembering instructions, and managing multiple tasks). During this period, teenagers develop “cognitive empathy,” the ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They are able to see things from another perspective, which in turn creates the social skills required for understanding how their behavior affects others. This explains why antisocial behaviors such as bullying should diminish as teenagers gain empathic skills (Shellenbarger, 2013).
Empathy usually is associated with sympathy, warmth, and compassion. Acquiring empathy does include these characteristics. However, empathy is actually a more comprehensive concept: awareness of the impact of one’s behavior on others and a sense of ownership of the consequences of one’s actions. Empathy is the foundation for mature relationships and promotes connection by inviting understanding. When 16-year-old Michael was young, he frequently visited his grandfather in a nursing home. Including Grandpa Harry in family holidays required carefully transporting him by wheelchair from his nursing home. Throughout his early childhood, Michael watched his parents lovingly integrate his grandfather into their daily lives, and this sensitivity for the well-being of another had a profound impact on Michael.
Recently, Michael’s friend Peter found out that his mother had a serious illness. Peter told Michael about his mom on New Year’s Eve. Rather than celebrating with his friends at the annual holiday party, Michael arranged to have dinner alone with Peter. Michael said he knew Peter appreciated his comfort and support, illustrating perfectly the concept of empathy. Michael knew that his desire to party and have fun with his friends was not as important as providing support for his friend. His mother always told him, “Michael, you reap what you sow.” Michael understood from his parents the importance of empathy, and should Michael ever find himself in a similar situation, his actions are likely to be reciprocated.
Another way to teach empathy is to help your teen better understand the family’s circumstances. Many of today’s teens lack a real understanding of what their parents actually do on a day-to-day basis to support their lifestyle, and few teens ask. Parents, regardless of income, don’t want to burden their children with the stress and pressure associated with maintaining their standard of living. Parents fear that this information will make their teenagers feel guilty. In their effort to protect their children by withholding the details, parents are missing a rich opportunity to teach compassion. In Ron Taffel’s words, “This leaves children disconnected not only from their parents’ common work struggles, but also from the perseverance and determination that daily survival requires” (2006). It’s hard to raise thoughtful, empathic, and compassionate children if parents don’t give them opportunities to demonstrate their understanding and appreciation.
An equally critical way to foster empathy is to seek opportunities to be quiet and listen. Gottman and DeClaire (1997) refer to this skill as “emotional coaching.” An emotional coach will elicit or draw out a range of emotions, including sadness, anger, and fear. Parents who function as effective emotional coaches can train their children to identify, understand, and tolerate complex feelings, which will have a lifelong application. Emotional coaches are more successful at setting and maintaining healthy boundaries, and they are patient in permitting children to express their emotions. The emotional coach doesn’t try to fix the feeling, but mirrors the emotion back to the child and, by doing so, facilitates the child’s growth and sense of self.
By asking questions rather than providing answers, you are demonstrating confidence in your teens’ ability to solve problems and better understand how their actions affect others. Asking questions such as “So what do you think she should do?” or “How do you think you’ll feel if you don’t go to the party?” or “What will happen if you do break up with her?” will better equip your teenagers to get in touch with their feelings and their impact on others. By guiding and coaching your teens in their decision-making process, you are giving them opportunities to develop skills in empathy to practice now, as well as building their confidence to handle similar situations in the future.
We have all come across children who do not demonstrate strengths in traditional academic environments but clearly have intuition, compassion, and wisdom. One mother talked about her son Noah, who has serious learning difficulties and couldn’t wait to be finished with high school. Of her three children, Noah is the one who always knows what she is feeling, knows the right things to say, and asks how her day went. She said, “Noah not only asks about work, he actually listens to what I have to say. Noah can tell how I am feeling when I walk into the house after work. His interpersonal skills are superior, and I know they will carry him in good stead for the rest of his life. My sweet Noah is an old soul.”
Emotional intelligence (ability to identify and manage your own feelings and the feelings of others) provides the skills to label and understand feelings, which leads to greater self-awareness and the ability to establish and maintain positive relationships. Parents can foster the healthy growth of emotional intelligence by supporting and encouraging the development of their children’s internal compass. Teaching teens to listen to their inner voice rather than responding to the conventional wisdom and/or being swayed by prevailing attitudes creates emotional intelligence. A psychotherapist mom remembered, “I’ll never forget a professor saying, ‘If you only have a hammer in your toolbox, then everything you see had better be a nail!’” We all require a full set of tools to cope with adult life. When people place too much emphasis on achievements and material gain, they are often surprised as adults at the emptiness they feel even when they have acquired all the desired trappings. Emotional intelligence provides the tools to give adults a more balanced, connected, and gratifying life.
Boundaries/Setting Limits
Developing boundaries begins early. As soon as toddlers start to explore the world, parents realize that their children have lives of their own. This aha moment reappears with spectacular clarity when our children become teenagers, when they close their bedroom doors, keep secrets, and challenge all limits. During this developmental stage, teachers, parents of teenage friends, and, yes, the local police department beer party squad may know more about your children’s social life than you do!
One of the best ways to learn how to respect boundaries is by learning to cooperate with siblings. In the past, there were more opportunities for sharing; houses were smaller, and the norm was for more than one person to share a bedroom. So much is learned from sharing a bedroom. The mother of three teenage boys said, “As kids, I was neat, and my sister was a slob. Her clothes lived on the floor, and she would dive into the pile to dress every morning. I finally divided the room in two and declared my half the neat zone, totally off-limits for her.” It wasn’t long ago that homes had one TV with few stations, requiring the entire family to share the resource. As recently as 20 years ago, there were few personal computers in individual homes, and everyone in the family used the ones that were there. In many middle-class communities today, kids have their own bedroom, and their homes have multiple TV screens and digital devices. There are fewer opportunities for kids to share, a skill that requires negotiating boundaries and setting limits.
Parents can model good boundaries by behaving with integrity, setting protective limits, and engaging in appropriate behavior. In dysfunctional families, boundary violations can produce teenagers who make poor choices, either in relationships or by hurting themselves by cutting and or self-medicating with drugs, sex, or alcohol. Seventeen-year-old Zach has seen this:
I can always tell whether my father’s been drinking by how he enters the house. If the door closes quietly, then I know it should be a good night. But if he bursts in like Kramer on Seinfeld and slams the door, we’re in for trouble. I try to disappear into my bedroom, but sometimes there’s no escaping his wrath when he’s out of control. In middle school, I vowed I’d never drink, but now that I’m seventeen, I have to be honest and say I often want to escape, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I can’t swear I don’t drink and smoke weed myself.
Robert Frost said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Finding that balance and setting limits can be tricky. Appropriate boundaries permit us to voice our wants and needs without self-reproach. When teens don’t know how to set limits and protective boundaries, they may be unable to say no without guilt. Tara, an 18-year-old senior, said:
I always feel responsible for everyone else. Sometimes I purposely say my phone is out of power to avoid receiving texts from friends. When I have plans for an evening, I feel guilty excluding anyone who calls me. I actually avoid people because I can’t say no without feeling selfish. I wish I didn’t obsess about how the other person feels. It’s not that I want to be rude; I just want to be able to spend my time with whomever I want.
Parents can guide their teens to maintain healthy boundaries by showing them when it is OK to say no and modeling appropriate boundaries. There are many good examples of teens setting boundaries for themselves. Cameron, an eighth-grader, said:
My mom and dad have been divorced for a few years. And recently, my mom has started dating. My brother and I think my dad still hopes they will get back together, because Dad has been asking me all kinds of questions about Mom’s social life. When they got divorced, they always said they didn’t want to put me and my brother in the middle, so I was proud of myself when I told my dad to stop asking about mom.
Dana, a 10th-grader, said to her boyfriend, “I feel pressure when you act disappointed because I have to study instead of hanging out with you. It’s not fair to make me choose between doing well on my math test and making you happy. You should want me to do well!” This boundary is one that sets the stage for a healthier relationship.
Trevor, a high-school freshman, said, “The first semester of high school, my buddies were talking trash to impress the older kids. They freely made antigay jokes that infuriated me. I told them how I felt and said I didn’t want to be with them when they acted like jerks. The good news is they took it in and stopped making offensive comments in my presence.”
For teens, boundaries define what they will and won’t accept from others. For parents, boundaries help everyone in the family take responsibility for his or her own behavior. Boundaries are the limits that create safety and empower us.
Cultural Competence/Accepting Differences
Today’s children are growing up in the most diverse society in our history. Cultural competence is the essential ingredient that allows children to interpret and appreciate their own culture, and then use this knowledge to understand others.
Many parents we interviewed commented on their teens’ comfort with diversity. According to one father, “My son just downloaded a CD by a comedian, Hari Kondabolu, titled Waiting for 2042, named for the year when the U.S. Census Bureau projects that white people will become the minority in America.” One immigrant mom whose three daughters were born in America said, “When I voiced my opposition to gay marriage, my daughters were appalled and said, ‘Mom, in this country we don’t feel that way. Don’t be prejudiced!’”
These examples provide us with important lessons regarding the culture in which teens are growing up and the problems we will cause them by imposing dated assumptions. While teens are more accepting of diversity, parents can best help them by demonstrating their support for cultural respect, inclusiveness, and tolerance. One mother told the following story:
I was sitting at a Pacers basketball game, and a homophobic television sports reporter walked in shouting distance from me, my son, Ryan, and his girlfriend. I hate heckling, so when I could sense my son getting ready to shout something, I braced myself. He yelled, “Don’t be a homophobe; gay people have rights, too!” Ryan knows screaming makes me uncomfortable, and he defended his behavior by saying, “Mom, this reporter uses his show as a bully pulpit to spew hate. I think he should be embarrassed and held publicly accountable.” While I might not have enjoyed hearing Ryan confront this reporter, I am proud of his beliefs and feel like I taught him well!
Parents can best demonstrate positive attitudes toward people from different cultures by their words and actions. One father said, “My son’s kindergarten teacher told the parents to think about how what we say at home may have an unintended effect on our children’s relationships at school. She asked us to avoid making harshly judgmental comments in front of our children about people who are different. She’s right; we are our child’s most powerful role model.”
Cultural competence is also a crucial ingredient in building self-esteem. Pittsburgh Steeler Heinz Ward, born in 1976, has talked about growing up with shame because he was bullied based on his Korean and African American heritage. As a child, Ward struggled to find an identity between two cultures. He felt like a lost child who didn’t fit with either the Korean or African American culture. However, when he visited Korea, he finally acknowledged his roots and has subsequently become a powerful model for other biracial children (Wiseman, 2006). Understanding and embracing your family history gives you a context and demonstrates how to treat people.
Most of us did not grow up in a world as culturally and racially diverse as our children are experiencing today. The assumptions that many of us grew up with are no longer valid. Our challenge as parents, therefore, is to grow and change with the times by modeling tolerance and speaking out against discrimination. Cultural competence is an essential skill for living and working in today’s diverse world and global economy. The ability to get along with people and appreciate differences is essential to adulthood in the twenty-first century and allows us to enjoy the richness of the world we live in. Our children’s appreciation for and comfort with diversity will help them take advantage of all the opportunities available to them and contribute greatly toward their future success.
The Way We Are as Parents
Three of the most important parenting objectives are to have our kids (1) ready for college and (2) able to function independently while (3) maintaining healthy connections with family and friends. However, we sometimes act in counterproductive ways. These actions can take a toll on our teens and make meeting these objectives more difficult. We want to fix things for them, but we also want them to learn to take care of themselves. When teens appear to be sophisticated, we may expect them to understand more than their life experience permits. Parents who sanitize their children’s environment during the teen years delay the development of their kids’ decision-making skills and deny them the ability to become self-reliant and tolerate consequences. These skills, if underdeveloped, may make their next stage of life more challenging than it needs to be. In recent years, colleges have backed away from the role of surrogate parent, and students are left to parent themselves before many of them are actually ready to do so. This combination of almost unlimited personal freedom and the expectation of self-reliance create anxiety if teens are unprepared.
The earlier parents start to cultivate and lay the foundation for maturity, the more likely children are to develop into healthy and resilient adults. We need to ground our children in reality and give them opportunities to master their own lives incrementally. A parent of a high-school senior observed, “Having just completed college tours, I was surrounded by anxious parents who asked all the questions and gave us the feeling that they wanted to pick their kid’s courses, roommates, and majors.” Colleges not wishing to alienate prospective parents and/or students enable this behavior when they should simply convey, “Please have your children ask the questions.” Some colleges separate parents from their children during college tours so prospective students can ask their own questions. Several years ago it was unheard of years for parents to call professors or school administrators to try to manage their children’s educational experience. Now, on occasion, parents are calling law schools about their children.
Parents who both micromanage their children’s lives and raise them to feel entitled sabotage their children’s development of self-confidence, grit, and skills necessary to successfully navigate adult life. These teens and young adults often find themselves unable to cope with performance expectations, prioritizing, scheduling, limits, disappointments, challenges, and rejections. To manage adult life effectively, teens need to have opportunities to practice making and learning from their own mistakes. Where teens have lacked encouragement to develop these critical skills, parents will be unpleasantly surprised to discover that they will be teaching these skills when their children are well into their twenties and beyond.
There Is a Silver Lining
Teaching teens these skills is a matter of moderation. Combining coaching and providing teens with the freedom to implement these skills allows them to learn what works, what doesn’t, and why. Parents can remain close and still maintain their role as mentor and supporter. A secure attachment and the lack of a generation gap have generally increased the connection between children and parents, which continues into adulthood. This silver lining is reflected in many stories from parents who told us that they feel closer to their children than they did to their own parents. Some parents of today’s teenagers are more pragmatic than their boomer parents who focused on a more democratic family and lacked the time necessary to teach their children the adult life skills they had developed for themselves. One mom shared this description:
I grew up in a home that was more democratic than my home now. My brother and I had a lot of power. If we didn’t want to go to a restaurant, we’d just complain to get our way. My brother and I were intolerable, yet it didn’t seem to register with my parents. They were ever so patient. It’s not that way in my family. The hierarchy is clear: I am the mother, and they are the children. They don’t have an equal vote. I have less tolerance for back talk, and I believe my expectations, coupled with consistency, provide a sense of safety and comfort for my kids.
Many parents understand their role and are raising their children differently from their own upbringing.
Connection is still essential to building resiliency in our teens. However, this connection has to be aligned with the developmental age of our children. Little by little, we have to let go. If we provide our teens with appropriate boundaries, emotional intelligence, cultural competence, and the other qualities of a mature adult, they will be able to make better choices and rebound from challenging situations. We see these better and more appropriate decisions when we hear from employers about employees’ requests to take time off to attend teacher interviews. Pediatric nurses are now seeing both mothers and fathers learning how to diaper and feed their infants. On any beautiful Sunday, you can see fathers with babies on their backs walking with other dads, a more common sight than it was 20 years ago. Many of today’s parents can remain involved while also being confident in setting limits. This is the balance required to set the stage for healthy development.
Parents can monitor the extent to which their children have internalized desired characteristics by observing whether their children have established personal identities, have developed reasonable and rational judgment, have begun to make independent decisions, behave in a purposeful and responsible manner, and are self-reliant and self-confident. These measures of maturity generally emerge incrementally over time.