Are
You Losing Control?
Sample
Chapter
If
it feels like you are losing control of your teen, you are.
Taking control of their own lives is the most important developmental
task our kids work on during their teen years. If this "work"
makes it seem like your home has become a battle zone, your family
is not unusual. A teen's push for independence runs smack up against
a parent's need to protect them and protecting our kids is a role
most of us have gotten pretty good at. If we hadn't, they wouldn't
have made it from infancy to adolescence!
Imagine for a moment, however, what it would be like to have a house
full of forty-year-old children, still dependant on us to take care
of them and make their decisions for them. Makes you shudder, doesn't
it? And yet, when we look at how often we try to protect teens from
making their own decisions (and learning from their mistakes), a
house full of dependant adult children looks exactly like the kind
of future we are trying to create.
Losing control of our teens is inevitable – time will see
to that. This book is based on the premise that parents will be
most effective if they work with that inevitability instead of fighting
a battle for control that they are certain to lose. There is no
law that says parents and teens must engage in the power struggles
that turn homes into battlegrounds.
Some parents interpret "losing control" to mean that the
job of parenting is over and psychologically abandon their teens
to figuring out everything for themselves. This approach is just
as devastating to the developing adolescent as are power struggles.
While the job of parenting is very different during the teen years,
it is the most challenging and exciting parenting most of us will
ever do. Our job is far from done!
Your Changing Role
Our children come into the teen years as just that, children. They
leave just a few, short years later as adults. The amount of developmental
ground they cover in those few years is phenomenal.
Back when they were infants and then children, they looked to us,
their parents, for everything they needed to survive: not only food
and shelter and love, but to make their decisions for them, set
their boundaries, and keep them safe:
How sick is sick enough to go to the doctor?
When is Todd old enough to take the bus by himself?
Does Jaime need a tutor?
How much sleep does a ten-year-old need?
Caring parents answer all these questions and though children might
mount campaigns to change the rules, there is security in knowing
that someone bigger and smarter than they are is in charge of keeping
them safe and healthy. Most of the time, they are cooperative.
Then one morning you ask your sweet-natured child some perfectly
reasonable question like, "What are you doing today?"
and the response you get back is pure attitude. And you realize
...the hormonal tsunami has beached.
Hormones are like a wake-up call to children. "Hello in
there! You're going to be an adult in a few years. You better start
taking control of your life now. Up, up, up! Get with the new program
already!" Every cell in their body wakes up with a screech
and starts straining for independence.
Adolescence is the bridge between childhood and adulthood. As a
society we readily acknowledge that it can be a challenging transition.
We accept a certain amount of attitude, acting out, and rebellion
as normal. We bemusedly tolerate of fluorescent hair, body piercing,
and eccentric clothing. Most adults don't expect to like or understand
teen music, language, or culture. Adolescent angst is regarded as
normal. It's all part of the passage to adulthood and we're confident
they will "grow out of it". We did.
What isn't acknowledged, however, is that just as teens go through
tremendous developmental changes, so too do their parents. Parenting
a teen isn't anything like parenting a child. Too often parents
don't see the change and try to continue parenting as if the adolescent
were just a bigger ten-year-old whom they can still control. But
it doesn't work very well.
These are the homes where everyone is at war with each other. There
is a lot of yelling, door slamming and unhappiness. These families,
in which parents and teens are in constant conflict with each other,
are in real pain. They are also in real danger of doing so much
damage to each other that their relationships may never be repaired.
Is all this conflict necessary?
No.
Teens and parents do not have to engage in these out-and-out power
struggles. As a society we seem to have accepted this level of conflict
between parents and teens as "normal". Many people believe
that it's an inevitable stage of family life. But it isn't.
It is possible to have a good relationship with our teens and while
that relationship will never be conflict-free, the teen years can
be the most interesting and fulfilling years of parenting. But parenting
teens does require a literal shift in style from protector/teacher
to guide. And it's not a shift we make once.
I liken parenting teens to Maui's famous Road to Hana. This road
has hundreds of hairpin turns and, when I was there, my car had
a standard transmission. I must have shifted gears a thousand times
in the two-to-three hour trip.
Why go? Why take a road that requires that much work to drive? Because
the views are literally breathtaking. Every turn opens up to another
vision of nature that just blows you away. It's worth every one
of those shifts.
Parenting
teens is like that. Their hormones surge and ebb, sometimes within
minutes, and we never know what or who we're going to be dealing
with. No single strategy will work all the time and we need to think
on our feet. But there is nothing more exhilarating than watching
a teen, gawky with adolescent angst, evolve into a self-confident,
emotionally healthy young adult.
It's the Grand Prix of parenting and we're in the front seat. I
can't imagine a more interesting or important place for an involved
parent to be.
Nobody's perfect, we all make mistakes. Fortunately, parent/child
ties are long term and durable. These relationships start before
the children are born and continue to affect them, even after their
parents die.
Research shows that parents are the most important people in a child's
life and, while that may not translate into teens wanting to hang
out with us on Saturday night, we are their number one long-term
influence.
In parenting our infants and children, many of us lean on our own
upbringing for the cues we need to tell us when to feed or cuddle
or discipline our children. We are "parenting by instinct",
really, parenting according to our own memories of how we were parented.
We do a lot our parenting on auto pilot, handling things, for the
most part, as our parents did.
When it comes to parenting our teens, however, many of us remember
our own adolescence as a time when relationships with parents were
strained and difficult. Adults expected us to rebel and behave badly
so they "put their foot down" and did everything they
could to control us. We pushed, they pulled. We left home at the
earliest opportunity, determined to "get out of there".
Many of us long for a better relationship with our own kids. We
are looking for a different model of how to raise our teens and,
perhaps for the first time in our parenting history, are recognizing
the need to really think through our parenting decisions.
This book offers a new way of looking at your relationship with
your teen – mutual respect and affection and the room your
teen needs to grow into a healthy, happy adult who makes good and
responsible decisions for him or herself. Losing control of your
teen is inevitable. In this book you will learn how to work with
that, helping your teen develop the tools and skills he or she will
need to make that transition to total control of his or her own
life, healthy and well.
