“They are trying to grow up too fast!” is a complaint that we often hear from parents about their young teenagers. Parents often end up in our offices because their efforts to make and enforce rules with their teens have backfired, and everyone is unhappy. While parents are generally just trying to keep their adolescents safe, teens tend to see parents’ efforts as overly strict, rigid and unfair. On the other end of the spectrum, some families end up consulting us because their teens are overly dependent and not making appropriate progress towards independence.
One important thing for parents to keep in mind is that teens are supposed to be growing up, and in fact they don’t have very much time to bridge that gap between losing the last of their baby teeth and choosing their first semester college courses. Further, by the time they get to the end of that process, most parents actually want their teens to be operating relatively self-sufficiently. They want their kids to know their own strengths and weaknesses and be able to make good, healthy decisions on their own. So, as the parent of a young teen, what can you do to help promote the kind of healthy autonomy that is likely to support your child on their path to being an independent, competent adult? Here are a few tips:
1. Include your teen. Research on adolescent development indicates that teens thrive when parents solicit input from them on family rules, even though parents still can opt to make the final decisions. Encourage your teen to tell you their reasons for wanting a certain privilege, and listen seriously to them while they do so. This practice in advocating for themselves can go a long way towards enabling teens to appropriately identify and assert their own needs later on in life. Further, teens who feel like their parents at least acknowledge their point of view (even if their parents don’t agree) are more likely to listen to their parents in return.
2. Pick your battles. Giving your adolescents control over some areas of their lives (e.g. clothing choices) can help reduce conflicts in other, arguably more important areas (e.g. curfew). Remember that teens’ drive to grow up can’t be squelched, any more than an infant’s drive to get mobile and explore the world can. The best parents can do is to try to “direct the flow” of this normative (though arguably difficult!) developmental process.
3. Give your teen responsibilities. If your son or daughter is going to ultimately be able to take care of themselves, they need to be in the habit of doing so before they are packing their bags to leave home. Teens can help with the family laundry, cook dinner once/week, take care of a younger sibling, wash the car, take out the trash… the list is almost as endless as parents’ own chore lists.
4. Find meaningful activities for your teen. Although many of our kids’ lives are very full, teens often complain that much of their time is spent on activities that don’t feel particularly worthwhile or important to them. Many adolescents are not great at delayed gratification, which makes schoolwork (leading to the distant vision of more of the same in college) not terribly fulfilling to them. Teens can gain a great deal of competence as well as personal gratification by helping others — volunteer work is a particularly powerful venue for building a sense of self and gaining important life skills.
Kathleen Boykin McElhaney, Ph.D.
Licensed Clinical Psychologist