Features: The Heart of Parenting

The Parent-of-Teen Metamorphosis

August, 2005

Recently I mentioned to a friend that my daughter would soon celebrate her 13 th birthday.   My friend laughed and offered me her "condolences."   I laughed too, guiltily, because I can remember when I dreaded the onset of my children's adolescence.   I worried most about losing my children to the reverse metamorphosis of adolescence--when they changed from the bright butterflies of childhood into a tightly wound cocoon of self-absorption, transformation--and ultimately the loss of our close parent-child bond.

I also dreaded the dramatic fall from grace that parents of teens suffer.   Younger children relish their parents' close involvement in their lives--from the warm snuggles to the knowledge that their parents are frequently checking up on them.   While no kid wants their parents hovering over them like a helicopter, they generally appreciate knowing that their parents are on the job and looking out for them.   Many kids think their parents are the best Mom or Dad in the world--and who among us doesn't want to believe them?   I wasn't ready to be dethroned or to lose my special place in my child's universe.

But time doesn't stop when we want it to, and our children will grow up witheither our support or our resistance.   The parent who seemed all knowing, understanding, and helpful to a young child begins to seem misinformed, misguided, and ridiculous to teens.   What felt like love and caring to a little kid, begins to feel like intrusive, mistrustful, and over-controlling parenting for many adolescents.  

Adolescents are often confused about what they want from their parents.   And most teens are clueless about what their parents want for them--they tend to focus, almost exclusively, on their parent's negative and restrictive behaviors.   No wonder the one true thing many teens are sure about is that they want to be free of their parent's control.   As the pendulum swings back and forth between feelings of exuberant bravado and crushing self-consciousness, teens can also be highly critical of their parents.   It's as if they want to deflect every doubt and insecurity they have right back at their parents: "Don't judge me--look at how imperfect you are!"

What I didn't realize until I had my own teens is that parents must also go through a metamorphosis when their children become adolescents.   Focusing solely on our high-maintenance teens, it is easy to ignore our own need to change as the parents of teens.   If we don't change, and keep on giving our kids more of the same, we are setting ourselves up for the classic "Clash of the Titans."   Most conflict between parents and teens is really due to our mutually changing roles, and to our mutual confusion about our roles.  

The advice that used to be given to parents of teens is to expect that their kids have to separate from their family in order to figure out who they are, and then their child would reconnect with their family as their new young-adult selves.   The trouble with this advice is that it sends parents out the exit door right at the time when teens most need their parent's encouragement and support.   Michael Riera (author of   Uncommon Sense for Parents with Teenagers ) has another solution.   He recommends that parents don't prematurely quit their job as parents, but that they rewrite their job description from being a child-manager to being a teen-consultant.

As Riera points out, teens don't want to totally separate from their families, but they do want to extend away from them.   Every teen is partly a regressing-child and partly an emerging-adult.   Out in the world--school, work, in front of other adults--the teen becomes the emerging adult.    But at home, the teen is the regressing-child--teasing a younger sibling, leaving messes everywhere, and whining about the chore they've been asked to do.   The key to successfully parenting a teen is to keep both the regressing-child and the emergent-adult in view.

The sad reality of parenting a teen is that you are not in control anymore.   Some parents respond to that fact by trying to tighten the controls over their teens--and their kids respond by breaking their connection with their parents either openly or secretly.   Other parents respond to their loss of control by becoming increasingly disengaged from their kids and allowing the connections to evaporate--and their kids often respond by either floundering or seeking connection with others who might guide them (such as a gang).   But when teens feel positively connected to their families, parents can influence their kid's thinking and the choices they make.   Parents-as-consultants can connect with their teens because they demonstrate respect for their teen's thinking and abilities to make good decisions.   Teens want to listen to their parents-as-consultants because they don't feel controlled or managed.   Instead, teens work to demonstrate their increasing responsibility skills to their parents in return for greater independence.

Parent-consultants, for example, give up on lectures and advice.   Instead, they acknowledge the difficulty of a given problem (even if it seems like a no-brainer, because if your teen is struggling with it, then it's tough).   Then they ask about the teen's ideas, what they have tried, what they think they want to try, and what might happen next.   These questions aren't to play "gotcha!" but to encourage their teen to think a little more deeply and a little more carefully.   The metamorphosis of parenting a teen takes us from the position of being the "expert" towards encouraging the development of our child's own expertise. It also guarantees that, while we may have been dethroned in our child's universe, we can still keep a chair in the room.   And that's sounding even better to me now.