BC Council for Families

by Carolyn Bergmann

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 40-year-old children, still dependent 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 dependent 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 10-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. They are generally cooperative most of the time.

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 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 10-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.

We need a new way of looking at our relationships with our teens—one of mutual respect and affection that offers the room teens need to grow into healthy, happy adults who makes good and responsible decisions for themselves. Losing control of your teen is inevitable. Parents can learn how to work with that and help their teens develop the tools and skills they need to make that transition to total control of their own lives, healthy and well.

Carolyn Bergmann is the author of
Are You Losing Control? The Common Sense Guide to Parenting Teens.
Writing as Carolyn M. Usher, she is also the author of numerous
family-life educational materials published by the BC Council for
Families.
The above is excerpted from Are You Losing Control? The Common Sense Guide to Parenting Teens, published by Crackling Communications.

If you found this article interesting or helpful,
please consider making a
donation to the BC Council for Families.