I wrote an article on “Letting Go of our Teenagers” and ended with the idea that raising a teenager is a time of great potential for personal growth and learning — for the parents.
This opportunity happens because it is a hard process to go through and when things get tough, how we navigate the situation helps determine the outcome. If we rise to a battle whenever one is offered by our teen, then we get exhausted and burnt out. So we need to ‘pick our battles’ and try very hard not to ‘sweat the small stuff’.
If we avoid continuous power struggles and don’t need to win every battle, we may come through the teenage (war) years alive. We do need to learn about establishing healthy, clear and fair boundaries without repression. This is very complex stuff as every teen is different with unique psychological needs. It’s the hardest thing we will ever do.
I see this need for my own parental re-education as a gift. I did not always see it this way. In the past, I have engaged with far too many battles with my teens, getting drawn into one power struggle after another, while demanding respect. I often resorted back to my juvenile self raising my voice to out-yell my teen. When my teens would lose control and become volatile, I would lose my self-control and try to suppress them by dishing out punishments. This practice never worked, and ultimately caused hard feelings with everyone involved. Pretty humbling to think about it.
Parents have been complaining about their teens for millennia. Push-back is part of the normal teen psychological makeup and is always a challenge to parents. If we want to do battle with them to suppress their push-back, the only thing that works is intense control and strict capital punishment to instill fear (often called respect) in our children. But this only works for so long.
The separation from parents has to happen for the kids to fully realize their own personalities and if separation doesn’t happen, the young person may never truly find their own identity or learn about healthy boundaries.
Not every teen is difficult and rebellious, but rebellion is a normal part of brain development. It has always been this way. Parents had the same complaints about their teens 1,000 years ago.
As teen challenges will happen no matter what, how we handle them (with understanding and acceptance or with resistance) determines our own level of personal growth. How do we get through these years without resorting to guilt, shame and punishment? We don’t really want our kids to look back on their childhood and just remember these negative emotions but it is hard, as a parent, not to dish them out.
The teen years are a ‘rite of passage,’ but we do get our awesome kids back when they mature into their adult minds with their teen angst behind them. The secret I think, is to do whatever we can as parents during the troubling teen years to maintain and nurture good relationships with our kids and the other parent.
We can learn to become the parents our kids need us to be. We want them to ‘choose’ to come visit us when they are adults themselves, rather than avoiding or resenting us because of relationship damage during the teen years.
All we can do is our best with an open heart and understanding ears, and thick skin so we don’t take personally what comes out of their mouths, all the while biting our own tongues and resisting the urge to engage or retaliate.
‘Raising a teen is like holding on to a wet bar of soap. Hold on too tight and they slip out of our grasp. Hold on too loosely and they also slip away.’ The topic of ‘what works and doesn’t work with teens’ will be a multi-part series, as I share my own learning.
To your healthy and evolving relationships with your kids.
Claire Nielsen is a health coach, author, public speaker and founder of www.elixirforlife.ca
