By Candida Abrahamson, PhD.
Have a teenager? Finding the experience not, perhaps, unending simplicity and joy?
You're not alone. Adolescence is a complicated time in which a teen accomplishes her progression to adulthood by separating from her parents, and attaching, in turn, to her friends.
Teens go from needing parents to rejecting them. In a healthy family, this ambivalence ultimately leads to a deeper acceptance of parents as caring and wiser — but still fallible — humans. But the path to this mountain is unpaved and steep.
If your child can't trust you, s/he will seek out others, and you might not be impressed with what they offer. You must earnyour child's trust; in adolescence, the credit runs out. Here are some points to remember:
• Keep your child's confidences. That is true even in regards to siblings, but do not collude with the teen in keeping a secret from the other parent.
• Find something nice to say when your teen shares with you. Don't mock. Do not insult your adolescent's friends, weight, clothing, or academic choices. Criticism will doom your relationship.
• What happens, you may rightly, ask, if your child has picked a friend who is a poor choice? It's hard to hear, but although you might find a way to gently say that you feel your teen has made a poor selection, s/he will just have to make his/her own mistakes. There are many things you can't control. Once your child is in 9th grade — the time for parent-arranged play dates is over.
• Try to see things from your teen's point of view, not an adult's. It isn't easy, but it can make all the difference in opening up the lines of communication. Particularly for moms, let your child individuate. This may seem obvious, but you are not your daughter. Be careful that you don't let your old experience, say, of high school cliques, be a roadmap for hers. Times are different, your daughter's different — let her make her own way. Ask; don't assume you know what she's feeling.
• Learn about your teen's friends and her conversations first-hand. Make your home a pleasant and open place for friends to visit and hang out, drive home from gatherings, be accessible for school functions; all of these will enable you to get to know what's going on in your teen's life without constant prying.
• Don't threaten your teen with abandonment, or that cruel insult, "I can never trust you again." Be there when you're needed, so your teen will tend to need you more frequently.
• Don't try to hurt your teen as much as possible by taking away what's most valuable. It's important not to punish your children by isolating, in the old, familiar ways parents have taken revenge: grounding, taking away phones, obligating them in so much babysitting of younger siblings that they can never make it to social events.
•Girls in particular will exhibit a need for constant contact and reassurance from other girls, often in the form of late-night phone calls, constant texting, or more sleep-overs than you find particularly inviting. However, this is an important step in the developmental process, and you need to accept it and encourage its appropriate enactment.
• Allow privacy, both for friendships and for alone time. Provide a private place for your child to talk on the phone, and allow time in the room with the door shut.
This said, complete rejection of parents and extreme isolation is not normal. The healthy adolescent seeks your approval at the same time that s/he makes choices of which you don't approve. If your child is so angry and sullen that s/he won't cooperate with either parent or any sibling on a persistent basis, it is time to seek the intervention of a therapist.
Be alert to certain signs of real emotional turmoil in your child:
• Notice cuts on wrists or arms, or evidence of smoking or drinking.
• Eating disorders have numerous indications. Is your child is pushing her food around the plate without eating, talking a lot about food, taking on extreme food restrictions, baking and feeding others desserts while forgoing herself?
• Be wary if your generally nice child has turned into a mean, surly loner. Are prescription medications and household cash disappearing from your stash or from their siblings'? If you are suspicious, count your money and your pills.
• If your child begins suddenly turning off the computer monitor when you come in, or is spending large amounts of time online, particularly at night, it's time to investigate.
The more you can carefully nurture your children's gradual separation from you and healthy attachment to friends, the more you encourage their growth into adulthood, accompanied by a strong parent-child relationship. The need for peer interactions involves learning whom to trust by testing peers for loyalty, truth, and values. Parents must serve as models in word and deed. If you make all your child's choices when s/he is young, s/he will let peers decide during adolescence. Try to keep your wits about you, and remember, as my mother used to say, "This too shall pass."
Dr. Candida Abrahamson has been coaching and mediating since receiving her PhD from Northwestern University in 1984. She specializes in mediation, family and marital therapy, bereavement counseling, and coaching communication and life management skills