Are You Letting Your Teen Grow Up?
A teen’s job is to struggle for their independence. They struggle to take it from you, their parents. The hard part of the struggle is the struggle. Some parents aren’t giving independence away for free and this is for good reason. You’ve seen them eat dirt at three because their friend told them to. You have your doubts about them taking their independence too far and hurting themselves or someone else. This all may be true, but that isn’t that the point?
The point is to take it too far? Take the risk? At times they must take it too far to understand what their limits are. And who would we have become if we never tried to be all those impossible careers we thought we might be in junior high? The basketball players, musicians, explorers and actors and yet some of us became those people because we dared to think that we could despite the better judgment of our parents to do something more certain or more stable.
For those parents who made mistakes they wouldn’t wish on their enemy, haven’t you learned something even if it was the hard way? If you think back did you seem like you would have learned it the easy way?
Your teen needs to forge their own path. If you clean up the road so well they don’t realize there are trip hazards they will have no confidence to pick themselves up when they finally fall and they will need you forever. The only way they learn how to be resilient is to make mistakes and learn from them, but they need to be allowed to do things where they may make mistakes. They can only learn these lessons when allowed to socialize, have a later curfew as they prove responsible, or give you the well thought out plan for their road trip. It really is better they make these mistakes under your roof, supervision and guidance. They need your guidance not your protection.
When you use the mistakes of yesterday to prevent them from doing things today, you tell them that they should lie to you if they want to have any experiences you don’t approve of. These experiences aren’t necessarily bad, just difficult for you, the parent. This can set off a cycle of trust and mistrust and that is not a good foundation for the parent-teen relationship.
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A good job Doc. My mum needs to read all of these articles. more like “Why Teens Lie”
Mistakes, accidents, stumbles, falls – all part of life for everyone. I am 47 years old and I am STILL making them! I think, too, that rather than point out your teen’s previous mistakes, stumbles, whatever we call them – it is also important to share our own with them. When I tell a story of something that went terribly wrong, or some situation when I’ve been embarassed or said something rash and out of line at work, I think I am showing my teens that those things are going to keep happening. How I react to my own mistakes and shortcomings is an example to them. Do I give up or do I figure out how to “fix” a situation? Do I hold grudges? Do I forgive and forget? Do I dwell on it for days and days?
When our teens stumble, and they do, I try to relate it to something I’ve done and how I resolved it – always telling them that MY way may not be THEIR way.