A healthy relationship can be tough when your child is a teenager, but you need to put the work in
Being a teen can be tough.
Everything is changing: friendships, workloads, your body and how you feel about it, the amount of control you have and want in your life. And it’s happening all at once, at a rate you’ve never experienced before, or ever will again.
But if you think being a teen is hard, just wait until you need to parent them.
If you’re like most Australian parents, you had (or will have) kids in your early 30s. This means while your child is dealing with all those teen hormones, you could be dealing with some unique challenges of your own.
Often your 40s is a time of life where you start asking big questions. Is this worth it? What am I doing? Who am I? Is it too late to change my life? In other words, not so different to the questions teens are asking of themselves.
As parents, we burn so much energy getting through the day without processing our encroaching mid-life that it can be hard to juggle the fraught demands of adolescence with grace and foresight.
Here we are, dealing with life’s curveballs as our teens sit down at the dinner table and show off how they’ve learnt not only to throw their own curveballs, but do it at an elite level.
But I promise you: there is hope. For those parents who yearn for the milestones and techniques of early childhood, there’s a way to identify what’s happening with your teenage kids, and work out how to help.
Start with your own expectations
Anne Hollonds is director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies. She says our entire lives are characterised by constant change. Not from outside through trends or technology, but within ourselves and our relationships. And given our own state of flux, it’s unfair to expect our teens to remain the same people they were before the onslaught of adolescence.
Of course, adding another element to the stress is that as your children become teenagers, the point at which they will move out and away from you becomes more real. As Ms Hollonds, a former child and family counsellor, says: “Perhaps parents feel like time is limited to help their teens.”
One sensible way to dismiss this panic is to remember the friends and wider family you’ve remained close with through your life.
You’ve managed to nurture those relationships over years, sometimes decades — you can rightly feel hopeful it will be the same with your teenagers.
Follow with your perspective
“Adolescence bleeds into the 20s now,” Ms Hollonds says, pointing out this is actually when the brain reaches adult maturity.
And as kids are now more likely to live with their parents for longer, everyone has more time to develop strong family relationships and refine the skills and experiences developed in the adolescent years.
To do this successfully, Ms Hollonds suggests putting aside specific high-stakes issues or milestones, and instead taking a longer view.
To experts like her, long-term thinking really does mean long term. Ensuring your relationship with your kids is strong, trusting and accepting can make the later adult years easier, allowing them space to share with you, safe in the knowledge they will be loved and accepted.
“I think [for] parenting generally, set boundaries, teach them stuff, but first and foremost, you’re building a relationship,” she says.
Influence, not control
From our earliest years as parents, we get used to controlling things. We get our kids into routines and, for their part, our kids are generally OK with following our lead as they learn how to figure things out.
But then they figure things out.
Learning how to exercise maturity, responsibility and decision-making skills are important milestones of teen development. But these behaviours place kids on a collision course with parents, especially parents holding on to the idea of being unquestioned authority figures.
Stereotypes aside, even relaxed parents will find teenage years challenge their view of themselves as ‘heads’ of the family.
So, what role should parents play?
Ms Hollonds suggests letting go of demands that things happen because “you’re the parent”, and to simply be “in tune and curious”.
“Listen carefully all the way through [and don’t] make assumptions,” she says.
She also suggests taking on a “growth mindset”.
How to use a growth mindset
Developed by Stanford University psychology professor Dr Carol Dweck, this approach revolves around the idea we can develop ‘static’ or ‘growth’ mindsets. One assumes things won’t change, the other assumes they will.
Dr Dweck presents it as a behaviour flow. If we accept change is a constant we can learn from, we’ll take on challenges and persist, confident we can learn how to deal with them even if there are setbacks.
Central to the concept is taking on criticism and observing what works for others, adapting our efforts until we feel OK with that change. It’s the opposite for a static or fixed mindset.
It’s easy to see how this can apply to parenting. If we accept that everyone in our family is changing, we can learn how best to support them (and ourselves) by listening to their feedback, as well as observing and researching what works.
International research agrees. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Raising Teens project reviewed more than 300 research studies into teen development. Its team found “the essential role of parents really changes very little from childhood to adolescence. What can and must change are the strategies for carrying out this role”.
So perhaps it’s not a teen against their parents, or your child changing in isolation, but an entire family working and changing together.
Directing your energy
MIT’s Raising Teen creator, A. Rae Simpson, says her review has shown her “many researchers see human development as a lifelong process, with parents developing alongside their adolescent”.
What does this mean for you as a parent? Well, it means remembering it’s not about you or how people view you.
It means continuing to develop a close relationship with your child. Accept them, love them and work out what they need — rules, support or services — and then work to make it happen.
So, focus on building strong relationships, listen to what your teens have to say, and offer persuasive responses.
Part of doing that successfully is to truly understand what kids are going through. “It’s always been tricky,” Ms Hollonds says, “but now it’s slightly trickier.”
Problems still arise, but taking the personal out of it not only makes teenage years feel more manageable, it leaves a lot more room for the positive, supportive and loving relationship we should strive for with our kids. It builds a bridge to the future.
And when it all feels too overwhelming, remember you don’t have to wait for the great news. “Our children love us,” Anne Hollonds says. “And they look to us for help.”
Amy Gray is a freelance writer, author and mother of a teenager.
- Family and Relationship – 9News Nigeria/ ABC Australia
