How Great Parents Face the Trials of Adolescence: KNOW, PROTECT, HONOR (and remember to breathe)

Raising Teenagers. Seriosuly. It's Nuts. Our first child’s dramatic entrance into the world set the tone of total disorientation. Rushing down the hospital hallway toward emergency surgery, I wailed to my husband, “But I didn’t read very much about c-sections!”

Nothing about parenting is what we expect. We diligently prepare for every challenge we can imagine, only to meet trials we have not fathomed. Teenagers, especially, make it their business to flummox us. Despite our experience, wisdom, and general aptitude for, you know, LIFE, raising adolescents can feel like showing up to a five-alarm fire with a squirt gun. 

A couple I know are raising their fifth teenager. The older four are happy, healthy, well-adjusted grown-ups who make their parents proud. And yet my friend, like so many of us, is at her wits’ end. She recently confessed, “It’s like we’ve never done this before!” It seems the current teenager is busy devising brand-new ways to rebel, challenge authority, express his youthful angst. These parents are seasoned professionals. They thought they knew every trick in the book. But every day with every teenager reminds us there is no book. No rules, no rhyme or reason . . . it’s like a carnival funhouse distorting the familiar into a terrifying new reality.

Some Parents Are Better Than Others. (I am Not One of Them.) Here is What They Do.  Hang tight, Intrepid Parents of Teens! I have observed parents—and their children—who get through the funhouse intact. One trait they share is the ability to step back from the chaos and evaluate every circumstance for what it is.

As they decide how to respond, these parents do three things. They make sure they KNOW their children and the reality of the situation. They PROTECT their children from real danger without fussing over smaller concerns. They HONOR their children and their unique journeys toward becoming the adults they want to be.

Know-Protect-Honor. This has become my shorthand. My mantra. My quick reminder of how to proceed when I get stuck in the rut of living with overgrown toddlers. Every time we remember to step back, breathe, and think about these imperatives, my husband and I find our way to more family harmony and less adolescent drama.

The champion parents I have observed and interviewed do not appear to “take a moment” and repeat such commands to themselves. This is my invention, my groovy little habit as I scramble to emulate better parents than I am. Whether they do so consciously or not, great parents KNOW their kids’ friends, their behaviors, their patterns, and enough about their secrets to keep them safe. Great parents do not meddle or sweat the small stuff, but they maintain strict boundaries in order to PROTECT kids from some very real predators. Great parents HONOR their teenagers. They forgive them for being imperfect and in-progress; they laugh at their foibles; they guide them toward becoming the very best versions of themselves.

Try It Today! What Have You Got to Lose? I will discuss these ideas in much greater detail, but for now, try stepping back yourself when things spiral out of control with your teenager. Try weighing each situation with clarity and candor. Ask yourself three things: "Do I KNOW what's really going on? Is there danger here from which I must PROTECT my child? Can I put my own needs, fears or feelings aside in order to HONOR the human being before me?" See if you gain any new insight. See if the conflict subsides, even just a bit.

I’d love to know how it works for you.

Tongue-Tied: How Do We Get Our Teenagers to TALK?

At my BEYOND MAMA BEAR presentation in Denver last night, a parent asked for advice on getting her reticent teenager to talk. I mentioned my favorite tactics, Distraction and Deception (or The Trojan Horse of Conversation). Distracting teenagers with shared physical activity (shooting hoops, scrubbing baseboards, walking the dog) often results in spontaneous and surprising conversation. Approaching them with feigned conversational motives likewise can be more productive than direct questioning. Teenagers are tricky. If they get wind of anything smacking of A Talk, their defenses go up and their speaking voices shut down. 

To that end, I also mentioned 25 Ways to Ask Your Kids "So How Was School Today" Without Asking Them "So How Was School Today." Here is a clever list of questions to ask which inspire more than one-word answers. Well. Imagine my delight just now when I discovered  25 Ways to Ask Your TEENS "How Was School Today ..." ! It's great. Use these suggestions and invent others of your own. Teenagers will talk. They just won't talk about what we want them to discuss, nor will they talk at times we find convenient.

I love this collection of conversation-starters for teens, because it speaks to the importance of knowing and honoring them (which is ultimately how we protect them). At this point in their development, remember, young people start to look more grown-up than they really are. Many of our beloved teenagers are self-absorbed puddles of hormones and confusing emotions. No wonder some of them don't like to talk to us; they can barely make sense of the racket inside their own brains.

How do YOU do it? Please add your favorite tricks to get teens talkin'! 

(Handle with Care)

Researchers tell us the adolescent brain is similar in many ways to a toddler’s. If you like to quantify things, you’ll love it. The research is often mathematical: the two-year-old brain and the teenaged brain are strikingly parallel. I really do hope you will read about it, but the real evidence lies before our eyes in those unholy disasters we call the bedrooms of our teenagers.

Think about it: the two-year-old acts impulsively. She needs to be reminded that the stove is hot, to stay out of the street, to keep peas out of her nose. The two-year-old says, “no” as a matter of habit. He recklessly challenges limits, wants to “do it myself” and requires frequent naps to keep from imploding. I don’t know about you, but my husband and I could safely say the same about our teenagers.

Thinking about our adolescent children as overgrown, smelly versions of their toddler selves has helped our family. A wise and irreverent therapist has guided every single one of us—and all of us together—out of the wilderness of adolescent rebellion and back onto a path that allows our family to grow and love and respect one another along the way. One of the most valuable tools she gave us was the reminder that teenagers are a lot like two-year-olds. When we remember, my husband I laugh more. When he recalls that toddlers can’t be expected to focus on an entire round of golf, he finds humor in the fifteen-year-old collapsing into giggles on the eleventh tee box. (It is all very confusing, remember, because adolescence is indeed a regression. This same child played golf with the attention-span of a PGA veteran when he was seven years old. My husband had to adjust his expectations, which can confound the best of us.)

When we recall that toddlers forget to flush the toilet and brush their teeth and pick up their toys, these teenagers make more sense. Surely you would not entrust a two-year-old with remembering her backpack, or putting his athletic cup somewhere besides the kitchen counter, or to deliver an important message to his teacher. So when the teenager loses yet another cell phone or fails to turn in yet another (completed) homework assignment, it is helpful and amusing to remember the toddler brain at work. We don’t give up on the idea of a two-year-old maturing. We know she will someday become more responsible and independent. We keep pinning notes to backs and delivering forgotten lunches, knowing it’s just a phase. It’s the same deal with teenagers, only they’re way less cute and their meltdowns are kind of scary.

Even the kids themselves—in my own family and in the classroom—do well to remember they are a lot like toddlers. My husband has, to great effect, taken a child by the hand and said, “Hey, Little Buddy, let me show you again how we throw our clothes into the hamper and not on the floor. I know you can’t remember because you’re really only two, so let’s just have another lesson.” This approach inevitably cracks up the teenager in question and has netted more consistent results than my knee-jerk approach (whirling about like a Tasmanian devil, leaving everyone in my path frightened and exhausted). A sense of humor and shared laughter with our teens are healthy antidotes to their attitudes. My husband’s instinctive ability to connect in this way with our children is one of his best qualities, and acknowledging their toddler tendencies helps every time.

Yes, teenagers are like overgrown toddlers, and we do best to raise them with as much love and vigilance as we do our two-year-olds.

True Confession: I Love Teenagers (They Are Awesome).

I love teenagers. I adore them in exactly the same way most people love toddlers. They really are so very much the same. They are goofy and silly and awkward in their own bodies. They are easily confused and constantly distracted. They fall down a lot. They are prone to temper-tantrums. They over-react and over-celebrate, and if you catch them in the right mood, they have an over-flow of love to share. They say things so ridiculous it’s just hilarious. (For a developmental check-in, read: 10 Things You Can't Expect from a Teenager.) 

I love teenagers—and want so desperately to protect them—because they are full of hope. They can’t help it. It is their lot in life. Because they are not fully grown, because they are not fully independent, every pore of their collective being teems with possibility. Teenagers—even when they adopt attitudes of contempt and threaten to grow bitter before their time—believe in the future.

Anything is possible, as far as they know. As much as it scares them, they enjoy looking into the next several decades and imagining what might be. They rarely see student-loan debt or complicated relationships or broken dreams. At 14 and 16 and 18 and even 22, they look into the future and see themselves as professional magicians, race-car drivers, athletes, fighter pilots, artists and activists. They believe—really, really believe, and nothing the cynical adult world does can shake them of this notion—that they will make the world a better place. It’s very nice to spend time with people who have this attitude.

Don’t get me wrong; teenagers piss me off, frustrate me and disappoint me every day. They’re just so darned adolescent all the time. So it’s good to remind myself, as often as I can, what it is I actually like about them. I encourage you to do the same.

Who Left the Demon in the Bed? Raising Teenagers Sucks, Part Two

Medieval literature is rife with tales of the swapped child, or changeling: a troll switched with a human child under the cloak of nighttime. It’s a haunting theme. According to scholars, the changeling character justified unexplained diseases or disorders. Anyone who has spent time with teenagers knows it is also the only explanation for what happens when our kids hit puberty.

Our teenagers are unrecognizable, but there is hope. My husband and I have witnessed the transformation of our own children from darlings to demons—doesn’t it happen overnight?—and we can see the light at the end of the god-awful tunnel. More importantly, I served in the trenches otherwise known as high-school English class, where I had before me a laboratory. I observed some champion parenting and I saw some parents fail their children. Mine is wisdom learned in desperation. Few things are so humbling as realizing your clever lesson on subordinate clauses matters nothing to a teenager struggling to find her place in the world, keep her skin clear, or gain the attention of that cute guy in the corner. High school students stand on the precipice of leaving the nest and starting lives on their own. They are at a unique moment in time when they crave independence and boundaries simultaneously, often in equal measure. They are dizzyingly close to becoming the adults they will soon be, yet they are light years away. They are difficult, rebellious, confused, brilliant, impetuous, impulsive, prone to drama, and really, really stupid.

Once in a while, one of these adolescents gets lost in the forest of despair. She loses hope. He forgets feelings are temporary. Before we can help them find their way to a clearing, where they can breathe and see and feel okay again, they choose to leave us. It is a deeply unhappy fact that we have lost some of the children I have cared about. Some of the teenagers I tried to help didn’t make it; some got lost without me guessing anything was wrong. Some of them have committed suicide or made reckless choices that have killed them. Others have gone down paths that have left them lost in countless ways. Many others have strayed, have stood on the edge of the abyss, and have found their way back. These happy stories we celebrate with a metaphorical fatted calf, because those who were lost are found.

What I have learned is based on years of very real, very raw relationships with teenagers. As my children turned into people I did not recognize, who suddenly spit venom at me whenever I entered a room, I paid attention to what other parents did. It has been a hard-scrabble, often ugly process, marked more by failure than grace. Raising teenagers into responsible adulthood takes grit and generosity and super-human tenacity. It is not for the faint of heart. It might threaten to destroy you and your family and everything you hold dear. But raising adolescents to adulthood can also be the richest and most redeeming thing you have ever done. I promise you, even when you don’t recognize them, they are the same people whose very existence once brought you unmeasured joy. Even when they act like otherworldly, supernatural, switched-in-the-night beasts, our teenagers are worth saving.

"Cutting the Apron Strings" (Yeah, Right: Raising Teenagers Sucks.)

We all know the phrase “cutting the apron strings.” Intellectually, we get it. Adolescents need to break away. They need to test their independence and differentiate from us. It is an inherently painful process. But “cutting the apron strings” is far too gentle a metaphor. The image conjures Donna Reed and Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver—apron-wearing, advice-dispensing parents finding tidy solutions for their teenagers’ kooky problems, all within a jovial half-hour.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not how it generally feels at our house. I think a more apt analogy might be, say, “sawing one’s own head off with a rusty blade.”

Perhaps you do not yet know what I mean. If your children are still young and lovely, brace yourself. It goes something like this: one day, you know if you could only see yourself through your beloved child’s eyes, you could finally accept your scars and imperfections. Flash forward a few years. You might be innocently getting dressed for your day in the privacy of your own closet. Your teenager barges in without knocking, and the look of disgust on her face re-activates every single body-image insecurity you have ever known. This is just one of many examples of how a teenager can bitch-slap you right out of any sense of confidence or enlightenment you might have developed, ever.

If you are a parent who does not yet have teenagers, I beg you to drop what you are doing and go smell your youngest child. I mean it—put your nose as far into his personal space as he will allow. If she will still let you smother her with kisses, go do it. Do it while you still can, my friend, because soon, all this is going to change.

If you are a parent with teenagers--if your voice and your wardrobe and your very existence have humiliated a child who formerly adored you--take a deep breath. There is hope. All of us, whether our children are six or sixteen, should breathe deeply and imagine our children as they were when they were toddlers. Sometimes, it’s the only way we can get through the day.