A parent cannot sit still in front of a child who looks like they are suffering. They are in that much pain, and I am supposed to watch? That feeling is where a question at the seminar came from. A child took a wound too hard, and now they are an adolescent, and at that age it is easy for a state like that to set. What do you do for them then?
Children and adolescents are not the same kind of problem. Somebody who takes up this sort of study as an adult can walk in on their own feet. An adolescent has things breaking the surface inside them and no idea how to regulate any of it.
So here is the picture I gave. A teenager builds emotional strength by feeling distress, making a choice, living with the result, and trying again. If a parent removes every consequence, settles every conflict, or decides every difficult question, the teenager is spared the strain but also loses the practice. That is what the weight means: the strength to carry what is coming up inside and regulate it without the parent doing the work for them.
There is no room for you to intervene
I am sorry to say it, but there is no room to intervene. The swings are severe. It is hard. The dynamics come surging up. And they have to knock about in it, fail at it, make the mistakes, and shape and build the thing themselves. That is their piece of work, not yours.
Environment bears down on children heavily now. About the only place a child can learn to handle their own dynamics is school; otherwise the world shows them a great deal that is evil, and the smartphone keeps coming in at them. Even so, they are the one who has to find the way through it and come to it themselves.
Be there, and talk when they come over
Then what is the parent for? Being there means remaining available without taking over: keeping ordinary contact, listening when the child approaches, and helping them think without supplying every answer. If your child asks to talk, talk it through with them. This is a different season from the one where you set lines for a small child (Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller).
When they say don’t touch me, you don’t touch. Sitting there listening to that, a parent gets anxious — they are growing up like this, what do I do. But if there was good parenting behind you, and there is still a space where the two of you can get through to each other, this is not going to turn into a large problem.
You are not going to find it
There is a smartphone and there is pornography on it. So how do you find it? You don’t find it. Which is why you stop trying to find it and put your strength into the form of loving them instead. What most people do is say don’t look at that phone, and outside of that there are not many methods on offer.
What makes it come out in a healthy form even when they do see it is love. Treat the relationship as the thing that counts. Love is built on the ground of a relationship. Take the strength you were going to spend hunting through a phone and spend it there.
Don’t talk to them about cigarettes
A school counsellor once put a question to me. Through the education office the school gathers up the children who smoke and runs a stop-smoking treatment for them, and what the counsellor wanted to know was how to get these children to quit. The answer that came back was this. Don’t talk to those children about cigarettes. Just be friendly with them. Then when the time comes, the cigarettes stop on their own.
Think back to the teacher you had a crush on at school. Whichever teacher it was, if I had a real crush on them, the subject that teacher taught was the subject I tried to do well in. Nobody had to tell me to study. The relationship with that teacher is what moved me.
Where the relationship with mother and father is healthy, it runs the same way even when a child veers off a little. They know what their mother and father want, so they do it.
Giving, not blocking
None of this means sit there with your mouth shut. You can say it. You can tell them their mother is worried. What you cannot do is actively block them. Telling them and blocking them are two different acts. What matters is giving love, not blocking the bad thing. And to give love, what were you told to do? Love yourself first. Without loving yourself you cannot hand over love in a healthy form (I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First).
Throw your own love at them and they take it as trespass
If you are a mother carrying this question in this shape, that is also a case of taking your own private love and throwing it at your child. And then the child comes back with: why are you taking my freedom away from me? Why don’t you respect me? The fight breaks out in that shape.
I am plainly thinking of my child. I am doing this because I love them. And they think they have been trespassed on, encroached on, their respect disregarded. One action, and one side calls it love while the other side calls it trespass.
The shape carries on into the marriage
Say the child raised that way is a son. The son marries, and in front of his wife it turns into why do you dismiss everything, and the fight breaks out there. He carried the shape he was handed at home out of the house with him. The marriage takes it up as well. That is how a thing like this gets passed down a line — this shape does.
So what the parent of an adolescent has to hold on to is not a better method for blocking. Being there. Talking it through when they come over. And loving yourself first, so that what crosses over to them is love in a healthy form. The weight is theirs to lift.
Related
- Why the Fear of Making Mistakes Is Really Fear of Being Seen
- The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting
- When a Child Stops Listening, You Should Be Clapping
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board