A parent cannot sit still when their child seems to be suffering. The thought runs like this: my child is hurting this much, and I am supposed to just stand by and watch? At a seminar I gave on loving yourself, someone asked a question that came from exactly that feeling. Some children take the same hurt much harder than others. When a child like that reaches the teenage years, they can easily get stuck in that hurt. How do you help them then?
The person who asked explained why they were asking about teenagers. An adult who wants to understand their own mind can go and look for help on their own. A teenager has feelings and urges welling up inside, and no idea yet how to manage any of it.
Here is the picture I gave in reply. Someone is lifting a barbell. If you step in and lift it with them because it looks hard, their muscles never develop. Muscle comes from the strain itself. Adolescence works the same way. 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. The muscle a teenager is building in these years is the strength to handle the feelings and urges rising inside them, and to manage them without a parent doing it for them.
There is no room for you to intervene
I am sorry to say it, but there is no room to intervene. Yes, their moods swing wildly, these years are hard, and feelings and urges come surging up. But they have to stumble through all of it themselves, failing and making mistakes, until they have built that strength on their own. That job is theirs, not yours.
These days, children’s surroundings have a heavy influence on them. Outside the home, school is about the only place where they can learn to manage what rises up inside them. The rest of the world shows them a great deal that is bad for them, and the smartphone keeps bringing it straight to them. Even so, they have to find their own way through all of that and learn for themselves.
Be there, and talk when they come to you
Then what is left for the parent to do? Be there; that is enough. 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 comes to you wanting to talk, talk with them about whatever they bring. This is a different season from the years when a small child needed you to set limits (Free-Floating Anxiety: Why Limits Make You Feel Safer, Not Smaller).
When your teenager says leave me alone, you leave them alone. Being pushed away like that makes a parent anxious: what am I supposed to do while my child grows up shutting me out? But if your child had good care when they were younger, and the two of you can still talk to each other, none of this is going to turn into a big problem.
You are not going to find what is on their phone
Take the smartphone. Your teenager has one, and pornography is only a tap away on it. So how are you going to find out what they are looking at? You won’t. Most parents simply tell their child to stay off the phone, and beyond that there are not many methods on offer. So stop trying to find out, and put your energy into loving them instead.
Even if they do see such things, what keeps them healthy is love. In practice, loving them means treating your relationship with them as the thing that counts, because love needs a relationship to grow in. Take the energy you were going to spend searching their phone and put it into the relationship instead.
Don’t talk to them about cigarettes
A school counsellor once put a question to me. The school, working with the local education office, had gathered the students who smoked and was running a stop-smoking program for them, and the counsellor wanted to know how to get these students to quit. This is what I told the counsellor. Don’t talk to those children about cigarettes. Just be friendly with them. Then, in time, they will stop smoking on their own.
Why would that work? Think back to a teacher you adored at school, maybe even had a crush on. If you really adored that teacher, you tried hard in the subject they taught. Nobody had to tell you to study. Your relationship with that teacher is what moved you.
It works the same way at home. When a child’s relationship with their mother and father is healthy, they may stray a little, but they know what their parents want, and they do it for them, the way you worked hard for that teacher.
Give love instead of trying to block bad things
None of this means you have to keep your mouth shut. You can speak up. You can tell them you are worried. What you cannot do is actively stop what they are doing. Telling them how you feel and trying to stop them are two different things. What matters is giving love, not blocking bad things. And what does it take to give love? You have to love yourself first. Without loving yourself, you cannot give love in a healthy way (I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First).
Push love on them on your own terms and they feel intruded on
Here is what love looks like when it is not given in a healthy way. Go back to the question from the seminar. If what you are looking for is a way to step in and fix things for your hurting teenager, then you are offering love on your own terms and pushing it onto your child. And your child pushes back: why are you taking my freedom away from me? Why don’t you respect me? That is how a fight breaks out.
You are clearly thinking of your child. You are doing this because you love them. But the child feels intruded on, invaded, disrespected. It is the same action, but one side calls it love and the other calls it an intrusion.
The same pattern carries on into the child’s marriage
Say the child raised that way is a son. He marries, and now the same kind of complaint is aimed at his wife: why do you dismiss everything? He feels as disrespected by her as he once felt at home, and the same kind of fight breaks out. He took the pattern from his parents’ house and carried it into his own marriage. That is how a pattern like this gets passed down from one generation to the next.
So what the parent of a teenager has to hold on to is not a better way to block bad things. It is being there. It is talking with them when they come to you. And it is loving yourself first, so that what reaches them is love given in a healthy way. The barbell 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