A room of parents, each of them there over the one thing with a child that will not come loose. At one point I asked how old the children were. The youngest was in the fourth year of primary school. The oldest was thirty-seven. Someone in the middle said twenty-five.
That is how far apart the ages ran, and still the same room, the same reason for being in it. The question that had brought the room together was this one: is it my child that’s the problem?
I want to take that question apart, because on one point I think the answer is no — and the no is not reassurance.
What a parent wants is not much
Raise a child and a great deal of it nags at you. Of everything that nags, the hardest is that it does not go the way you meant it to.
And what you meant is not grand. If they are a student: do well at school, mind their manners. If they are grown: earn their own living. And underneath both of those, do as their mother and father say — no conditions on it. Written out, it is just the ordinary social code, the same code everybody else is holding. Nothing exotic in a single line of it.
Which makes it stranger how much of it does not fit between a parent and a child.
The difficulty arrives in two layers
One layer is the frustration of not being able to understand your child’s mind all the way through. That layer sits between you and a person who is outside you (an external object). It is the real distance between you.
You would like to be close. You would like the talking to go well — some back and forth, a bit of warmth in it. You would like to know what they do when they are out of the house and what they make of it. On the whole they will not tell you any of it.
The other layer is the parent’s anxiety. When the child withholds information or rejects advice, the parent may experience not only frustration but also loss of control, fear of becoming unnecessary, or fear that the child will make a damaging choice without protection.
Puberty can arrive in primary school
It is early now. It can start in the third or fourth year of primary school. A child in the fourth year is at the age where it begins.
And from there they really do not listen. Nothing you say lands. It is bickering from the first sentence. They do not do what they are told, the door of the room closes, and they would rather be behind it on their own.
From where the parent is standing this looks sudden, and particular to their child. That is where the question comes from.
It used to be comic books
The fight breaks out over the phone. Phone, games, television — though nobody seems to fight about television any more. What is left is the phone.
It used to be comic books. The parents now doing the fighting had whole stretches of their own childhood buried in comic books. Look back at it from adulthood and you cannot quite work up the case against it.
The child’s position resembles the parent’s earlier attachment to comic books: “What is so terrible about this?” The object changed, but the wish to enter a private world did not. When the parent forgets that earlier need and insists on total prohibition, the struggle becomes not only about screen time but about who controls the child’s attention.
The house with hard rules and the house that allows everything look like opposites. On the one question that matters here they are standing in the same place: both are trying to keep the child inside the parent’s control. The second house I have written about separately, in You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious.
The son who tells you everything
Daughters give you a little of it. Sons, on the whole, give nothing. And giving you nothing is normal.
If your son does come in and lay out what happened to him out there, all of it, in order — it is a pleasant thing to be on the receiving end of, and I would still put a small question mark beside it. It is not especially healthy.
When he was small, telling the parent everything was developmentally natural. After puberty begins, some privacy is necessary for a separate identity to form. If the adolescent still reports every thought and event, the closeness may reflect difficulty separating rather than exceptional trust.
Not listening and going out of reach are one event
The child who was in your arms grows, and stops listening, and while he is not listening he moves outside the parent’s control.
Not listening and moving beyond parental control are one developmental process. To form independent judgment, the child must sometimes reject the parent’s judgment and discover what follows. Compliance cannot remain total while psychological separation increases. Resistance therefore shows that separation is already underway.
Which is also why the wrestling over the phone gets you nowhere. Why asking someone repeatedly to stop does not work is the subject of Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries.
So you clap
When children move outside the parent’s control, the parent should actually applaud. What is happening is an enormously good thing.
This reverses the usual concern. A son who no longer reports everything may be establishing normal privacy. A parent who feels reassured because an adolescent shares every detail should also ask whether the child feels permitted to have thoughts, relationships, and decisions that remain their own.
If puberty has arrived and you and your child are exactly as close as you always were, then the going out of reach — the part that deserves the applause — may simply not be happening yet.
The question has to move
Of the two layers, the frustration is at least visible. It is pointed at the child, and the child is right there being difficult about the phone. The anxiety is the hard one. It comes up inside you, which is the one location that is hard to get a look at.
So move the question. Instead of asking only, Why won’t this child listen to me? ask, What do I fear will happen if this child makes a decision without me? The answer may reveal fear of danger, loss of authority, rejection, or no longer being needed.
One of the two layers is always on the parent’s side. Saying the problem is not only in the child is not the same as saying it is the parent’s fault, and I want to be exact about that, because parents hear the second when the first is said. What it says is that there is one more place to look, and it has been getting left out.
If a child who used to do as he was told has started not doing it, then in that house a child is growing. Wrestle over the phone if you must; it is going to happen anyway, and I will not pretend it can be talked away. Just know, while it is going on, where this child is actually heading.
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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
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