I once gave a seminar for parents. Each of them was there because of a problem with their child that they had not been able to resolve. At one point I asked how old their children were. The youngest was in the fourth year of primary school. The oldest was thirty-seven. In between, someone said twenty-five.
The ages were that far apart, and yet everyone in the room was there for the same reason. The title of the seminar was a question: is it my child that’s the problem?
I want to take that question apart. If all that has happened is that your child has stopped doing what you say, I think the answer is no — and I am not saying no just to make you feel better.
What a parent wants is not much
When you are raising a child, a lot of things weigh on you. Of all of them, the hardest is when your child will not do things the way you want.
And what you want is not much. If they are at school: do well in their studies and mind their manners. If they are grown up: earn their own living. And, no matter what, do what their mother and father say. These are ordinary expectations, the kind most parents hold. There is nothing unusual in any of it.
And yet it is on exactly these things that parents and children so often clash.
The difficulty arrives in two layers
One layer is the frustration of not being able to fully understand what is going on in your child’s mind. This layer lies outside you, between you and your child. It is the distance that actually exists between the two of you.
You would like to be close. You would like your conversations to go well — some back and forth, a bit of warmth in them. You would like your child to tell you what they do out of the house and what is on their mind. Mostly, they would rather not tell you any of it.
The other layer is not between you and your child but inside you: an anxiety that comes up from deep within. When your child keeps things from you or brushes off your advice, you may feel more than frustration. You may feel that you are losing control, or that you are no longer needed, or you may fear that your child will make a harmful choice with no one there to protect them.
Puberty can arrive in primary school
Puberty comes early these days. It can start in the third or fourth year of primary school. A child in the fourth year, like the youngest child mentioned that day, is at the age where it begins.
And from then on they really do not listen. Nothing you say gets through. The bickering starts with the first sentence. They do not do what they are told. They go into their room, shut the door and want to be left alone.
To the parent, this seems to come out of nowhere, and to be happening only to their child. That is when parents start to wonder whether their child is the problem.
Before phones, there were comic books
Most of the fights are about phones, games or television — though these days, I am told, hardly anyone fights about television any more. What is left is the phone.
The parents now doing the fighting spent whole stretches of their own childhood with their noses in comic books. Looking back as adults, they cannot really say what was so bad about that.
Children feel the same way about their phones: “What is so terrible about this?” For children today, the phone is what comic books were for their parents. The thing in their hands has changed; the wish to have a world of their own has not. But parents forget what they themselves were like at that age, and they insist: no phone, absolutely not. That insistence is what turns into the fight. And then the fight is no longer only about screen time. It is about who controls the child’s attention.
The son who tells you everything
Daughters will tell you a little about their lives. Sons, on the whole, tell you nothing. And telling you nothing is normal.
Suppose your son does come home and tell you everything that happened to him while he was out, all of it, in order. It is a pleasant thing to be on the receiving end of, but I would still put a small question mark beside it. It is not especially healthy.
When he was small, telling you everything was fine; at that age it is natural. Once puberty begins, he needs some things that are his alone, because that is how he becomes a person separate from you. If, as a teenager, he still reports every thought and every event to you, the closeness may not be a sign of unusual trust. It may be a sign that he is struggling to become separate from you. It is the same scene, but at a different age it means something different.
Not listening and moving outside your control are one and the same
The child who was in your arms grows, and stops listening, and while he is not listening he moves outside the parent’s control.
I do not see these as two separate things; they are one and the same. To learn to judge things for himself, a child sometimes has to refuse your judgment and find out what happens. There is no way to keep doing everything you say and, at the same time, move outside your control. So when a child stops listening, it means he has already started moving outside your control.
That is also why the fights about the phone get you nowhere. Through them you are trying to make him do as he is told again, at the very age when not doing as he is told is part of how he grows up.
So you should applaud
When children move outside the parent’s control, the parent should actually applaud. What is happening is an enormously good thing.
That turns the usual worry around. Parents usually worry about the son who no longer tells them everything, but he may simply be keeping a normal amount of privacy. The situation that deserves a second look is the one where parents feel reassured because their son tells them every detail. Those parents should ask themselves whether he feels allowed to have thoughts, relationships and decisions of his own.
If puberty has arrived and you and your child are exactly as close as you always were, then the thing that deserves the applause — your child moving outside your control — may simply not be happening yet.
The question needs to change
Of the two layers, the frustration is at least easy to see. It is aimed at the child, and the child is right there in front of you, being difficult about the phone. The anxiety is harder to see, because it comes up inside you rather than in front of you.
So change 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 be a fear that he will come to harm, that I will lose my authority, that he will reject me, or that he will no longer need me.
One of the two layers, the anxiety, is always inside the parent. That does not mean the difficulty is the parent’s fault. I want to be exact about that, because when parents hear that part of the difficulty is inside them, they tend to hear that they are to blame. What I am saying is that there is one more place to look — inside yourself — and it is the place that has been getting left out.
If a child who used to do as he was told has stopped doing so, then in that house a child is growing up. The fights about the phone are going to happen anyway, and I will not pretend they can be talked away. Just know, while they are going on, where your child is actually heading: towards judging things for himself, outside your control.
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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