Parenting is a tough job. Some days it seems like the toughest job in the world, especially when you have teenagers in the house! So when you have had a good day, when you feel you’ve made some headways, you want to give yourself a pat in the back.

Today is one of these days.

My almost 14 year old son is growing fast. Very fast. It seems we have fallen into the teenager years overnight! From a quiet and very obedient child who was happy to stay home or go on an occasional playdate, I now have a child who is on his phone all day long and who wants to go out with his friends all the time  – scary and way too fast to my taste! Now, to be fair, I don’t have to complain too much about the attitude just yet – although some days I feel it’s coming. I also can’t complain about his academic performance since for the second year in a row he’s made the top 10% of his grade. Where I ‘feel’ his teenager years is in the never ending conversations we’re having around the permissions he now asks for. It feels everyday he’s asking for more.

As he’s pushing the boundaries, I’m connecting with mine, the ones I didn’t know I had. Like everything else with parenting, it’s not like there’s a ‘rule book’ for us to refer to!

I find extremely difficult to know what I’m comfortable with and what I’m not. Sometimes, I wish I could just simply say “no, you can’t do that because I said so, end of story”. But I’ve taught my kids to have conversations, to discuss and share our perspectives on things; as much as possible, we’ve learnt to come to a shared agreement.

I’m now finding the limits of that approach.

First, because my son is now a great debater with strong arguments (be careful what you wish for!) and second because sometimes, you just can’t agree on things and as the parent you have to make the call… For as unpleasant as it might be at times, it comes with the role of being a parent. As I’m finding myself telling my children on a regular basis “My role and responsibility as your mother is to keep you safe and help you grow to become the best adult you can be; keeping you happy is not my #1 priority, if it can happen great, but I will not make this my objective.”

Let’s go back to the challenges of setting boundaries and of adjusting them to your teenager’s needs growing independence needs. What’s not helping in my situation is that I know I am highly risk-averse when it come to physical risks, in other terms, I am a wuss and I know it! But I don’t want him to be penalised by my overly anxious nature. So that leaves me ill-equipped to come up with a decision that I feel is fair to him. For as much as I usually see myself as having a solid ‘inner compass’ to help me take decisions, in this territory, I find myself doubting a lot.

These conversations are often difficult and leave him highly frustrated with a mum who he says “has trust issues”. How can I make him understand, it’s not so much him as a person I don’t trust but the people around him, the environment we leave in and yes his ability to assess risks. As I tell him when he gets frustrated, “the simple fact you don’t want to agree there is risks, makes me uncomfortable with your capacity to evaluate risks in any given situation”. As you can imagine, my comment usually doesn’t land very well…

But tonight he surprised me. We’re in Singapore on holidays. As we were walking back to our friend’s place, he started engaging in the risk conversation about a jump rock he’s been desperate to go to and to which after hesitating a lot and consulting with other parents of teenagers, I said he couldn’t go to.

– My son: “So about the jump rock thing you won’t let me do, would it help if I told you all the risks I can think of?”

– Me: “Sure”

And then he started listing all the risks he has been mulling over over the past few weeks. I’m now much more impressed by my son’s ability to reflect and yet when it comes to letting him go to the jump rock, it’s still a no… How can I tell him and leave the door open to other conversations?

And then in the spur of the moment, a question came to me:

– Me: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how risky do you think the jump rock is?”

– My son: “3/10”

– Me: “Well for me, it’s an 8/10”

There was a long silence… All of sudden, it seems the reason why we were arguing so much about this specific situation made sense. We had talked about the different risks and how we didn’t agree but giving our position a number changed the dynamics. It’s like we could feel the different meaning we gave to the risks. Beyond words, using a scale allowed us to frame the conversation in a very different way. It allowed him to explore his own thinking, to hear mine and to ‘feel’ mine. It allowed us to objectify the conversation and put some distance from our emotions.

Now, let’s be honest. Going to the jump rock is still a no and he’s still quite frustrated with me – apparently on his ‘love-scale’ I fell from an 8 to a 4! But as we closed the conversation, we agreed it had been a constructive conversation. We also used that same approach for other situations, e.g., him wanting to go to the mall with his friends, where we had been disagreeing for some time and I have to admit that , based on this risk-assessment scale I had to change my position.

Now, this is just the beginning, assessing a situation purely from a physical risk perspective is way too black and white. There are other dimensions we need to include in our reflection, like for instance how interesting we think an activity is or how aligned it is with the values we believe in. But at least, we now have a starting point. I find this approach is also helping me anchor my reflection on some objective points and helping me regain confidence in my ability to make a rationale decision, away from the emotive.

So what?

  • As a parent our duty of care takes precedent over our desire to be loved and appreciated by our children.
  • Teens need to learn to develop their complexity of mind. They need to learn to ‘see more’ and to see from other people’s perspectives. The more we do it with them, the more we can help them develop that capacity faster.
  • Staying with the tension and finding a way to approach it together is a great way to role model how to deal with conflict in the ‘real life’; it’s also a great way to connect.

And yes, this approach takes time, more time than using the traditional ‘command and control’ approach many people use. Now there might be some extreme situations where this ‘command and control’ approach might be warranted but I strongly believe that our planet needs better thinkers and that there is no better place than home to start them on their thinking journey!

 

With Love,

Sandra