In Theory

I have spent a lot of time in my life with adolescents. In fact, most of my life has been spent in this is stage with these people. I have spent time with so many individuals in their second decade of life as well as with the social systems in which they are embedded – families, churches and schools.






Monster-making. Sometimes adults and parents of adolescents make all adolescents into monsters. It is generally done as a response to fear as these adults hear horror stories of terrible things done by adolescents and fear that the teen they love is at risk for being the next one to do such a thing. Here are four ways adults engage in this process:

• Self-esteem. Sometimes adults and parent use the success of their adolescent for their own self-esteem. Being associated with the adolescent reflects well on the adult and therefore the adult exploits this process.

• Self-promotion. This process is the next step building off of exploiting the adolescent’s success for their own ego, it drags that process out into the public to demonstrate their own greatness.

• Superiority. Stage three in this process is when this trophy-making process is leveraged against other parents or adults to demonstrate who is the better parent, teacher, youth minister, or therapist.

• Take-over. Sometimes adults or parents completely take over the success of the adolescent. They see an opportunity to be supportive, but end up commandeering the whole thing such that the adolescent becomes secondary to the success, project, or event.

• Projection. Sometimes the adult or parent engages with the adolescent in the event, project, or effort so much that the original effort of the adolescent disappears and is remade in the image of the adult or parent.

• Overwhelm. Sometimes the adult or parent offers so many ideas and contributions to the adolescent’s initiative that there is no room left for the adolescent to develop their idea, project, or effort. In the worst cases the adolescent just quits the project and the adult or parent continues it to completion.

I can't keep up with my kids.

When I became a parent it was whether I was ready or not. I wasn't. I thought I was, but alsa, i was not. What can prepare a person for this? Books? Therapy? Pet dog? Nothing. I entered in unprepared, and then with the title and responsibility of being a parent, these (wonderful) children of mine who made me a parent became a moving target that refused to sit still. They insisted upon growing up at what I have now determined is an unsustainable pace. They keep growing into situations for which neither they nor I are prepared to handle - only I am the one who notices this lack of preparation. The reality is that there is no preseason for parenthood, no scrimmages, no practice children to try parenthood out on. When you have children, it is game day, every day.

There is a time in every father's life when his children no longer consider him cool. I have arrived.

I am coaching my son's 6-7 year old, coach pitch baseball team. Today was the first practice. This is a co-ed league, so this team is half girls and half boys. I did some groundball practice with the girls. My ten-year-old, approaching-adolescence-faster-than-she-should-be, too-smart-for-her-own-good daughter was watching from behind the backstop.

As I threw some groundballs to these girls, I was encouraging them playfully ("the ball is not the boss of you" and "go to the ball because the ball won't find you") and in batting practice I told them that "the ball has no feelings, so you can hit it as hard as you want."

After the practice I was having a drink of water in the kitchen and my 10 year old daughter says, "Dad, you were kind of cheesy with those girls in practice today."

"Hey," I said in defence, "I am cool to six year olds."

"Yes," she agreed with a sarcastic tone, "like you learned that in 'coolness for Dummies.'"

What can be said against that?

Parents, until a certain age, your children believe that everything you say and do is right and normal. No one has more to say about the cultural and moral realities about children than parents. You are their truth...until a certain age.

And then there is an age when children can determine truth without you. This is entirely a good thing, a developmental necessity. What you hope as a parent is that when your child learns to determine truth without you, that what you have done up until that point still looks like truth to the child. If your parenting has been untrue in the early years, the children will likely spend the rest of his or her life unlearning you. The process of unlearning a person is painful for all involved and is likely to have poor relational outcomes.

Now, there is hope for parents who have done poorly when their children were younger. Own the wrongs. Not always, but often, when children become adults, they can forgive their parents wrongs when the parent owns those wrongs. Parents who insist that they were great parents when they were not and do not admit their wrongs OR parents who give up to their wrongs and don't even try to change are less likely to find forgiveness.

Here's the take away message: In the early years of childhood, parents are truth. In the later years of childhood and into adulthood, parents are compared to independent ideas of truth. Gross mismatches are damaging. But no matter how bad things have become, there is always redemption in seeking to be a truer person.

The very thing we think adolescents would dread doing is the very thing that keeps them safe. That thing is self-disclosure to their parents.

However, the conditions need to be right. Adolescent self-disclosure is precious flower which will bloom, wants to bloom, but only under the right conditions.

Parents who think they have some sort of right to have their adolescents disclose their lives to them at the parent's whim are very wrong-headed about their relationship with their teen. Controling a teen's self-disclosure is only going to result in the teen feeling controlled - and probably resorting to decpetion or stonewalling.

No, the considitons need to be just right.

My question to you:

What are the conditions under which an adolescent would willingly volunteer sensitive information to his or her parents?

When children grow up to survive the hypocricies of their parents and religion without repeating them or rebelling against them, they have accomplished a great thing.

Then they are free to create hypocrisies of their own.

Then they must find the wisdom to watch their own children fight to survive and use them to sovle their own problems. Guilt-driven parenting is nothing but selfishness.

When parents own their self-constructed hypocrisies of parenting and faith and find a compassionate and responsible way to deal with themselves, their children are freed to release their parents from condemnation and grow into their own hypocrisies and find compassion and responsibility in dealing with them.

Redemptive parenting is not summed up in perfection, but rather in the response the parent has to his or her own imperfection. Self-condemning parents create self-condemning children.

All that you do as a parent is a lesson plan, packaged and delivered. It is a lesson that cannot go unlearned. Parents fear this reality and become hypocrites. Then there will be a lesson about hypocrisy, about imprefection, about failure. What will that lesson be? Lie? Pretend? Intentional obliviousness? NO!

The lesson must be compassion, forgiveness, and redemption.

Within the parenting research literature there is a body of research literature called, "Parental Monitoring." In many of the articles written, "parental monitoring" is defined as an act or behavior of the parent. It is measured, however, as how much the parent knows about what their child/adolescent is doing.

Did you catch the mismatch? Define it one way and measure it another way. This mismatch has caused confusion and not a few false assumptions. It was assumed that parents came to know what their adolesent children were doing was mostly because of something that parents were doing. That was a big fat assumption.

What was missing for the longest time was HOW parents came to know things. Since the word "monitoring" was used in so many studies, it was assumed that parents came to know what their children (mainly adolescents) were doing. Parental knowledge came by way of something the parents did.

However, recent studies have said, "Hey, parental monitoring is one thing and parental knowledge is another. Let's measure knowledge and call it knowledge. And while we're at it, let's not assume parents know things because parents do things."

What has emerged is a terrific collection of studies that have found out something that is pretty dramaitc. Parental knowledge is more a function of what the adolesent does, not what the parent does. Parental knowledge comes from adolescent self-disclosure more than from any other source.

That is not just a major difference, it is a complete reversal from previous assumptions. The locus of control over information about the lives of adolescents rests with the adolescents, and not the parents. This research makes a whole lot of sense if you think about it. If an adolescent doesn't want to talk, that kid won't talk. If a teen wants to hide the truth, guess what? The truth will remain hid.

So, what power does a parent have if parental knowledge is in the hands of the child? Quite a bit actually. What the parent must do is create the kind of relationship wherein the adolescent would want to self-disclose. This relationship pattern should be begin before the child is an adolescent. It should begin at birth and continue on forever.

Parents have a whole lot of influence and power with their adolescent children, but it is not forced or imposed as much as parents might like believe (or how some research might imply).

What kind of relatinoship do you think results in adolescent self-disclosure?

During get ready time this morning, I knocked on the bathroom door and asked, (Sierra is my 9 year old daughter)

"Sierra, are you in there?"

"Yes."

"Are you going potty?"

"No!" She replied with a tone of voice indicating that I was an idiot for asking such as question.

"I mean, are you going to the bathroom?"

"Yes," with a tone of voice that said, "what else would I be doing in here?"

"Right," I say, "we don't talk baby talk anymore, do we?"

"Uhm, yeah," she said - and I guarantee she rolled her eyes.

So, as my children are growing, I am required to grow and change at a pace that matches their maturity level. For some reason, my vocabulary about what happens in the bathroom has gotten stuck. Yes, sometimes I get stuck and keep treating my kids as though they didn't change or grow in the past year or two.

Any other parents out there find that you are not growing in your parenting as fast as your kids are goriwing as kids?

Meal time at the Gonzalez home means kids prepare the table: clear off anything that is not meal related, place meal related items on the table. That's about it so far as the kids are concenred.

Well, today one of the non-meal items to be removed from the table was an empty Diet Dr. Pepper can. My daughter (age 9) insisted that I clean up my own mess. Well, there was a certain logic to the demand, but there was also this tone of self-risghtouesness that was inescapable. I refused and continued doing what I was doing.

My son, who will own a dog one day with his same loyal, loving, and peacemaking personality, in an effort to create peace and bring resolve, grabbed the can and headed for the recycle bin. He almost got out the door the garage when I caught him with my voice and told him to place that can right back on the table. His confusion was understood, but there was a larger battle going on here.

I told my daughter to please place the can in the recycle. She resisted. I resisted her resistance. She finally relented in her behavior, but not her attitude. She annouced that after she puts the can in the recycle bin that she was going down stairs to her room. It was an announcement packaged in restrained anger and brewing indignation.

My wise son (age 7), though he did not understand why there was this conflict emerging, politely and quietly agreed to the process knowing that silence was the best way not to be included in this battle.

After a couple of minutes my son brought peace and laughter to my daughter. He is incredibly silly and can make his sister laugh in almost any situation. He loves her so much that he wants her always to be smiling and laughing. He is a great gift to his sometimes brooding and melancholy sister.

I waited until the laughter downstairs grew and then waned some, then I made my move.

I went downstairs and excused my son from the room and told my daughter it was time to talk. My son left in peace while my daughter's laughter instantly changed to disinterested agreement. Her situational emotional control is perfect. She's becoming a teen. Only four more years and there she is.

After a few opening remarks and my own brand of silliness cracked a smile on her face (Yes, I still got it) I was able to ask why she was so upset with me. She used logic (clean up your own mess) and I used mine (I clean up your messes way more than you clean up mine, I bought our cars that you get to ride in etc). Obviously this got us no where.

Then she revealed the nugget of insight that began the change. She said that she is learning about personal responsbility in school and that she was upset that I was not personally responsible for my Diet Dr. Pepper can. I restrained myself from wondering who personally responsible for her popcorn mess last night (restraint - good move).

Intead, I moved on to different levels of responsibility. Yes, there is personal responsibility, but there is also family responsibility. We share duties to make the whole process easier.

Then she said that it's like purple.

Huh?

She said that there is blue and there is red, but when they come together it is purple. Red and blue are primary colors, so they are individuals, but purple is made by the two other colors coming together, they are family.

I promptly told her that her thinking is deep and very intelligent, that I had never thought of it that way before, but now I will.

Then we got crazy thinking of all of the different levels of responsibility andwhat colors those levels might be.

"You're food's getting cold..." is what broke our fun and brought back into the family meal.

Click here to see Mom My Ride.

OK, you have got to see this video. It's 3 and a half minutes. Watch it to the end when Hal Runkel throws the news person for a loop. She can't even close the interview and move to commercial.

The content is good, as well.

Click here to see the video.

I like the book called, To Own A Dragon. Donald Miller discusses life without a father. It's a great complement to Wild At Heart by John Eldredge. The books are verydifferent angles at the same kind of topic - the longing for boys to be fathered.

I have especially recommended this book for single mothers raising sons on my Smart Single Parents Blog.

The following quote was quite penetrating for me, especially since I am a natural born introvert.

Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be.

That's rich. Let it sink in. Lying within each of us is this package of something wonderful, beautiful, and powerful - and yet the key to unlocking that potential does not lie within ourselves, but within another person. This is part of the beauty of marriage, friendship, raising children, being part of a church, inv iting neighbors over for cards etc.

Relationships are the context in which the very best in us can be released. We are gold mines waiting to be mined. Unless we let people in, we may never bless the world like we were inteneded to.