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January 31 - February 16, 2018
But in many ways the struggles that mothers and fathers face when their children hit puberty are the very opposite. Back when their children were small, parents craved time and space for themselves; now they find themselves wishing their children liked their company more and would at least treat them with respect, if adoration is too much to ask. It seems like only yesterday that the kids wouldn’t leave them alone. Now it’s almost impossible to get their attention.
Yet parents of adolescents have to learn, by stages, to give up the physical control and comfort that was once theirs. In the end, they are left only with words. This transition is almost a certain recipe for conflict. There’s so much yelling, suddenly, and so much (seemingly) gratuitous defiance; simple requests to do work or pick up clothes “lead into temper tantrums,”
Children at this stage are better able to reason too, and to turn their parents’ own logic against them in potentially ugly ways; as any parent of a teenager will tell you, an adolescent knows just what hurts.
Y, this is going to be the worst part. Young children don’t have an objective to injure with their words, even if they say things that hurt while in tantrum mode. Adolescents certainly do, and in fact might be their primary aim at times. Ugh.
Steinberg has also found that parents of a child of the same sex weather the pubescent years far worse than parents of a child of the opposite sex. (The conflicts between mothers and daughters, he added, are especially intense—
He speculates that their difficulties may again be explained by an abrupt break in equilibrium: before adolescence, parents tend to be much closer to their child of the same sex, which makes that child’s efforts to separate all the more painful.
There is, however, another possible explanation for this phenomenon, one I ran across not infrequently in interviews: having a child of the same sex opens up an uncomfortable opportunity for identification. The child, now older, reminds the parent of himself or herself, or who he or she was in high school.
In addition, Steinberg has found that adolescence is especially rough on parents who don’t have an outside interest, whether it be work or a hobby, to absorb their interests as their child is pulling away.
Have a pre-teen? Get a hobby, fast.
A 2007 survey published in the Journal of Marriage and Family went so far as to track the “growth spurt[s], growth of body hair, and skin changes” of the children of its 188 participating families—as well the voice changes in boys and the first menses in girls—in order to see if marital love and satisfaction levels dropped even more precipitously as these changes occurred. They did.
a disproportionate share of mothers said that the task of discipline fell to them alone (31 percent, versus just 9 percent of the dads). Mothers also reported setting more limits for their adolescents: they were 10 percent more likely than dads to set limits on video and computer games; 11 percent more likely to set limits on what types of activities they did online; and 5 percent more likely to regulate how many hours of television their kids could watch per day.
Anecdotes on top of this about dads being too lenient when kids make mistakes, being a friend rather than the parent.
Later claims that this leads to more conflict and threats with mother than father. Which in turn makes the departure from the home easier for mother to weather than fathers, who feel a more abrupt change occur.
It’s a dicey business, being someone’s prefrontal cortex by proxy. But resisting the impulse to be a child’s prefrontal cortex takes a great deal of restraint. It means allowing that child to make his or her own mistakes. Only through experience can a teenager—or anyone, really—learn the painful art of self-control.
But when do you step in vs allow learning lessons? Especially with vices below, such as drugs, porn, violence, other crimes, mistakes can be costly and perhaps have life-long effects.
Margaret Mead complained that the sheltered lives of modern adolescents were robbing them of an improvisational “as-if” period during which they could safely experiment with who they’d ultimately become; the result of this deprivation was a lot of acting out.
What does this mean, exactly? Encourage them to be entrepreneurs? :) later: pretty much yes. Start a business, get a job, help the family survive when parents are gone (more common in 18th c. With poorer medicine) etc. also ‘complains’ that child labor laws rob adolescents of the opportunity to be of value, experiment with careers/identities.
“In other words,” writes Howard Chudacoff in his conclusion to Children at Play, “children’s ‘aspirational age’ has risen, while that of adults has fallen. An eleven-year-old no longer asks for a stuffed animal or fire truck and instead desires a Madden NFL football game, a cell phone, an iPod, or a Beyoncé Knowles CD, while a thirty-five-year-old may also indulge by buying a Madden football game, a cell phone, an iPod, or a Beyoncé Knowles CD.”
I definitely see dads (well, moms too for that matter) dressing like teenagers with an ‘aspirational age’ far below their own. What’s driving /this/ phenomenon? Many adults are on delayed maturation path?
Some of the worst pain, in fact, can stem from the things we failed to do, or the errors we made that our kids have seen, or the rotten habits we failed to conceal and our kids have now made their own or decided very aggressively to reject. Children bear witness to some of our most shameful behaviors and worst mistakes. Most parents can tell you with grim precision what they were, and the pain those habits and episodes inflicted.
Ugh. Don’t look forward to these. None yet, but we have zero teenagers right now. ;)
WITH THIS SIMPLE OBSERVATION, Paul has stumbled onto one of the biggest paradoxes in the research on human affect: we enshrine things in memory very differently from how we experience them in real time. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a couple of terms to make the distinction. He talks about the “experiencing self” versus the “remembering self.”
Can already see this myself. But I think 3 years old is fun in the moment too!
Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time with our kids. (I am very specifically referring here to Kahneman’s study of 909 Texas women.) But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales.
“And the most common high point for midlife adults,” he tells me, “is the birth of a first child.” That’s true for both men and women.
I don’t know. Sure it was pretty big deal to go from no kid to kid, but I think higher points come well after birth, no question.
Their competence at things you can’t do, and their mastery of subjects you know nothing about, can engender a wild sense of pride.
Yes
This pride need not come from kids’ accomplishments either. It can stem—and often does—from their simple transformation into moral, compassionate creatures.
Yes also
If these adults falter or behave ignobly, they know their kids will see; the same is true if they do well. They are exquisitely aware of themselves as role models. They know they are being watched.
Some parents could up their introspection a bit though, I’d say, in order to usher in a more moral generation. So important to think about long-term effects of all our decisions and lessons. The immediate result is of almost no consequence: its how you react to adversity and opposition that teaches children how to be. So important.
