Unconditional. Telaina Eriksen

      Adolescence is just a mess, both for parents and our kids. Then you add the pressure cooker of today’s average middle or high school and things can get even messier. Our local high school is just a few blocks from Michigan State University, a large Research I-designated, Big Ten University. This means that a lot of students who go to the high school have at least one parent who has a PhD, and possibly two who have a PhD. Then there are the parents who don’t have a PhD, but they may want their kid to be smarter than that other kid whose parents do have PhDs. Everyone wants to feel their child is advanced (I include myself in this. I am not free from sin on this topic). It can become a ludicrous contest—whose child can take the most AP classes, and who can get not only a 4.0 GPA but a 4.1 or higher, depending on how many AP classes they can stack their schedule with.

      And then there are the sports! Student-athletes are now expected to train year-round in their sport or sports. Three full weeks before school starts in August, all the fall sports begin their two-a-day practices. Football, volleyball, water polo, swimming, tennis, and golf all practice for two hours in the morning and another two hours in the afternoon, sometimes with strength training/conditioning between.

      Or maybe your child goes to a school with the opposite problem. Maybe no one is invested academically and there aren’t a lot of good role models for success in grades or sports. Maybe the school your teen attends had to cut extracurricular activities just to make ends meet, and your child is spending too much time indoors on social media and/or video games. Regardless, high school looks very different now than it did 30 years ago.

      Whatever you and your child’s experiences have been with their schooling, this is a time of life when their bodies are changing (or not changing, which is also stressful), and our society wants to determine a large amount of their future using standardized tests; there’s homework, friend-drama, maybe even a peer they are interested in romantically; then there’s competition, parental expectations, perhaps learning to drive, maybe an after-school job, chores, and on top of all of this, they are LGBTQ.

      Parents, if you drink, you have my permission to go pour yourself a cocktail.

      I have seen (and you probably have too) parents so over-involved in their child’s sports, music, and/or academics you can scarcely believe it. I’m not just talking about the notorious “helicopter parent” (who I think is exaggerated by the media. Seriously, how many parents have the kind of money to take time off work to go with their kids to job interviews or buy houses where they are going to college?), I’m talking about parents who have become so invested in their child’s high school career that they forget it’s their child’s high school experience. One mom I know said her daughter’s name 27 times (!!!) in our 20 minute conversation. (I counted.) “Brenda said…” “Brenda can’t stand it when…” “Brenda is just like me when….” “Brenda won’t be able to…” “You do know that the college scouts came to look at Brenda?” “Brenda doesn’t get the recognition she deserves…” “Those girls are jealous of Brenda because she’s so much better at ______ than they are.” I wanted to slip her the number of my therapist. I wondered about the last thing she had experienced as herself, and not as “Brenda’s mom.” Did she even have her own identity anymore? Or was she solely living through her child? What is she going to do when Brenda goes off to college? Or gets a job in another state? Or gets married?

      As much as her daughter may enjoy being the center of everything to her mother, you can also bet Brenda is also absolutely terrified. When you are built up that much by a parent(s), even a little failure can seem like a big fall. It is easy (so easy) to let our egos get wrapped up in our parenting. But it is very important, even more so with an LGBTQ child, that we recognize this and overcome our egos and hang onto our unconditional regard and love for them. When we only take pride in our children for their accomplishments, and let them know our disappointment when they fail, we are operating on the pride/shame axis as parents that Eric Parens talks about in his book Surgically Shaping Children: Technology, Ethics, and the Pursuit of Normality.23 Children learn quickly to feel proud when they achieve or when they are “normal,” and shame when they fail or “aren’t good enough.” This can evolve into an external locus of control where the child constantly seeks external validation and the approval of authority to complete goals, rather than an internal locus of control, where the child and adult can self-regulate and monitor without the constant need for external validation. An external locus of control also results in fragility, where every time a child fails, they can feel as though they themselves are failures, rather than just processing their failure as something to learn from. 24

      Alice Dreger writes in The Pacific Standard in her article, “What’s Wrong With Trying to Engineer Your Child’s Sexual Orientation?”25 (the answer is a lot, in case you were wondering) about a father who is overwhelmed and wants to abort upon finding out the baby has a cleft lip. “My friend and I both were thinking: Come on! If you can’t handle this, what are you going to do when your kid smokes a little dope? What are you going to do if she ends up pregnant at 16? What are you going to do if she’s terrible at math or suffers from a lot of acne? … The problem with such a parent is that he is planning to live his entire existence with his child on the shame-pride axis,26 where everything his child does is rated according to whether it makes her father proud or ashamed… You can’t seriously expect your whole parenting experience to consist of softball trophies and bumper stickers that brag about your Honor Roll child. It is not your child’s job in life to make you proud. It is your job to make your children proud of you as their parent.”