manipulative and ruthless. If this statement seems offensive, please don’t take it personally. Regardless of the amount of quality time you have spent with your children, the financial sacrifices you have made, and the hopes and dreams on which you have hung your parental heart, your offspring will ooze with ingratitude. They are the sun and moon of their own universe, sprinkling their skies with stars—their friends. Your teenagers and their friends float along their own private Milky Way with little regard for your needs. Unless you come with money or a ride, you have no importance to them, as you merely reside on planet Earth.
Depending on the day or the hour, your teens’ moods will vacillate between selfishness and intentional disregard for your rules as they race toward premature independence with a sense of entitlement and with their judgment lagging behind their autonomy.
Your son or daughter at this stage is the epitome of a teenager, behaving exactly as this milestone dictates. While this may be of little consolation to your injured feelings, you can take solace that adolescents are predictably unpredictable. When they dis-regard the rules you set, their behavior is not to be condoned, even though it is to be expected. But recognizing this life phase helps to keep everything in proper perspective. In a perfect world, your children would be appreciative of your efforts and eternally grateful for your sacrifices, of which there have been and will continue to be many; in their world, they stand alone in their grandiosity, searching for instant gratification with an insatiable need for more.
During this stage your child is encoded by nature to march to a different drum; he or she needs your assistance to find the balance between what they need and what they want. You find yourself on high alert as their world becomes riddled with risk-taking behavior, heightened by soaring emotions on one hand and plummeting despair on the other. Your teenager’s sense of reasoning is littered with skewed perceptions, where monumental decisions are made by a simple roll of the dice.
Back to the Good Ole Days?
To be sure, there are times you will wish you could turn back the clock and start over. In your daydreams you may find yourself lying by a swimming pool sipping a cool drink and reading magazines without a care in the world. In this wonderful scenario you are responsible for absolutely nothing, and in charge of absolutely no one. You drift off with only one thought: This is the life you were intended to live.
Wake up! That dream is twelve or fifteen years off; you have produced offspring, and you are stuck with them. Now, you have to figure out what to do with them. We know you’re feeling overwhelmed and fed up with your children’s indignation and sarcasm, their comments directed toward you muttered under their breath purposefully loud enough for you to hear. No one could have prepared you for this stage of your life, nor theirs; yet here you are, staring into the face of someone who pretends to be your child, and whom you do not like. They may call you Mom and Dad convincingly, yet they cannot possibly be yours, especially when they challenge you in the war of wills, finger pointing at your inept parenting skills, unearthing your secret insecurities.
You on Trial
When you have teenagers residing under your roof, expect long and sleepless nights, kept awake with nagging doubts of your parenting abilities—doubts planted by your offspring.
It is astonishing how quickly a teenager is able to convince you that you have no idea what you are doing, until you retaliate by losing control. Then, he or she has succeeded in gaining control. Later, in the quiet of night, as your overgrown child lies sleeping, you tearfully question how you have come to this point, pitted against your teenager in a battle in which you did not enlist. Words spoken in anger illuminate the darkness, robbing you of much-needed sleep.
You don’t want it to be this way: all the negative energy that has filled your once-harmonious home; this festering of negative emotions demonstrating the enormous power of your teenage son or daughter, with exhausting escapades and screaming matches their only method of communication, or, what’s even worse, their unbearable silence. You have a sense of longing for your once-loving child in all his or her innocence, relying on you for the answers to their questions, finding comfort when you soothed their fears. Now you find yourself plotting to decode their secrets, hypervigilant as you gather clues to stall their emotional destruction.
When you weren’t looking, your teenagers have become undercover sleuths, amassing evidence to prove their accusations against you, adept at turning the tables as they smokescreen their own deficiencies by pointing out yours. You will find yourself in the witness chair as they become the self-appointed judge and jury of your infractions, supporting their allegations with erroneous evidence, cleverly taking your words out of context for the purpose of turning them against you. You foolishly plead for mercy when your son callously has none to give; your words are manipulated with innuendos of nothing resembling the truth. Or your daughter’s closing argument proves brilliant as she gains her own sympathy at having had the misfortune of being born to a family such as yours. This is what you’re up against, without much hope for logic to speak in your defense.
While you attempt to rise above your teenagers’ faulty rhetoric and skewed perceptions to a place where truth and reason prevail, it is senseless to remind them of your monetary sacrifices or emotional endeavors. They can’t hear you right now. Any proof you enter as evidence will be rejected as irrelevant. There is only one issue at hand, and that issue is the constraints that you have placed upon them with the sole purpose of ruining their life. The gavel resounds with their ruling: You have been found guilty.
You plead, to no avail. You request an appeal; denied. Your teenagers have encased themselves behind a soundproof, invisible shield and entered the ethers of adolescence, where adults are prohibited. This is the stance from which you will parent from now until they reach adulthood.
You are on the outside, looking in.
Step One: The Business of Parenting
Separating your feelings from entanglement with those of your teenagers and separating your feelings from your convictions and decisions is the most difficult part of any ordeal with them. Try to think of parenting as a notebook page divided into two separate columns, one labeled “The Emotional Aspect” and the other “The Business Aspect.” The Emotional Aspect consists of love, hope, laughter, sadness, trepidation and tears. The Business Aspect must be devoid of these emotions in order to function objectively, and includes a blueprint, a job description, goals, incentives, bonuses, rewards and consequences. It is this business of parenting that is so difficult, yet so essential to the overall emotional well-being of your children. If only love were enough.
About Sheila
Sheila came to the office with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Ashley. From Ashley’s authoritative tone as she spoke to her mother in the waiting room, it was immediately clear to us who was “in charge” of whom. In fact, once inside the therapy room, daughter Ashley held nothing back when it came to listing her mother’s foibles, while Mother sank into her chair, embarrassed by Ashley’s accusations of her inability to make a “decent family meal.” When Sheila finally tried to speak in her own defense, Ashley quickly cited example after example of what she considered to be her mother’s inadequate parenting skills. The room soon grew quiet due to Mother’s surrender. It was torturous to witness such a browbeating.
The original complaint that brought Ashley and her mother to therapy was Ashley’s angry assaults on her family. It was no wonder to us that Ashley was allowed to manipulate the family with her demands, as there was no parent who could rein in her smokescreening behavior.
When we confronted Ashley about her disrespect, re-minding her that her misbehavior in school was the
