Adolescence may seem like it’s a thousand years off. I know it sure felt that way to me as I rocked my infant son or watched him as a toddler playing in mud puddles. Even in the elementary school years, when he seemed to be growing like a weed and no longer resembled the baby he once was, I never dreamed the reality of raising teenagers would hit like it did.
Once you enter this stage, there’s no turning back, girlfriends. Truth be told, we don’t really want to – well, most days we don’t.
This stage of parenthood can strike fear in our hearts. We remember our own teen years: the edginess, confusion and poor choice making. A feeling of being misunderstood sometimes dominated our relationship with our parents. We want to avoid this with our own teenagers.
How can we do it differently?
GIVE THEM SOME ELBOW ROOM
Letting go is the hardest thing to do as we parent teenagers.
Over the years my mentor’s mantra with regards to my oldest son has been, “Give him some psychic space.” By that, she doesn’t mean to let him be a psychic {um, no}. She is talking “psyche,” meaning soul. As children enter the teen years, they need to be allowed to think their own thoughts, feel their own feelings, make choices of their own, and differ from us.
All well and good until I see him veering. Then I freak. You know. The anxiety over what could happen flares up and I rush to put up barricades and force him to see from my perspective. Can you relate?
Fear moves me from an empowering parenting style to micromanaging in a nanosecond. Ugly stuff. Not only is this controlling something I’d rather not admit, it actually undermines my ultimate goal. Increased attempts to control can spur teenagers into more rebellion. A little wiggle room helps them feel they don’t have to buck against us so hard.
How do we set limits while still allowing them extra freedom?
ENOUGH ROPE TO HANG THEMSELVES
I think there are three key things we can do to facilitate the hard and profitable process of letting go. The first is to give them enough rope to hang themselves.
While we continue to guide our teen towards what we think is right, we leave much of the choosing up to them. Bad choices still wind up poorly. Crossing our solid boundaries never ends in a blessing. We learn that we can’t “make” teenagers do what we want, but we can dole out consequences (or allow the natural results they have brought on themselves). Consequences make the best teachers.
LETTING GO OF OUTCOMES
The second key is to learn to release the outcomes of their lives and choices. This is excruciating and it isn’t optional.
It is normal to have thoughts like, “My child will be okay if …” We imagine formulas for the path they need to follow and the things they need to avoid. We convince ourselves this will lead to our desired outcome.
The thing is, our teenagers didn’t get the memo. They might not buy into the outcome we want. Even if they do want something similar to what we envision, they may go about it a totally different way.
I’m going to tell you something really hard here, but it is going to be life-changing for you and your teen. You can not put your hope in how your teen will go through or emerge from the adolescent years.
Almost every parent wants to ensure our teenagers will walk the straight and narrow and agree with all we have instilled over the years. We aspire for our teens to go to college, obtain satisfying jobs with decent salaries, get married to wonderful people (and remain sexually pure until then), never dabble in drugs, or worse become addicted.
The truth is far more of us will have disappointments in one or more of those categories than not. If our hope is in avoiding these pitfalls, we are setting ourselves and our teens up for conflict and disappointment.
WHAT HOPE IS THERE?
Shouldn’t we aim for all of the above? Yes. We should! The trouble comes when we hang our hat on whether our teen achieves all those dream results.
- Putting our hope on outcomes puts too much pressure on our teen
- Outcomes are not guaranteed
- Our hope isn’t meant to be in earthly outcomes. We hope in God. He is with us regardless of the outcomes.
The good news is when you take your hope off the outcomes of your teen’s life, they feel the giant “whew” of that pressure being released. It’s hard enough for them to feel the stress of growing up without the added tension of your attachment to their outcomes.
You will not be disappointed when you put your hope in God instead of the results of your teen’s life. God’s got this. It’s easy to forget that truth in the throes of parenting.
The seeds we planted will flourish better when given some air and sunshine rather than digging them up for repeated inspection and replanting. Entrust the outcomes to God. Put your hope in Him, not your teen.
PROVIDE A SAFETY NET
The third key to letting go well is to provide a safety net.
Don’t you want your teen to learn hard lessons while still under your support and guidance? The blessing comes through your presence. When your teen blows it big time, after the results of their failure have sunken in, you can be in their corner encouraging them and giving them input when their heart is soft. We aren’t here to say “I told you so” or belittle their poor choices. We are here to help them dust off and to set their eyes in a proper direction to the extent that they will allow us.
A SECOND LABOR
The essential and difficult lesson of letting go readies us as much as it does them. They start in our wombs and separate physically as infants at birth. We watch them learn to walk independently as toddlers, and on it goes. Our children increasingly move out into their own lives – the ones we are preparing them for as we give them room to be all God intended them to be.
You can do this. Just breathe through it like you breathed through labor. It’s a second labor of sorts, birthing them into adulthood. It hurts a bit, {Ok, who am I kidding? It hurts like heck.}. The pain will be worth it. The results are bound to be glorious.
If you are parenting a teen, I would LOVE to hear your thoughts. If you are not yet in this season of parenthood, take notes. I’m hoping my posts on parenting teens will be a blessing to help you prepare for the road ahead. If you want to get my monthly letter chock-a-block full of goodness and be on the list to receive my parenting teens ebook for free when it comes out, simply subscribe to PattyHScott.com.
this post was originally written in June 2016 – revised in Jan 2018 to bless more moms like you.
