Transcriber: Phuong Vu Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I have two kids.
When they were very small, their father and I,
our goal was to just keep them alive every single day.
“Lucy! Do not eat that Tide pod that you found under the sink.”
“Owen! When we go hiking, you need to stay on the trail,
not go off and choose your own adventure.”
And in case you’re wondering if you’re ever at Kohl’s
and you hear someone call a code yellow over the walkie talkie system,
it may be that one of your children has separated from you,
disappeared through the clothes racks, and is in front of the store,
making trains out of the shopping carts by the entrance.
Our goal was to keep them happy, healthy, safe,
and alive every single day.
Now that they’re older, things look a little bit different.
No longer can I keep them by my side every day and protect them.
Now conversations go a little bit like this:
“Hey Mom, can I take the car to Nashville to go see a concert with my friends?”
And I find myself channeling my inner Frances McDormand,
who in the Cameron Crowe film,
“Almost Famous,” when she drops off her sweet little William
at his first Black Sabbath concert, rolls down the window and shouts out,
“Don’t take drugs!”
and she has to leave him behind.
You see, we no longer can protect them every single day.
So we have to start to let them go.
But how do we do that?
How do we as parents start to give them that independence that they need?
And why is it so important to their development?
The German-American psychologist Erik Erikson believed that as people develop,
they go through many stages of development.
During adolescence,
children are in a stage known as identity versus role confusion.
It begins about the age of 12 and ends about the age of 18.
During this time, teenagers are trying to identify who they are
as people,
and trying to establish their independence.
This constant struggle of wanting to become independent
yet the parents want to keep them protected
and this constant wanting to establish who they are as individual people
and establish this identity
creates many of the conflicts that parents see in their home with their teenagers.
So what do parents do?
How do you protect them yet let them be independent?
And how do you let them start to become and develop their own identity?
So maybe you’ve had a conversation like this:
Your child, bright, smart, well-put-together kid,
suddenly is failing their classes.
So you go to the smart, great, capable child, and say,
“OK child, what is going on?”
and they say to you, “Well, a number of things could be going on,”
but normally they start blaming things.
“Well, the teacher this, and the classwork this, and things are just too hard.”
You think to yourself, “There’s got to be a reason,”
because, you know, they’re on their X-Box all the time after school,
spending a lot of time with their girlfriend,
and they’ve assured you that everything is just fine.
But usually, it’s the universal. “Well, I don’t know.”
Maybe you’ve heard that one.
The point is that when you talk to them, whatever comes out of them,
when you start questioning them,
think about what it was like when you were 15, 16, 17 years old,
and all of what you felt when you were in adolescence,
the struggles you had,
the difficulties of finding yourself and what that meant.
How would you have wanted the adults in your life to respond to you?
It may seem like a great time to start with:
“Well, when I was your age”
or “Hey, we never had this problem with your older sister.”
But in that moment, when that child is talking to you,
the most important thing you can do is listen to what they have to say.
You see, when you engage in that act of listening with them,
it encourages them to speak more
and tell you more about what’s going on with them.
As they talk to you, there are two things that you need to establish:
something you need to say, and a question that you need to ask.
The statement that needs to be made is
or the saying you need to say is “I’m here for you,”
and the question is “What can I do to help?”
As you are growing with your adolescent,
you are no longer going to be a leadership of your child,
but create a partnership with your child.
When you say to them, “I’m here for you,”
that starts to create that partnership with your child.
And when you say to them, “What can I do to help?”
it causes them to pause and think, “Well, what do I need?”.
That is starting to create that independence,
and then it starts to build that collaboration with your child.
There also is a lot of educating that goes into this time of life.
Again if you think back to when they were really small,
you taught them many, many things.
You think back to: you teach them how to feed themselves,
dress themselves, ride a bike.
You teach them how to be safe like cross the street.
When they’re older, they still need a lot of teaching,
even though they fight you on it.
They still need to be taught how to manage their time when they’re learning.
They need to be taught how to manage their money when they get a new job.
They need to be taught how to drive,
and most importantly, how to manage and care for themselves
when they’re getting into new and unfamiliar relationships.
You see, parents never stop parenting.
I myself -
We are in the throes of adolescence with my own two children.
What they need from me is different than what they needed from me
when they were little.
My own parents are in retirement age, and they have three adult children,
And we are still going to Mom and Dad for advice.
Not too long ago,
I made my first solo adult purchase of a brand-new vehicle,
and I went through all the paperwork, I sat down with the car company,
I picked out the vehicle I wanted,
I did all the financing, and I felt very adult,
but before I made that purchase, I called my dad to make sure
I was making a smart decision.
It all comes down to this:
When a baby is born, there’s a lot of excitement around a child.
People sign up.
They come over to see the baby.
They come over to hold the baby. They come over to bring you a casserole.
How’s the baby doing? How’s Mom doing?
How’s Dad doing? Is there anything I can do to help?
Wouldn’t it be great when you had a teenager
and they started going through puberty and adolescence,
if they said to you,
“Hey, Susan, can I bring you a casserole or check in on you?”
You know, “Hey, Mary, can I come over and sit with you
while Tommy’s out at the rock concert and won’t be home till 2 am?
We wait till he gets home for curfew.”
It is important as they grow that you keep parenting,
and loving, and caring for that child but in a different way.
Adolescence is hard.
It’s hard on the kids.
It’s hard on the parents.
It’s hard on society.
Just ask John Hughes; he wrote many films on the matter.
As Allison said in “The Breakfast Club,”
“As you grow older, your heart dies.”
When you’re parenting an adolescent, just remember that heart piece.
Use your heart; consider their heart.
And if you think about parenting a teenager as a collaboration
instead of a competition,
then as Russell Hammond said in “Almost Famous”
you truly will be a golden god.
Thank you.
(Applause)