If you took a snapshot of the scene we would most often find between you and your teen, what would it be?
Would you be yelling at each other? Tip toeing around the room in avoidance? Or talking and laughing together?
Communicating with teens is hard. And positive interactions seem impossible when both parent and child are perpetually reactive.
How Do Parents Get Lost in Conflict?
As I said in my previous post, when you’re parenting in the dark zone, it’s easy to lose control of your emotions and react to your teen.
Here are some of the common pitfalls of boundary setting in the dark zone:
Over-identification: For those of you who have children that are your exact replicas, it’s easy to fall into one of two traps. Either, the child is similar, and those similarities lead to projecting your experiences on to them, OR they’re similar and those similarities create more emerging conflicts.
Think of the mother who has social anxiety; she sees her daughter’s anxiety and remembers how painful the rejection was in her own teen years, so she keeps her daughter safely at home. Or, the father who struggles with explosive anger, and when his son lashes out, it escalates his own anger until they’re both yelling. While either example can happen in isolation, most parents tend to move between both ends of the spectrum.
The Power Struggle: Another common pitfall comes in the form of placing ultimate value on control. Demanding control of teens creates an eternal power struggle. The struggle is a way for parents to assert authority to keep teens from destabilizing their own worlds. And parenting teens can be like bracing for aftershocks as they ripple through in seismic waves.
The teen years are a nebulous zone where the fetters of dependence are still there, but the work of independence is essential and emerging. New boundaries are called for, boundaries that reflect the inevitable and diminishing control. Ultimately, if parents set boundaries within the framework of control, they miss valuable in-roads and vital opportunities to help their teens move towards independence productively. There is a better framework; one that also respects the parents’ stability.
Identity Cloning: Most parents view their teens’ actions as a reflection on their identities. Teens’ missteps become internalized as parents’ failures. Or parents fear others’ judgment if their children misbehave. This can lead to working harder to prevent acting out. And the harder parents work to control, the harder teens work to resist.
It’s essential for parents to understand the forces at work within themselves that subtly influence their behavior. It’s only in this context that healthy boundary setting can begin.
The answer to boundary setting with teens is a pragmatic one. More on that next time…