Surviving Your Child's Adolescence E-Book

Carl Pickhardt

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 438

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Expert suggestions for guiding your child through the rough teenage years Does it sometimes seem like your teenager is trying to push you over the edge? Learn what your child is going through and what you can do to help your teen navigate this difficult period in this practical guide from psychologist and parenting expert Carl Pickhardt. In an easy-to-read style, Dr. Pickhardt describes a 4-stage model of adolescent growth to help parents anticipate common developmental changes in their daughter or son from late elementary school through the college age years. * Provides unique advice for dealing with arguing, chores, the messy room, homework, and many other issues * Offers best practices for teaching effective communication, constructive conflict, and responsible decision-making * Includes ideas for protecting kids against the dangers of the Internet, bullying, dating, sexual involvement, and substance use An essential road map for parents looking to guide their children on the path to adulthood.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Author’s Note

Introduction

Voices of Parents Past

Chapter One: Preparing for the Inevitable

Parental Attitude

Mutual Disenchantment

When Your Dog Becomes a Cat

Resetting Expectations

Adjusting to the Five Realities of Adolescence

Lack of Appreciation

Chapter Two: A Road Map to Early and Mid-Adolescence

Early Adolescence (Ages 9–13)

Mid-Adolescence (Ages 13–15)

Chapter Three: A Road Map to Late Adolescence and Trial Independence

Late Adolescence (Ages 15–18)

Trial Independence (Ages 18–23)

Chapter Four: Parenting Adolescent Sons and Daughters

How Mothering and Fathering Are Different

Fathering an Adolescent Daughter

Fathering an Adolescent Son

Mothering an Adolescent Son

Mothering an Adolescent Daughter

Chapter Five: The Complexities of Spoken Communication

Adolescent Shyness

Adolescent Secrecy

The Problem with Truth

Parental Self-Disclosure

Communicating Clearly

Listening

Chapter Six: The Use and Abuse of Conflict

The Nature of Parent-Adolescent Conflict

Arguing with Your Adolescent

Emotional Extortion

Managing Parental Disagreement

Bridging Differences with Interest

Chapter Seven: Discipline That Does and Doesn’t Work

Balance

Authority

Punishment

Anger

Criticism

Yelling

Practices of Effective Discipline

Chapter Eight: Informal and Formal Education

Escaping Responsibility

The Early Adolescent Achievement Drop

Cheating in Mid-Adolescence

Procrastination in Late Adolescence

Lacking Self-Discipline in College

Chapter Nine: Problems with Peers

Social Intolerance

Response to Puberty

Social Cruelty

Substance Use

Caring Relationships

Romantic Breakups

Sexual Experience

Chapter Ten: The Power of Parents

Parental Influence

Parental Treatment

Nurturing Self-Esteem

Eight Anchors for Adolescent Growth

Managing Life on the Internet

Adolescence and the Power of Parental Love

Epilogue: Climbing Fool’s Hill

Recommended Reading

Index

Cover image: © Joseph O. Holmes/Flickr/Getty Images

Cover design: J. Puda

Copyright © 2013 by Carl Pickhardt. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pickhardt, Carl E.

 Surviving your child’s adolescence : how to understand, and even enjoy, the rocky road to independence / Carl Pickhardt. – 1st ed.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-22883-8 (pbk.); ISBN 978-1-118-41934-2 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-42122-2 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-43386-7 (ebk.)

 1. Parent and teenager. 2. Parenting. 3. Teenagers. 4. Adolescence. I. Title.

 HQ799.15.P53 2013

 305.235–dc23

2012038559

To all those parents and teenagers who manage to keep their relationship together while adolescence is growing them apart, as it is meant to do

Acknowledgments

I thank Psychology Today for the opportunity to write the weekly blog Surviving (Your Child’s) Adolescence, which provided the inspiration for this book. Special thanks need to be given to all the parents at workshops over the years who have taught me so much as I was trying to teach them a little; to my four grown children, who each introduced me to a new path through adolescence; to my agent, Grace Freedson, who keeps managing to find publishers for my parenting books; and of course to Irene, who is a wonderfully supportive writer’s wife.

About the Author

Carl Pickhardt, PhD, the author of fourteen parenting books as well as works of adult and children’s fiction and of illustrated psychology, is a writer, graphic artist, and psychologist in private counseling and public lecturing practice in Austin, Texas. He received his BA in English and MEd in counseling from Harvard, and his PhD in counseling psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a member of the American Psychological Association. He has four grown children and one grandchild.

Pickhardt has written newspaper, magazine, and Internet columns about adolescence, family life, and adult relationships. For the past four years he has been writing a weekly parenting blog for Psychology Today, Surviving (Your Child’s) Adolescence.

Pickhardt gives frequent public lectures about parenting and adolescence to PTAs, church congregations, and mental health groups, and is often interviewed by print media about diverse aspects of child development, parenting, and family life. More information about all his books can be found on his website: www.carlpickhardt.com.

Author’s Note

Unless otherwise attributed, all quotations and case examples used in this book are fictional, created to reflect concerns and to illustrate situations similar in kind but not in actuality to those I have heard from clients over the years.

Introduction

Given what I’ve heard from other parents with teenagers, I’m dreading our child’s adolescence. They make it sound like such a hard time—harder to get things done, harder to get along, harder on everyone. My child and I have been such good company up to now. Can’t we just remain friends?

Despite whatever alarming accounts you may have heard, you are not destined, or even obligated, to go through agony when your child enters adolescence, a relatively recent concept that dates back to the early 1900s when psychologist Stanley Hall first popularized the term. Adolescence describes the transitional time between the end of childhood and the onset of early adulthood, a period that has lengthened in this country over the years, thanks in part to child labor laws, compulsory K–12 education, and a growing discontinuity between the generations because of increasingly rapid social and technological change.

From what I have seen these many years in private family counseling practice and speaking with parents at workshops, about a third of young people go through adolescence without making much of a ripple in family life, growing and changing well within the home rules and tolerances of their parents. These are the easy adolescents. Another third intermittently pushes some family limits, but these episodes are usually successfully confronted and resolved so that life goes forward without any major disruption. These are the average adolescents. And then there is the final third of young people, who break significant family boundaries or stumble into serious unhappiness, and it is the parents of these who usually seek counseling help. These are the troublesome or troubled adolescents. If you have multiple children, a single “easy” adolescent is all you are likely to get, so don’t automatically expect such smooth parental sailing with the next or the rest based on your harmonious experience with one. Even with an easy adolescent, however, there will still be some normal adjusting to do.

Adjusting to what? This is the question parents need to be able to answer if they are to be adequately prepared for the teenage years. To effectively keep up with an adolescent, it helps to stay ahead of the growth curve by anticipating what common changes, tensions, problems, and conflicts will typically arise as the process unfolds. Confusing to parent and teenager as adolescence may seem, it is a developmental process, orderly in its larger outline. Most important for parents to accept at the outset of this transformation is that an adolescent is not a child. They need to understand and work with this change, not fight against it. In adolescent parlance, they must “get used to it!” Surviving Your Child’s Adolescence is intended to help parents do just this.

Chapter One helps parents prepare themselves for the inevitably changing relationship to their child that adolescence brings. Chapters Two and Three present a road map to four stages of adolescence through which young people must grow on their way to young adulthood. In Chapter Two, I map out early and mid-adolescence and the transformation from childhood. In Chapter Three, I map out late adolescence and trial independence, and the challenges of your child acting older. Chapter Four distinguishes the adult-adolescent relationship depending on whether one is mothering or fathering a teenage daughter or teenage son. Chapters Five through Ten each describe a significant focus in the parent-adolescent relationship: communication, conflict, discipline, education, peer relationships, and the power of parents. Last is an Epilogue that provides some perspective on the journey of adolescence through which parent and teenager have traveled together.

An adolescent is an adult in training, a young person on an arduous ten- to twelve-year journey of transformation that begins in late elementary or early middle school, and doesn’t usually wind down until after the college-age years, in the early to mid-twenties. During this process, the dependent child, learning from parental preparation, from peer association, and through experimenting with new experiences, gathers enough power of knowledge, competence, and responsibility to finally claim independent standing as a young adult.

Compared to childhood (up to about age nine), adolescence is the harder half of parenting because now the parental job becomes a more unwelcome one—for both adult and adolescent. Why? The general answer is that it is difficult to stay as closely and influentially connected with a child once adolescence increasingly puts parent and teenager at cross-purposes over matters of freedom and starts causing them to grow apart.

Adolescence is not just a simple passage from childhood to young adulthood. It is a revolutionary process that changes the child, and the parent in response, and redefines their relationship. It is also a ruthless process. Adolescence begins with the loss of childhood, proceeds through increased conflict over freedom, and ends when the young person moves out and empties the family nest. Along the way, parent and adolescent learn to tolerate increased distance, differences, and discord as more independence is established between them. Fortunately, this abrasiveness is intermittent, not constant. There is still the caring they feel for one another, the enjoyment they have together, and the future family connection they count on being able to share.

Adolescence is a moving and fascinating time. Parents get to see their child transform from a little girl or little boy into a young woman or young man by journey’s end. I hope this playbook for parents, based on many years of counseling families with teenagers, will help you find a loving and constructive way to participate in this exciting period of your daughter’s or son’s growing up. As you do, remember this: parenting adolescents is least of all a science, more of an art, and most of all an adventure. So hang on, hang in there, and enjoy the ride!

Voices of Parents Past

“Maybe adolescence is a child’s way of getting even with her parents.”

“If there’s two of us and only one of him, how come we feel outnumbered all the time?”

“She’s allergic to work. It irritates her mood.”

“He said he’d do it in a minute, and it’s been over an hour.”

“She said it isn’t lying if she only tells us what we think to ask.”

“He said we never said he couldn’t, but that’s because we never thought he would!”

“She said she wouldn’t have gotten into this trouble if she hadn’t been caught.”

“The furthest he can see into the future is now.”

“The only time she’s considerate is when she wants something from us.”

“He’ll argue with us about the time of day!”

“She says we used to be such great parents, but now we’ve changed.”

“No matter how much freedom we give him, it’s never enough.”

“She doesn’t care what we think, but she hates being criticized.”

“He said he’s just going to hang out with friends, will be back later, and for us not to worry.”

“All she’s asking for is enough support so she can live independently.”

“He promised we’d never catch him doing drugs, and we never have.”

“She doesn’t want to be included, but resents it when we leave her out.”

Chapter One

Preparing for the Inevitable

The change seemed to happen overnight—that suddenly! Through elementary and middle school, our only child was easy to be with, but now with him at high school it’s more difficult to stay as close. We don’t talk as much, and we argue more when we do. Used to be we could do no wrong, but now it seems we can do no right. Gone is the happy threesome that we used to be. Now he wants to spend his time alone or with friends. We’re just not fun to be around anymore. What did we do wrong?

Of course, the entry into adolescence doesn’t actually happen overnight, but for many parents it can seem that way. In hopes that they and their child would escape the discomfort of her teenage years, they may have denied small changes they didn’t want to see until the unwelcome signs were finally too numerous and intense to be ignored. Thus it’s their sudden awareness and admission that happens overnight. Now is when the parental questions begin. What’s going on? What happens next? How should we prepare? Suddenly there’s a lot that parents need to know—not just about how to manage their changing child but about how to manage themselves. Parents tend to think that the primary challenge with adolescence is how to affect the teenager’s conduct when in fact the first order of business is how to maturely conduct themselves. Just as the first injunction for medical doctors is “Do no harm,” for parents of adolescents the first command is “Govern thyself wisely.” To do this, some adult reorientation is required that necessitates changing parental attitude, understanding parental disenchantment, resetting parental expectations, making parental adjustments, and accepting why most parenting goes unappreciated, particularly in adolescence. It all starts with your attitude.