Mark Snyder Lexington

Working With Preteens and Teens

One of my better photos

INTRODUCTION

At the urging of dozens of parents and friends I have decided to do some writing about working with and parenting school age children and teens. Most have suggested writing a book. The problem with writing a book is that you are writing with the purpose of having something to sell, and this often comes at the expense of saying what you think needs to be said. Furthermore, unless your book is a Superstar, you aren't likely to make that much more money than you end up putting into the book to get it published and recognized.

My purpose is not to make any money or to please an editor, but to impart understanding and to help others. So instead I'm going to put some thoughts down here on my website and if this evolves into something that has the makings of a Superstar, I'll consider turning it into a book as I'm certainly not opposed to another source of income. As you can see, web design is also not my strength so I'm using a very simple WYSIWYG editor which is not going to make my site look particularly professional. The content is professional though and is derived from decades of experience working with children, working with parents, teaching, attending seminars, lecturing and formal work that I have done in my graduate studies. This is a work in progress so what you are reading has not been edited, nor is it finished. My committment to you is to keep working on it though and certainly to answer any questions that you have about your kids or the kids you are working with. The primary audience here is parents but I believe that by better understanding some of the issues faced by parents, that child care workers can also become more effective. I will definately write more specifically towards working with children outside of the context of parenting at another time.

CHAPTER ONE: THE PARENT/CHILD BOND CONTINUUM

There are several premises to my theories of working effectively with kids, but I'm going to start with the one that I believe inhibits the greatest number of parents and child workers from being effective with older children. Most of what I am going to begin with applies to kids older than lets say 7 or 8 years old. Without question, kids develop at vastly different ages. It is impossible to generalize about every child and every situation, but there are clearly trends in development that bring kids to a stage somewhere around the age of 8 or 9 for girls and 10 or 11 for boys, where they begin to make a transition from looking at the world through the eyes of their parents. As children develop a certain degree of confidence and independece, and begin to wonder about their place in the world with respect to their peers, role models, television characters and others who they identify as not being them, they begin to make definitive breaks from their parents.

The problem of course is that parents are used to the child who came out of the womb. Completely dependent, completely focused on parents, from a very young age every uncle knows that the child they make hold in their arms is bonded to the safety of it's parents. Now how strong this bond is, how healthy it is, how much of it is divided equally between mother and father, is so complex and varied that I could write a whole book just on this issue. However it is neither within the scope of what I want you to understand nor is it my area of true expertise. Clearly though every parent and young child worker knows how bonded children are to their parents. So, for the first years, just short of a decade, the parent plays the role of teacher, provider, protector, holder, consoler, feeder and much more.

While momentary inconveniences, the late night visits to your bed, the horribly orchestrated accident in the parents in the most public of places and the screaming for ice cream fits of rage, may cause a parent to queston how attached they really are to this child all it takes is a momentary loss off sight of a toddler in a department store to remind a parent how bonded their are to their child and how desperately they would protect him or her.

There are steps into independence from a very early age. For instance, a toddler suddenly decides that he wants to hold his own spoon or try flushing the toilet himself. These steps of independence are usually welcome by the parent because they reflect growth of the child, added convenience to the parent but do not represent an emotional break. In other words, the parent does not end up missing the chance to flush the toilet for the child. Instead, they take pride in the accomplishment of their child. As a child gets older though, nearing the preteen years, there are new steps that children take towards a type of independence that is much more difficult for the parent. When a parent, who for the better part of a decade has been the life and lifeline to a child suddenly encounters those first signs of true emotional separation, the first time we hear "don't hug me in front of my friends" or "Mom, you're embarassing me" or the horrifying "but Dad we don't WANT you to come with us!" the parent is faced for the very first time with the reality that their child may someday think that he or she doesn't need them anymore. Now as a sidebar, there are some parents out there, more men than women, who are so self focused that they actually don't care anyway. I'm going to guess though that they are not the ones reading this, and if you are, I'm going to recommend that you first look for resources to understand that dynamic first because it's more relevant to you than this writing. In fact, most of what I am going to write here wont apply to you. In many cases your relationship with your child is going to need more help than what you read here unless your child happens to idolize you. The good news is that if you are a father, and you have not been a very good one, but your child idolizes you, you actually have a fairly easy ride through the teen years if you play your cards right. That is beyond the scope of my writings this time but maybe I'll write those Dad's a book another time. Additionally, if you fall into this category, there are deficits in your child's upbringing that will affect her and your relationship negatively. Although you might have a different ride through the teen years compared to many other parents, the long term affect on your child is not good. So, be careful about concluding that you should ignore your child but get him to idolize you, so that the teen years are easy. This is not the ideal case. Additionally, kids don't idolize parents who set about acheiving this goal. It isn't quite that simple. Parents are idolized for character traits, and either you've got them or have been working hard on them, or you don't. It is easier to be a good parent from the start than to be an idolized parent. MUCH easier.

So, returning to this scary transition point that almost all relatively focused parents face, as their children begin to make statements of independence, brings us to the core theory of this writing. Almost every parent, whether they ackowledge it or not, whether they explicitly understand it or just internalize it without really knowing what they are feeling, feels betrayed by their child. If expressed or explicitly processed, the parent may have feelings ranging from, "How can you do this to me", "You don't need me anymore" to "I may not be as loved in the future by you as I have been up to this point". In almost every case, the parent takes the child's step into the waters of independence personally.

The corollary to this understanding is that the parent emotionally needs the child. Experts will talk forever about the pathology of parents emotional dependence on children, whether it's living vicariously through the child's accomplishments, to fitting in with others who have children, to having something to talk about when there is nothing else to discuss, to having someone love you unconditionally when you have difficulty loving yourself all the way to emotional incest, when a parent's need for love from a child becomes too high an emotional burden on the child. I'm going to take a gentler tack on parents and propose that very few adults, and therefore parents as well, are so emotionally put together that they aren't going to have some tendency to emotionally depend on their children. I think that parents need to be aware of to what degree they need their child emotionally and to consider whether their emotional needs are stifling their child. From the parent who insists that their daughter become the top swimmer in the pool or gymnast on the mat, to the parent who doesn't let their child play with friends because they'll miss him too much, parents need to be aware of what burden they are placing on their child for their own needs. More pathalogical, would be parents who confide in their child about issues they are having with the other parent. Red flag types of dialogue like "Do you think that daddy still loves me?" and "You know that I love you more than Mommy does" are signs that you need to change your ways before you scare your child out of their childhood. The relatively healthy and stable parent needs their child to need them and while parts of this comes from unmet emotional needs in a parent, part of it comes from the love for the child, the desire to protect the child, the desire to help the child go in the right direction and the normal companionship that comes from anyone who lives with and loves someone else. College roommates can miss and need each other too. Part of us being human is loving others, needing others and needing to be needed by others. Yet when college roommates part ways for the summer, there is rarely a conclusion drawn that one roommate is betraying the other by leaving. It is a normal course of circumstances that the time living together is going to be temporary and soon enough, the young adults will part ways. Clearly the level of bonding that occurs between a parent and child far exceeds the bonding between roommate. Yet when a child begins to make the normal transition to independence, most parents don't want the child to let them go. Not only are we going to talk about this but we are also going to talk about the fact that in reality the child is not giving up their need for the parent at all. Now I'm not just saying this so that you keep on reading. What is happening is not a giving up of need but a change in need. And that change in need will be the subject of a subsequent chapter. Depending on how many children a parent has had, how much reading ahead they have done, how committed they have been to learning about the stages of parent, how much input they have from other parents, a parent will respond to these feelings in different ways.

The simplest reaction is a feeling of not being wanted, needed or loved by the child as much as before. It is a realization that one's "baby is growing up" and it can be heartbreaking. This can occur in single parent households especially, where parents lack the simple love and companionship of their spouse. Certainly it occurs in other contexts as well and across every ethnic and socio-economic group. On the other end of the continuum is the well seasoned parent who knows about this stage and expects it and almost immediately is waiting for the break point message from their child. For example a parent who has a seventeen year old, who has already provided them the experience of vast levels of separation, may decide when their 12 year old daughter starts spending 3 hours a night on the phone that she has launched into the very same stage as their 17 year old. They may provide her immediate freedom and 'space', long before she will actually benefit from it (at least to the same degree as the 17 year old). Parents need to be cautious of the all or none approach to parenting, where their kids are either all needing or completely independent. In fact, kids need their parents throughout their development. Just in different ways. Birth order can also affect how a parent handles a child's move towards independence. The oldest child of several may be easily given independence by a parent because oldest children do tend to be more independent anyway from the parent's perspective, they have several other children "left" to need them in the way that young children do. Quite often, a youngest child of several children will be held onto by a parent, in ways and to degrees that usually serve the needs of the parent -- not the child. Remember thought that it is impossible to generalize about every child, parent and birth order mandate as every single person is a little different. By reading about all of the different possibilities, you will soon pick up the points that you need for you and for your own children. Signs Can Often Be Confusing

CHAPTER TWO:

NEEDS OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN

What we will do next is to jump ahead of the initial betrayal feelings to a point in the relationship between parent and child somewhere in the early preteen years. Many parents, particularly those who either have experience working with children, who have multiple children and have already been through these stages, or just parents who have read ahead enough to know that their child is going to pursue some independence by the time the middle school years arrive, quickly realize that their child is now beginning to ask for some space. I have encountered many parents who literally allow their children to parent themselves virtually as soon as the child shows any signs of pre-adolescent independence. In many ways, this is an easy solution for parents, as it gives their child what the child seems to be asking for, and really requires less work as they basically become co-habitants with their children rather than parents. Some thirty years ago, Dr. Spock wrote to parents that they should "Love them, feed them and leave them alone" and while this approach wasn't all wrong, it was mostly wrong and we'll talk about why later on as well. On the other end of the scale, is the parent who either by surprise, or as anticipated but feared, becomes devastated by any sign from the child of independence other than the conveniences mentioned in an earlier chapter. This response more classically highlights some of the emotions that we are going to discuss about betrayal feelings that the parent experiences. Whether the parent overtly reacts to their child's independence or whether they welcome it as a stage where they can let their child fly free there remain feelings that the parent experiences of separation that determine how they interact with their preteen or teen. What you see in the early adolescent years and which grows into the teenage years, is almost constant conflict between parents and teenagers. The conflict begins somewhere at that early betrayal stage where changes occur between the wants and the needs of both parents and children.

The wants and needs of parents do not change very much. They want their child to be safe, healthy, happy, self-actualized and successful in whatever way the parents sees success to come to a child. Many parents limit their ideas of success to athletic accomplishment, marriage and family, career and economic success or power and position in their community. Other parents value happiness and creativity more, and don't really care about the other details as long as their child is happily being 'herself'. It is very hard to impose a right or wrong definition of success on a parent, because a parent's view of a successful child is often based on their own views of success. We won't go too much into why certain parents view success in different ways. You can certainly figure out on your own what your standards of success are for your child and where they came from. Of course as a child ages, the parents expectations for measuring success change. All parents view going pee-pee in the potty as success. All parents view getting along with other kids in the sandbox as success. As the child gets older though, the range of success measures vary widely. One parent may insist that their son become the number one soccer player and may involve himself in coaching and the soccer club in order to insure that success is found. Other parents have no interest in their child being involved in sports but insist that their child succeed in the classroom. As the child ages, the ranges of expectation from the parents change but the expectations don't tend to change for the individual child and the individual parent throughout the life of the child. In other words, a parent who values athleticism, will do so from the time the child is born until that child is able to actually play sports.

As you have probably figured out, the needs of your child do change as she gets older. However, you might be surprised (pleasantly or unpleasantly) to know that many of your child's needs do not change from thei time they are born until their teenage years. From birth until adulthood, your child needs to be protected, fed, loved and taught. The food changes but the need for food does not. The protection changes from being supervised in the department store while you shop perhaps to the need for good teenage car insurance coverage, but the need does not change. What we will look at in the next chapter is changes in the child's needs socially and emotionally, and changes in the parents role in helping provide those. As we build a better understanding of the needs of both parents and especially of children, we will gain a better understanding of why there is so much conflict and ultimately what needs to happen in order for the conflict to turn to opportunities for a new type of relationship between parent and child.

CHAPTER THREE: WAIT A MINUTE, I'M NOT THE CLINGY TYPE

Some will have read this far and will think that this isn't the case with you. You are a cool parent, or a seasoned parent or the parent of a teenager and you are way past this stage. You let your child have all of the space that they need and in fact, you are glad to give them the space. More and more parents have figured out how to give their kids space and this certainly reduces the conflict that you find in situations where parents have restricted their child's independence. So, it would seem that helping parents who have not gotten over the betrayal of independence to simply get over it and then there would be no conflict between parents and their kids. Of course we know this to be completely untrue. Kids in their preteen years still need their parents and teens need their parents as well. If you completely set your child free at the age of eight, then you are missing critical years of parenting as well as critical years of relationship building with your kids. You would be unable to address problems that occur in school, to deal with fights among siblings, to control who drives what car and who gets home and what hour and who is at whose friends house until when, if it were not for some parenting function to be served beyond the age of eight or nine. Indeed, parents understand well that parenting does not stop the first time that a little girl wants to be alone with her friends in the basement for a slumber party. The question is not whether you do or don't parent, but how to parent in the context of having been severed from dependence except when beckoned to the preteen thrown to provide more munckies or extra cash for the movies. The question is, how do you parent a child who only seems to need you when they want something and then pushes you away almost immediately after that need is met? How do you deal with the mixed messages that your kids begin sending you and respond to the apparent lack of appreciation for anything that you do for them.

Before we answer some of these questions, it will be helpful to look at the role that others play in the dynamic of your relationship with your child. For children who are quiet, shy and introverted, a close friendship with a parent is absolutely invaluable. Children who are afraid to be part of the social fabric, for whatever reason, really need parents to provide a safe place for them to socialize. These children need help from their parents to branch out and form friendships so that they can become independent. Most of what you are reading here today does not speak to these parents quite as much, though once your shy child does begin to blossom, you will quickly be thrust into the same mainstream issues. Conversely, parents who themselves are very social and have lots of adult friendships, have a much easier time when their kids get a little older because they can relate to the importance of peer relationships and therefore unconsciously can also relate to how the relationship with a parent does not fill that need.

Children at the early preteen years into moving through into the teen years, gradually transition from their parents as being the most important relationships to them. As children reach a certain age, the relationships that become the most important to them are peer relationships. This is really hard for many parents and others take it completely in stride. Yet regardless of whether the parents has an easy or a hard time with this transition, the conflicts that occur between preteens or teens and their parents, still remain a barrier to fulfilling the needs and desires on both sides.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CONFLICT

Whether at this point you feel a little more like the parent who has been betrayed by the independence of your child, or whether you are the parent who has sent your child off into solo flight in his new world of friends and are comfortable with your new role as parent at will, the relationship that you have with your preteen or teenage child no longer resembles the relationship that you had with your toddler. The role of feeding, changing, clothing, deciding, wiping, putting to bed, scolding, hugging and bathing has evolved and your relationship with your child has evolved into something brand new. One of the interesting things that occurs as children move into the preteen years is the fact that children now begin to evaluate their parents. No three year old cares if Mom is overweight or dad wears geeky glasses. They don't pay attention to how you look, what you wear, whether you are cool and how you fit into relationships with other adults. As soon as they begin to make strides into the social world though, they begin to take a look at how their parents fit in. Very quickly, kids become aware of how parents look, dress, speak, act and relate to others. They begin to question whether they want to be just like you, exactly unlike you or if they aren't quite sure where you fit into the social pecking order. If this is news to you, don't start panicking yet. One of the worst responses you can have to this understanding is to go out and start trying to act like something that you aren't. One of the things that kids like the least are parents who are hypocrites. They are much more concerned about your self-confidence as a confirmed geek than they are about you trying to look cool when you just plain are not cool. What you should consider though is whether you are confidence and honest about who you are and whether you are being the best possible vegan-crunchie-democrat that you can be rather than pretending otherwise. In order to be effective as a parent of a preteen or teenage child, one of the things that you must be completely convinced of is that you do not exist for your child and your child doest not exist for you. Now you might be your child's world, in a matter of speaking and your child may be your world, in a matter of speaking, but you do not each exist for the purpose of the other. This sounds simple but it is not simple. Parents often do not exist outside of the context of their children. They are Ashley's Mommy or Aiken's Daddy and that's pretty much who they consider themselves to be. In order for you to be an effective parent, you need to be an effective person and you simply cannot do that if your existence is contingent on another person's existence. Your child might be the most important person in the world to you (or one of the most important people in the world) and that is normal and healthy. But if you do not exist beyond your role as parent to your child, then you will have a very difficult time parenting your child.

Parenting children and working with children requires confidence in who you are and what you are doing. This is not necessarily the same as being dictatorial, harsh or strict. It just means being able to stand on your own and to realize that your child is a separate human being to you, and both of you have wisdom, experience, value and worth. One of the most common complaints that I hear from parents and youth workers alike, is the complaint that the child is doing something to them to make their job more difficult. She is ignoring me, he is yelling at me, she is irritating me, he is driving me crazy. Well, of course, you say, that happens all of the time. In fact your child is not really going out of their way to do these things TO YOU. There are troubled relationships where kids will actually treat their parents like schoolyard lackeys and chase them around the house specifically attacking them in some way. But this is not the norm. Most kids responses to parents and parenting (and this can also include youth workers as well) are not about the child doing things to the parent but about the child responding to parenting that is not working. One of the very first things that you are going to have to do is to remove yourself from this dynamic and remind yourself that you are an independent person, with experience and value and ideas and you can be confident to be a great parent to your child. Remove the personal attack that you are seeing and realize that this small person is still developing as a person and has not yet landed on being a mature adult. They are not picking on you or harassing you. They are responding to you and you have to learn how to respond back. There is an old addage among middle school teachers to pick your battles and make absolutely sure to win the battles that you do pick. Now this isn't always 100% correct, as being humble and willing to admit mistakes is also extremely important. Yet there is some degree of wisdom to this addage, because when you go to battle with a seventh grader, you often find out that you are stepping into the ring with someone who just wants to fight.

CHAPTER SIX: GETTING ON THE RIGHT TEAM

One of the greatest recognitions that any parent or youth worker can come to, is the fact that you and the child you are trying to help are on the same team. It kills me sometime, to see how much of an adversarial relationship develops between parents and kids, teachers and kids, or youth workers and kids. This is never going to work, because the fight ends up a battle of your needs and feelings versus the child's needs and feelings. If your needs and feelings play a role in your parenting, you are bound to get hurt. How can the needs of a parent possibly be served in a discussion of whether your 14 year old daughter should be allowed to go to the movies alone with a boy from school?

What is needed is a major paradigm shift, where you introduce into every situation a third party: THE PROBLEM. Parenting will take on a whole new color if parents realize that it is not them versus their kids, but instead it is the team of parent and child, against a particular problem. For example: Lets suppose that the problem is that the child is not doing his reading for school. The teacher calls a conference and shows you a quiz that your child failed, which clearly indicated that he did not read the book. So, you meet with the teacher and your child and of course your child does everything that he possibly can to look away, misremember where the book is at that moment or to have any possible explanation of why the book wasn't read. You get home and you demand to see the book, hoping that there will be a few wrinkled pages at the beginning and perhaps the rest has been eaten by the dog. Of course your child has no idea where the book is, and so an argument breaks out as to his lack of organization and messy backpack, and he isn't going to play any more Guitar Hero on his WII until that book is found the that bookbag is organized. For that matter, the room needs to get cleaned and he needs to take a shower for once and you never listen to him and he hates school and the teacher is just out to get him anyway. Now one thing that you have done right here was to support the teacher and the school. If you had an inkling that the teacher was actually being unfair then you would have an obligation to, after your child has left the room, speak with the teacher and make sure that your child is being treated fairly and has reasonable expectations. Presuming that this is the case, you now have taken the problem adopted by the teacher and made it your problem. In other words, the original problem was that the child did not read the book and therefore failed the quiz. This became the teachers problem and, as any good parent should, you now took it on as your problem. You are the agent for the unread book and it is your job to impress upon your child the importance of the issue, etc, etc. In reality though, you are now in conflict with your child over the unread book. What I am suggesting is that the unread book become a third party problem. Here is how a dialogue with your child might work:

PARENT: Do you understand why we had a conference today?

CHILD: Because I failed my quiz?

PARENT: Right. Any why did you fail the quiz?

....to be continued

Mark Snyder Lexington, MA Mark Snyder Lexington, Mass