You Can Do It!
Carl listened as Jean ended a phone conversation with her mother.
“Yes, Mother. We’ll be careful,” said Jean. There was a moment of silence as Mom talked at the other end of the line.
“We have plenty of ice. We’ll see you after the weekend. Goodbye,” finished Jean.
Carl knew what was coming. As she hung up the phone, Jean said, “I’m forty-six years old. I know enough to keep the potato salad cold. We always stop at every second or third rest area so that we don’t get too tired. Why does she keep treating me like a child?”
Before Carl could reply, eighteen-year-old Mark came in. “I’ll see you two after while. Bob and I are going to get a pizza before we turn in.”
“All right,” said Jean. “Be sure you have enough money to pay for it. Don’t stay too long because you have a test in biology tomorrow, and be quiet when you come in because we are going to bed now.”
As soon as Mark was out of hearing, Carl said, “Think about what you just said, Jean. You’re treating Mark the way your mother treats you. He knows to take money when he goes to buy something. He knows that he has a test tomorrow, and he’s always quiet when he comes in. You’re treating him like a child too.”
“But he’s only eighteen,” said Jean. “He has so much to learn. I’ve been gone from home for twenty-five years and have nearly raised a family. Mom shouldn’t still be treating me like a child.”
Carl said, “Jean, he’s eighteen and legally an adult. The state treats him like the adult he is. You can do it too. It’s hard for me to think of him as an adult, but he really is. If you’re not going to do it now when he’s eighteen, when are you going to do it?”
Like Jean, you may find it very difficult to treat your adolescents as the adults they are. In early adolescence nearly everyone treats teenagers as children, so it is “natural” for you to treat yours that way too. In late adolescence the law begins treating them as adults, but many parents keep treating them as children.
During my junior year in college, as I was about to leave to drive six hundred miles home during Christmas break, my mother wrote, “Keep a flashlight with fresh batteries in your glove compartment. Be sure to keep your gas tank full so you don’t run out of gas.”
I took the letter home and assured her that I always kept a good flashlight in the car, and whenever the fuel gauge went below half full, I filled the tank. It was hard for her to think of me as an adult.
For the last twenty-five years that has been a part of our family good-bye, as a reminder that the “kids” are now adults. Mom and Dad are retired now, and as they left our home last week to drive to my sister’s, I said, “Be sure to keep your gas tank full, and keep a flashlight in the glove compartment.”
A Final Exam!
At the end of a book written by a college professor you would expect to find a final exam. Here it is. This final exam is different from most finals in that the “right” answer is always obvious. You can get a perfect score and look like a perfect parent if you wish, but that will not do you any good. As you take the test, be honest about what you would do in each situation.
Also, rather than marking the book, write your answers on a separate sheet of paper. Then ask your teenager or teenagers to take the test as well, answering each question as they think you would respond in that situation. You can then compare how you view yourself with how your teens view you.
Finally, this is not a test of what you know, but a test of what you do (or would do) when the situations come up. Each chapter ended with a section titled “What Can Parents Do?” This test is about what you do in real life, not about what you know you should do. I have simply taken two situations from each chapter, beginning with chapter two. Give yourself one, two, three, four, or five points for each of the following, according to this scale:
5 = definitely yes
4 = probably yes
3 = perhaps
2 = doubtful
1 = no
Do You Pass?
Total your score and see how close you come to getting 100. The higher your score, the more you are treating your adolescents like adults. The lower your score, the more you are treating them like children.
Students in my classes usually want to know what grade they would get on every test. If I were grading the test for someone who had a junior or senior in high school, I would use the following scale.
A = 95-100
B = 85-94
C = 70-84
D = 60-69
F = 0-59
To get an A you would have to treat your teenagers as responsible adults three-fourths of the time and be likely to treat them like that the rest of the time. If you are doing less than that by the time they are in the last couple years of high school, you have room for improvement.
If your adolescents are in the last years of college, I would certainly raise the standard for an A. They have been away from home for a couple years and you definitely need to regard them as the adults they are.
If your teens are in junior high school, I would lower the scale for an A. Our culture expects so little of early teens that you may have real difficulty expecting what they are actually capable of at this time in their lives. This does not mean that you should not expect the best of them, but that you are really fighting our culture to do so.
If Not Now, When?
You may say, “Our adolescent is only fourteen or fifteen. That’s too young to expect him or her to behave as a responsible adult. You can’t expect people that young to know how much they need to study for the test they have coming up tomorrow.”
If you do not expect it of them now, when will you? When they leave home and go to college, will they suddenly know how much they need to study? I believe it is better for them to get a low grade in junior high, where transcripts are not even sent to colleges and are largely forgotten in the future, than to have it on a college transcript that will follow them throughout life.
I have seen too many college students who do not know how to get out of bed in time to get to class. They do not know how to study. They are not disciplined enough to study for tests. I always think, If only their parents had helped them develop some self-discipline while they were still at home. Such students tell me how much their parents did for them, and I tell them they would be better off if their parents had done less.
If you do not expect responsible behavior of them now, when will you? When they marry? Does going through the marriage ceremony suddenly give them the ability to handle money? Money is one of the most common causes of friction—and divorce—in marriage. If you do not expect responsible management of money now, you will be making their adjustment to marriage in the future more difficult.
Will getting a job suddenly teach them how to work? A friend of mine working in industry as a chemist says, “The technical problems are simple compared to the interpersonal problems on the job.” He has found that getting people to work together is far more difficult than solving chemical problems.
Teenagers who have not learned to work from their parents have to get on-the-job training. This often results in losing several jobs in the process of learning how to work. That may lead to a poor work record and trouble getting the positions they really want.
There is no better time and place to become an adult than during the teen years while a person is at home. Of course, teens make mistakes, but it is much better to make these errors at home in the presence of understanding parents than to make them elsewhere where they will be more costly.
You may say, “I realize I should let my teens act as responsible adults, but I just can’t let them go!” Some parents have a real problem letting their children grow up to act as adults. This is often a problem with the parents themselves. You may not be aware of it, but the problem may not be immaturity on the part of your teens, but a reluctance on your part to let them grow up.
There are many reasons for not wanting your teens to become adults, but we will discuss only a few here. Adam would not let his teenagers act like adults because he believed that if they were adults, it meant he was getting old. He would no longer be considered one of the “young adults” at the church.
Before he could let his teenagers be adults, he would have to realize what his problem was. Finally, he accepted it when some of his friends lovingly talked with him about it. He realized that the empty-nest years were usually the years of greatest satisfaction, not of emptiness.
Edna would not let her teens be adults because she would not give up her “helper” role. She had been a helper to her children for nearly twenty years because her four children were born years apart. When the youngest one was in sixth grade, she was still helping dress him for school in the morning. She was afraid to let him grow up because she would have no one to help.
Finally, her husband was able to convince her to let her own children grow up. He did this by getting her involved in helping less fortunate, younger children in the community. She became involved in both Brownies and Cub Scouts where she was a real helper to children, rather than a hindrance to allowing teenagers grow up.
Larry had been a very successful young businessman, achieving his major career goal by age thirty-five. In doing so, he had neglected spending time with his children in their younger years. As they were becoming teenagers, he took the time to attend family life seminars and read books on parenting. When he realized that he had been a poor father, he felt very guilty.
Just as his teens wanted to become adults, Larry was trying to treat them as children to relieve his own guilt. He was trying to be a good father now, but it was too late for the kinds of things he was doing. It was only when his pastor helped him deal with his guilt feelings that he was able to let his teenagers act like the adults they were.
Some parents have thoroughly enjoyed their children. As those children become teenagers, it means that they will be leaving home—if not physically right away, at least they will begin leaving emotionally. Bruno and Phyllis would have passed this chapter’s final exam with flying colors when Laura was fourteen, but treating her as an adult was still difficult for them. They did it not because it was easy and felt natural, but because they were convinced it was best for Laura.
Do It Now!
Our culture has created adolescence and handed it to you. Perhaps sometime in the future adolescence will again disappear, but you and your teenagers have to live with it today. As in the past, someday in the future teenagers may be treated as the adults they are, rather than as children, but for now you must struggle with it. Our culture leaves you little choice.
After reading this book you are in a better position to cope with the problems adolescence creates. Now you understand yourself and your teenagers better. Now you are at least asking the right questions. You have a better chance of developing adequate answers. The key, as we have seen over and over, is to recognize that adolescents are adults who are treated like children. The solution is to treat them like the adults they are.
Now that you understand, it is your responsibility to pass this understanding on to your own teenagers. Most of them do not realize why they wonder who they are, struggle with their sexuality, hate school, and wish they had more money. You are responsible to teach them about themselves. Self-understanding itself can help them. If they can understand themselves, and if you treat them as adults, you and your teenagers have made a great start toward solving the problems handed to you.
Of course, if you have been treating them like children, you cannot just suddenly tell them they are adults and they should act like it. They need your help in gradually assuming responsibility. It is important that you start immediately. To get some idea of where to start, look at the final exam you took at the beginning of this chapter. Remember that the test included two questions from each chapter, beginning with chapter 2. Find the areas in which you were falling the shortest and begin there. For example, questions three and four were from chapter 3. If you had low scores on these questions, look over chapter 3 and begin there.
Although I called it a final exam, it is really a progress report. It is “final” in the sense that it comes at the end of this book. However, you should take it every three months or so to see if you are making progress toward treating your teens as adults. Have your teenagers repeat it too. Then have them replace some of the questions with questions of their own so that you find out in what areas they feel you are treating them like children. That will give you some new areas to work on. That kind of individualized test is much more valuable than the general one in this chapter. Then repeat the test (using their new questions) three months later.
Of course, you may do everything “right” as parents, and your teens still not become the kind of persons you want them to be. Remember that they are adults and can make choices on their own. Some of those choices will be wrong ones. The suggestions in this book only help steer them in the right direction, not ensure that they make the right choices. As we saw at the end of chapter 1, understanding adolescence makes the task of being a parent easier, not simple. Ultimately you must commit your teens to God and pray for them constantly.
2005 Update
This chapter is the conclusion, and I would change nothing relative to that since the first edition.