It’s in those tumultuous, stay-away-from-me teenage years that you should maintain a strong connection…
Awakened one night last year by strange crashing sounds, Nisha Kadir went to check on her 12-year-old son, Irfan. Not finding him in his room, she looked out of the window and was astounded to find him sitting precariously on a ledge atop their three-storey house in Singapore.
Although he didn’t resist when she told him to come in, Nisha knew things were not right. Checking the ledge the next morning, Nisha found candy wrappers, empty Coke bottles and cookie crumbs - showing it had been a regular haunt for some time.
Withdrawn and silent for the past few months, Irfan’s grades had been dipping despite extensive tuition classes.
“I don’t know where I’ve gone wrong, but he has become a total stranger to me,” says Nisha.
Like Nisha, many parents feel helpless when their teenager refuses to fall in line. Alternating between belligerence and sullen silence, the teen may frustrate all attempts at communication. Even so-called “good” teenagers many disengage from their parents and develop a separate life with their all-important friends. As such, many parents give up trying to stay close.
“That could have damaging results,” says Mumbai psychiatrist Dayal Mirchandani. “When the parent withdraws prematurely, the child withdraws even further, and the bond between them is weakened.”
But isn’t it natural and healthy for teens to pull away from their families? Apparently not. New research suggests that teenage children need their parents as much as younger children do, especially during the vulnerable 13-to-16 years. The National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health, which has followed more than 12,000 American teenagers since 1994, concluded that being “connected” to family members protects teens against high-risk behaviours like unprotected sex and drug use.
And what exactly does “connected” mean? Not just the sense of being loved but also the physical availability of the parent during the child’s day - before or after school, at dinner or bedtime. Other documented benefits of a strong parent-teen connection: fewer weight-related concerns and eating disorders, a smoother transition to secondary school and fewer conflicts in the teen’s personal relationships. Teens who feel insecure in their connection to their parents have a higher risk of drug abuse, aggressive and delinquent behaviour - even suicide.
“There is a ‘pull-push’ factor for parent-teen relations,” says Carol Balhetchet, the director of the Youth Services at the Singapore Children’s Society. “Teens who grow up with family problems tend to push their parents out of their lives and gravitate towards the pull of their friends.”
Called “peer orientation,” according to Gordon Neufeld, a Canadian development psychologist, teens begin to take their behavioural cues from their peers, not from their parents.
“The problem is that these friends become their moral compass,” explains Neufeld. “Peer-oriented teens don’t wish to live up to their parents’ values and don’t take parental rejection to heart.” Typically, says Nuefeld, “teen become more difficult to parent, harder to teach, more aggressive, less mature and emotionally hardened.”
So how do you stay connected to a teen who seems to crave nothing but distance from you? Here are some strategies that parents and parenting experts have found to bring parents and teens closer together: Read the rest of this entry »
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