Learning How to Let Go of Your Teens
Should you really let go of everything?
When I was 33 and had two very young children in tow, my mother decided she needed to do an intervention of sorts. I, in her opinion, was falling way short of my wifely duties because I was not making my husband’s lunch and ironing his shirt before he went to work.
At least I think that’s what she said. I can’t recall precisely because my ears were ringing so much at the shock that she felt she should comment on my life at all, never mind offer an aggressive statement regarding my shortcomings while I was trying to console my one-year-old who had just fallen.
Clearly my mother was still feeling the urge to parent. I’m sure it came from a place of love — the fear that my husband was going to leave me or that I was not measuring up to appropriate societal standards. But that intervention, and other similar ones, strained my adult relationship with my mother.
For some reason, she just couldn’t let go.
Now that my boys are 16 and 18, I’m faced with the notion of letting go, but it’s a strange and difficult transition, fraught with tough decisions. Should we really allow them to go hiking in an area closed to the public full of old mining stopes and scree slopes? What about attending a party in a sketchy area of town? Should they not have any curfew whatsoever?
Of all the parenting challenges I’ve faced over the years, knowing when, how and how much to let go is one of the hardest.
My husband is finding it easier. He’s more certain that we’ve given our 18-year-old all the skills and judgement that he requires to make all of his own decisions. It’s a frequent refrain around our house that, “he’s an adult now and he has to make his own choices.”
I’m not as convinced.
Don’t get me wrong. I think our son is almost an adult, and for the most part makes good choices. Me letting go is a critical step in his development and independence. I don’t want to be a crazy helicopter parent. But when you’re wired to be mama bear, and do whatever it takes to protect your child, it’s almost impossible to just flip a switch and cease to care, worry or provide any advice whatsoever, and I argue (mostly with my husband) that there are some things that we should continue intervening in or helping our son with, at least in the short term.
Some of the articles that I found on how to let go, such as this one by Kenneth Ginsburg focus only on the notion that parents aren’t letting go because they consciously or subconsciously fear their lives will be empty if they aren’t parenting. I didn’t find this helpful. Of course, there is a part of me that is sad that they are starting to get ready to leave the nest, but that’s not the reason I still argue for putting an oar in in some situations.
Dana Baker-Williams suggests that by the time a teen is in their senior year, parents need to stop being managers and become mentors. She writes,
“Our job is to be available for advice and guidance as opposed to authority figures and caretakers. We don’t get to assert too much authority anymore, but we do have to be available for advice and guidance. We aren’t abandoning them; instead, we are allowing and encouraging our teens to learn how to live independently.”
David J. Baxter suggests that parenting teens involves “monitoring from a distance” just as we would have done with a preschooler loose in a grocery store, building their independence, letting them make mistakes, and conveying that we trust that they will eventually make good choices. Others call this “submarine parenting” — staying out of sight beneath the surface, letting kids try things, but keeping the periscope up and being willing to step in as needed.
Great… I can be a submarine… most of the time. But there’s some areas I’m not sure about letting go of.
Safety decisions
Okay I’ll admit that I’ve sometimes been referred to as “safety mom”. Being a writer has its challenges, one of which is the ability to imagine quite vividly all of the ways your children can come to harm. I also have two boys and a husband who like extreme sports and are definitely not risk averse. Living in a small town in the mountains with old open mine shafts, bears roaming the streets, and icy roads adds to my burden of worry.
Over the years, I’ve allowed my kids to do multiple things alone or with their peers that make me uncomfortable, including skiing extreme terrain, downhill mountain biking in the wilderness, driving themselves to school along an icy highway, recreational boating with friends on a busy lake, ski touring in the back country, and the like. So I’m not over the top with my safety rules.
I find the articles on letting go often offer sanitized examples. For example, one of the articles on “letting go” indicated that a woman was struggling with whether or not to let her 17-year-old off a block from school. The parenting experts then say that where drugs and alcohol are involved, the situation is different. But in the life of a teen, drugs and alcohol are often involved, and kids are going to have to learn to navigate around them without their parents.
In the community we live in, the grade 11 and 12 students get together twice a year to have a big unsupervised party with alcohol and most likely drugs in the bush with no cell service a 45-minute drive from our house down a winding dirt road along a river. The question parents have to ponder is not whether they will allow their kid to go (almost all do), but rather whether they will allow them to spend the night.
Parents who allow their kids to spend the night say “I trust my teen”. I trust my teens too, for the most part, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t make mistakes (I made mistakes myself when alcohol was involved well into my thirties and forties), and in situations like these bush parties, the stakes seem pretty high. In the end, we did let our older son spend the night in his final year of high school after multiple conversations about the risks and responsibilities, and he was fine, but these are the types of decisions that parents are faced with when letting go.
For the most part, I still stay up to check in with my teens when they get home from parties. I insist on knowing where they are going and when they’ll be back, and if there is cell coverage where they are going, especially if they are engaging in a risky sport, I sometimes track their location with their permission using their phone — not to check up on them, but to know where the heck to send the search parties. And there are rare occasions when what they want to do seems too dangerous that we still pull rank and tell them they can’t (with a long discussion on the reasons why). I’m still trying to warm up to the notion of solo, overnight road trips.
I know we’re supposed to give them freedom to make their own choices, but shouldn’t letting someone know where you’re going and when you’ll be back be a good rule of thumb for life no matter how old you are?
Financial decisions
A few weeks ago, our 18-year-old declared he was going to buy a cheap, used sports car. He has money saved so could afford it, but I wasn’t happy for multiple reasons. First, he already has a great car, that he also bought with his own money. He wasn’t planning to sell his Subaru. He wanted to have two cars. Second, he’s about to start university that we are paying for, and I feel he should be contributing as much money as he can to the venture. Third, it was unclear where he planned to store the sports car in the winter, but I had a feeling he was thinking our already crowded driveway would be the place.
I voiced my concerns, pointing out that most university students don’t have two cars — in fact many of them don’t have a car at all, and many of them work two jobs to pay their tuition. I suggested that the money spent on the car would be better off put towards covering some of his living expenses at college, especially the extras, such as going out with friends. I proposed doing a budget so he could understand what the actual cost of living on his own would be.
I didn’t forbid him from buying the car, but I did indicate that I thought it was a bad idea practically and philosophically. The discussion was rather heated, with opinions expressed that I should stay out of it. Although we’ve endeavored to teach our children financial literacy, it’s hard to really understand the cost of living until you are actually trying to make ends meet on your own.
I do want them to make their own financial decisions, and I will stay out of it when they’re entirely financially independent, but I feel that while they are still receiving financial support from us, that their big purchases do require some discussion.
Areas where they are still building skills
I helped my son with his university applications, and then once he got accepted to university, I helped him navigate how to set up his timetable, pay his fees and identify the things that he needs to do before September. I experienced some indignation regarding my involvement from other parents who left their teens entirely to their own devices to work through the application process.
I get it. It’s supposed to be their thing, and they will have to do this on their own in the future. But navigating applications and complex directions isn’t an area where we’ve built our son’s skills. On the flip side, there are other areas where my teen is fully competent that other teens might not be, such as planning and cooking elaborate meals, doing laundry, replacing the brakes in his car, researching and ordering car parts, planning and packing for camping trips, making his own hair and doctor’s appointments, and holding down a job.
Honestly, some of the university applications were so complex that even with a Ph.D., I had a hard time figuring out what the heck they were asking for. I turned it into a coaching session as much as possible, walking him through the steps, and leaving the ball in his court to complete as much as possible on his own.
There are many skills involved in being an adult, and they take time to pass on. Continuing to support my son in areas where we have not fully developed his skills seems fair to me, as long as the goal is to transition him to being independent in that area.
Even as adults, everyone has different skill sets and division of labor is a way to get things done efficiently. I still proof-read things for my dad, while he helps me with minor car repairs. If my boys ask me, I will help them with some things in the future — the trick is walking that line of not stepping in too much, or stepping in when you haven’t been asked.
House rules
My boys still live at home, and we have general house rules that we expect them for the most part to follow — they are like rules that one would have with roommates. These rules include the division of chores, quiet time between 11:30 pm and 8:00 am, not leaving too much of your crap in common areas for too long, cleaning up your fingernail clippings, and being generally respectful of each other. They also include curfews, not because we want to limit our boys time out and about, but because as a member of a household, we expect them to give consideration to other people’s sleep needs, especially on weeknights.
All the rules are negotiable of course (except the respect one). Curfews are routinely extended for special occasions. Chores can be shifted around, and we, as parents, have obligations to the them, just as they have to us.
It’s not perfect, and I’m sure my kids think the rules are unreasonable at times, but the house rules are more about our obligations to each other as people and co-inhabitants of a household than us as parents demanding certain behavior from our kids (although granted, when they do get to the point of having actual roommates, I suspect their house rules will look a lot different and involve a lot more keggers).
Ethical and political views
My husband is more of a conservative republican type (we’re Canadian so I can’t say he’s a true Republican), and I’m more of a centrist liberal type. We have heated political debates and often disagree. My boys are also forming ethical and political views, and are tending more towards a conservative stance, and I don’t always agree with them either. I do feel it’s okay, and perhaps my obligation, to challenge their perspectives sometimes. They often do the same to me — I’m actually often impressed by their conviction and ability to present their argument.
Challenging them doesn’t always go perfectly though. In fact sometimes it goes downright poorly. Depending on their mood, and the manner in which I approach it (sometimes more skillfully than others), they can feel attacked, or just don’t want to listen to anyone else. It’s important not to make statements about them being “wrong” and to maintain a curious rather than a judgemental stance. I do my best, and try to use humor, which goes well sometimes and backfires horribly other times.
I’m not sure when, or if, I will let go of questioning their views sometimes. I want them to know that they are going out into a world where their views will get challenged, that they are not always right (and I’m not either), and that they need to be okay with that. I do hope I get better at doing it in a way that doesn’t provoke.
General guidance
Both my husband and I still provide general guidance on things that we just consider good practice, like exercising daily, reaching out to friends, avoiding drugs, and eating your vegetables. This is presented as advice though, not as a decree, with the reasons why we think it’s important. We’ve had mixed success, and we try to be judicious on this front (tip: general reminders that exercise is good are okay, suggestions about what footwear to wear on a hike are not).
Parenting teens on this front is like an intricate dance. You keep putting things out there, getting told to back off or that they already “know” (even if they don’t actually practice the advice), and hoping that if the advice doesn’t land at any particular moment, it will eventually stick somewhere, somehow. Our days of doing this are probably numbered though….
In short: Letting go of your teens isn’t just a matter of washing one’s hands of the whole parenting thing on their 18th birthday (but you probably should mostly by the time they are 33…). It’s a transition and requires skills, many of which I’m still developing. Every teen is also different in terms of their propensity for risk-taking behavior, openness to input and desire for independence. Every parent is also different. The good thing about teens is that they are pretty good at letting you know when you’ve stepped over the line. I know I’ve made lots of mistakes as I work towards launching them fully into independence. In the meantime, I’ll just continue channeling my inner submarine (with a few lingering mama bear tendencies).
