Parenting Guidance: Fathers advice for a teenage son
My son is 14 and a half and about to start year nine. He can be considered a normal 14-year-old teenager by most standards.
On average, part of a separated family tends to fail in school results. He is totally uncontrollable by his mother, does what he wants, and is strong and self-willed. He has no clue that his mum feels she is supporting the development of a local terrorist cell. Despite already exploring most mid-range substances and kicking vaping three times, he has not picked up any serious habits. He associates with friends whose friends are well on their way to a criminal career. He spends a good amount of time eating in and out of his mother’s home to maintain his 6’2 foot and 116 kg stature. He invests most of his time in two areas — spending 1000s hours on each new Steam incarnation and hanging out with friends who seem to attract the attention of the people in blue.
Normal, right?
While his younger brother shared his time with his mum and me, for the last two years he spent living with his mother and over the previous six months, transitioned through the “Dad screwed my life phase,” we reconnected. During the period of our break, I never allowed any space for him to think that his dad did not care for him or love him despite his decision not to connect.
This was a really difficult time for me, but despite my hurt, I wrote to him consistently (snail mail), sent him some pictures, told him about my life, and enquired about him. Each letter concluded with my love and desire to connect with him. While I had the power to force him to be with me, I decided that this would not lead to a positive result for him or me. I thought waiting for him to come around in his own time would be best.
And come around, he did. Two things occurred: the letters conveyed my message that I cared, and he realised that he had reached the full extent of what his mum could do for him.
When he reconnected, I struggled with how to deal with him. A part of me was thinking through resentment and hurt, and the other part was clear that this would be unproductive and I should engage him from where he was.
Six months later, after we reconnected and engaged every week, he decided to spend two weeks of his school holidays with me.
When he stayed with me, combined with my view that he had not been parented in a long time by me (or anybody else), I felt that I needed to make up for the lost time. I spent a good amount of time supporting and coaching him. It became evident that he was not used to this, and to my surprise, he knuckled down and was determined to make it work.
The first few days were an adjustment in attitude and support of what I consider normal contributions to running a home. Within that time, he learned to cook his own meals, do the washing, set the table, and be a great helper on the weekend home improvement projects, actually a joy to be around.
We had many conversations, and I asked him about his ambitions and where he saw his future. I think he has a lot of pressure from his mum to have a university degree, and anything less would be a failure. I believe asking kids what they want to be when they grow up requires some consideration. While the questions seem innocuous, the responses are predictable, as the answers can only be formed from the sum of their exposure. Occupations of parents or parents of friends tend to dominate the likely options.
It should have been no surprise that when I asked my son what he wanted to be, he said, “I just want to be like you, Dad”. I was shocked and humbled. I felt a little emotional and thought, “Wow, my son wants to be a humble IT engineer.” After shaking off these feelings and emotions, I began to see what he actually wanted: extensive international travel, asset accumulation, an executive salary, and a life full of incredible adventures and experiences. He did not want to be an IT engineer like his father. He just wanted the fruits of my labour.
Having just completed year eight, achieved a student mark of 47/100, and ranked 26/27 from his immediate class, I wondered what he needed to do to find the motivation to improve the trajectory of his success. Right now, he chalks off his results to his view that school is not for him. It is a necessary evil, and the system does not work. He found TikTok insights to support his views and was righteous in sharing them with me. I pondered that if we could align on a future goal, he might be able to find the motivation to shoot for that.
Can my son respond to soft power? Can I influence him, and with my 27-year career experiences, 20 years of which have been in a leadership role?
I find this an easy conversation in the work context, but nothing prepares you to be a father. Where do you start?
I thought through my own experience, and in many ways, he is just a chip off the old block. I was headstrong and stubborn; my only motivation came from hard power. I paid little attention at school and did not have the grades for university. My parents asked me to leave home three months after I secured my first job. At 17, it became a matter of survival for me. I received no help from anybody. I was utterly abandoned, rejected, alone, and scared. I disconnected from my parents for ten years. It could have gone one of two ways.
So, starting with soft power. “Step into my office, Son, and let’s talk about your career.” Right?
Having established he wanted to be an IT engineer like his father, I had to start with my own bias and get that out of the way. I wanted him to realise that there were no options for emotional manipulation. Career-wise, I was not invested in any particular outcome. This clever kid realised that his mum would sell the shirt on her back to have him complete a university degree. He has become adept in trading attitude and insignificant progress in supporting his own needs. He definitely has an entrepreneurial mindset, as he has extracted over $3,500 for a single venture called Time-zone in the last 12 months. This mastermind will find the cracks in anything and build a highly profitable racket.
I started with that I just wanted his happiness, and what he ended up doing did not matter to me. Reviewing his current progress at school with him, with his results, I said that he was well on his way to becoming a plumber, but even then, he would need to learn discipline, listening and attitude adjustment, which is no easy feat. This fate touched a nerve as he immediately rejected this idea.
I poked into this further to understand his tension. It seemed more than any idea that did not conclude that having a university degree was unacceptable, but as I probed, he could not be clear why. I sense that from his mum and her side of the family, education was a rite of passage, and anything else was a failure, while never directly stated it was implied. I sensed that the competition with his cousins and the perceived rejection from his mum would not be something that he could accept.
Thinking I understood his motivations ultimately came down to lust for the fruits of my labour, I went on to say that more than 80% of Australians were blue-collar workers, services/tradespeople who made plenty of money, got married, bought houses and cars, travelled the world and also had incredible experiences.
I hastened to add some good news, was he was well on his way to a blue-collar career and needed to make no changes to his Time-zone racket or school results, and a bonus, he only had two years of school left and could start an apprenticeship at the end of year 10. Finally free of a system that did not work for him.
There was a stronger reaction to this; I could see his senses vibrating. It looked like he was completely uncomfortable being encouraged in his current state of passivity and that there were no driving forces or motivations he could resist or trade-off. I think he has, on the one hand, enjoyed having his arse continuously wiped, living in a hotel, contributing nothing to the household while demanding to be treated like a full-fledged adult, having proven himself a capable man and deserved respect.
I went on to say that he needed to learn discipline, doing hard things and the things he does not like. Otherwise, being a plumber could also be a stretch. The mistake he is making right now is that everything is easy. He gets what he wants, does what he wants, and has no accountability for his actions. His miscalculation is that he thinks this is what life is. He is comfortable and has no motivation, which would cause him to do things he would not want to do.
Reinforcing the point that my only concern was his happiness, I said, “Son, do you know what depression is?” I don’t think he knew, and to avoid revealing his position, he said, “Tell me.” “Well,” I said, “I think it is like this.”
We have expectations in life like you want to be an IT engineer like your father, right? And to do so, you need to be a B+ student, so your grades must be in the mid-80s. When you achieve your goals and expectations, you achieve happiness and contentment. Well, when you don’t reach the success you need to meet your expectations, you become sad, and over time that leads to depression.
With your current success, it will be a good outcome that you turn into a successful plumber. Still, given your expectations to complete a university, you will be sad, unhappy and disappointed in life. So there are two ways you can deal with this.
The first way is to accept that your efforts will result in you being a plumber, and when your achievements match this change in expectation, you will be content. The second way is to increase your success by studying hard, focusing on school, minimising distractions, and picking good friends that help you level up.
Most people in life are depressed, and they tend to deal with this by escaping their lives through substance abuse or into work or hobbies.
I don’t know what to do, but I wish I could send him to a re-education camp to solve the problem. It already sounds familiar, and now I need to look in the mirror. This is my matter to solve, and I cannot outsource it.
To compensate for my lack of involvement in his adolescent development over the last two years, I decided to share with him some of the wisdom I have learnt now, which would have transformed my life if I had those gems at his age.
Here are my pearls of wisdom for my 14-year-old son in his adolescent development journey:
- Everybody works hard.
There are broadly three career paths — blue-collar, white-collar or professional. The blue-collar is a plumber, electrician, mechanic, builder etc., while the white-collar is having completed a university degree and doing some form of office job, sales, marketing, accounting, Information tech, etc. Professional being a doctor, lawyer etc.
These professions work exactly as hard as each other, and none is easy. Whether as a plumber you have shit up to your arms, being paged out at 2 am to fix emergency sewer problems working 12-hour days, or as an IT engineer on call 24x7 for mission-critical business systems or as a doctor making 80 x 5-minute appointments per day for the rest of your life, they all work just as hard as each other, and they all have aspects that suck. The only difference is how much you get paid for your work.
The simple rule of thumb here is your level of education and your role determines how much reward you get for your efforts and success.
2. Pick something you love.
Pick something you enjoy doing first over how much money you can make. By doing what you love, you will never work a day in your life, and you will find the motivation to get through the really hard things. While earning good money, I meet some people who hate their jobs and, worse, feel stuck that they cannot change.
3. Disciple is the key.
To do anything successfully in life, you require discipline. Learning a skill, managing a job, running a family — all of these are challenging. Learn discipline as soon as possible, and take the harder route of choosing your profession; otherwise, life has a way of choosing it for you. To learn discipline, pick something hard and work your way through it. Stay with it even when every fibre tells you to quit. Discipline is transferable. If you can learn it in one area of your life, you can transfer that skill to many other areas.
One of the best ways to achieve this is to get a part-time job, preferably in a customer service-related role. You will develop routine, disciple, teamwork and customer skills. This will lead to rapid maturation and serve you well as future employers value these skills of an early start to a career.
Picking a job to learn discipline has the upside of earning money, which enables you to have more freedom and do other things.
4. Tell me who your friends are, then I will tell you who you are.
The people you associate with in life will profoundly impact you, your motivations and your success. There are three types of friends — those that will help you level up, those that will keep you where you are, and those that will bring you down.
100% of friends are choices, and you should pick the majority of your friends that are better than you. They will help you level up. Find interesting people who read, travel, work out, go to the gym, have career aspirations, desire higher levels of education, and want to make a positive impact on people and society. Hang out with these people, and their life will rub off on you.
People who are the same as you are fun, convenient and easy because they share the same interests. The main challenge here is that they keep you where you are. If you have achieved what you want in life, that’s fine. However, if you don’t want to grow or learn more, they will keep you exactly where you are.
Friends abusing substances, having antisocial behaviours, disrespecting authorities, having police encounters, and dealing with other teenage behaviour problems will bring you into their world.
5. Live powerfully
Develop the mindset that you are 100% responsible and accountable for yourself and everything that happens in your life. When you don’t have this mindset, you become the victim of things and circumstances. When you have a victim mindset, you are no longer in control, you don’t have your hand on the steering wheel, and therefore you cannot change them. When you are responsible and accountable, you can change anything.
6. Consider your health and fitness.
Develop a fitness routine, and when you think about what you want to do, pick activities you can do for the rest of your life — something that is manageable in terms of time, complexity and effort.
It is really easy to get caught up in short-term fads or intense bursts, but they don’t stick, so you oscillate into and out of shape. Then associated with that comes the guilt cycle of not completing something, falling behind, always being out of shape, and hating your body.
Best to pick smaller, easier and simple exercises, something that can do forever. Changes from this baseline can then become incremental up or down from that.
If you need to lose weight, here is the secret. You cannot exercise your way to weight loss. Here is the broad formula, 70/30, 70% diet and 30% exercise. So if you want to substantially impact your weight, you must eat less. Adding exercise to this is helpful, but that should already be a normal part of your lifestyle.
You should have 500 calories less than your Resting Metabolic Rate to make a noticeable impact. At this rate, you will lose about 1kg per week.
The average person has a resting metabolic rate of around 1800 per day. You can use online calculators to get an estimate. Using an app, count your calories for a week to get a sense of your consumption and food’s calorie values. Once you have learnt this, you don’t need to keep using the app, as it can become a chore over time.
The easiest way to eat less is through substitution. Replace Coke with water, and replace fries with a salad.
I am sure there is better parenting advice out of these, and my parenting solutions are more rules of thumb. However, if they are followed, they will have a transformative effect. If I could tell my 14-year-old self some wisdom, these would be them.
