Dear Jean:
I have a 16 year old daughter and we definitely knock heads about everything!!

I recently upset her when I wouldn't sign a release form for her to enter "R" rated movies (when necessary) for a new job at the movie theatre. She told me she had written (vented) about this in her school LA journal and her teacher had read it but I wasn't allowed. Curiosity got the best of me and I read it over Christmas break.

Ok, so I'm an over protective mother who... "ruins her life and it's not like she hasn't seen "R" rated movies before." Got it! Been a teen ager myself. But, in this journal, she also writes that I won't allow her to be "who she wants to be."

Jean, she is a "drama queen." She has done dramsa since she was 4 and has been in voice since she was 5. This is what she wants to do. Church and school plays - nothing serious! She loves horses and we have done horseback riding lessons on and off but they are expensive!!! She has used money from birthday's etc but we can't afford to keep it up. I have a friend that has horses and she would spend a couple of weeks with her in the summer but I found they were not good influences on her. (That's probably where she saw the "R" movies.)

I'm not trying to be her friend, but I don't want her to feel that I'm trying to make her someone else either. Any advice??

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Jean responds:

Hi,
Thanks for writing to ParentingAdolescents.com.

Knocking heads with a 16-year-old...ah, yes. But knocking heads "about everything"-?  You may be over-playing your control and authority hand.

Adolescents are trying to become more independent of their parents and trying to find out who they are. In the process, they need more freedom to make decisions whose consequences they then have to live with. Parents need both to facilitate increasing freedom of choice for their teens, on the one hand, while using whatever authority their teens are willing to acknowledge that they still have, to try to keep the kids from killing themselves one way or another, on the other hand.

This is why I say parenting adolescents is a balancing act. Err too much on one side and you risk producing a resentful child who doesn't know who he is or who he wants to be, has no sense of his own capacities, before being sent out into the world. Err too much on the other side and you risk producing a child who has had to depend too much on his own resources and may lack a sense of goals and values or even of being cared about.

I think what parents need to see is that their STANCE regarding the limits they set is as important or more important, even, than the actual limits that end up getting set. I will try to describe what I mean by the stance you take in limit-setting:

1. The fundamental part of the parental stance that needs to get communicated to teens in setting limits is the recognition on the part of the parent, articulated to the teen as necessary, that you really get that your job is not to control your teen, but to help your teen learn how to control him or herself, through giving him/her increasing freedom to make increasingly important choices in their lives and then living with the consequences. You have to get, in fact, that it not only is not your job to control your teen's behavior, but that YOU CAN'T! When they were little, you had a lot more control--now you have only the control they let you have.

2. Your job as a parent nevertheless remains to try to get your teen's attention to important areas where limits must be set to what they're currently doing--or request to do, as in the case of your daughter with the movie job. You try to set limits in as FEW areas as possible; the more freedom your child has to make her own choices and decisions, the more she'll learn about consequences in the real world.

My advice to parents is to wait until your kid steps over a line to then define the line of what is not acceptble--in consultation with them. (Read more about the art of setting limits and consequences by searching on these topics in the Archives.) In your case, a request has been made to allow your daughter to do something that you are not comfortable with her doing. NO ONE CAN PROVE THAT YOU ARE RIGHT in wanting her not to be allowed to go into the R-rated movies. It's just your best judgment, based on your life experience and parenting beliefs, that this would not be in her best interests.

You don't have to be coming from insistence on the rightness of your decision in order to MAKE the decision. When asked for permission for something, you LISTEN to the child, tell them that you hear what they're saying and how they feel about it, and then make your decision based on what you believe is in their best interest, and after hearing their reasons for asking for permission. You want to GIVE PERMISSION as often as you can--again, they need life experience, and you want to reinforce their turning to you honestly to ask for your blessing on something. But if you can't give permission with a good conscience, say so and stick to it.

3. When you turn down a child's request, of course they're going to feel angry with you. They will argue not only that you are not right in doing so, but that 'you have no right' to limit their life choices. This argument is undercut by the fact that they felt they needed to ask you, thus recognizing your authority. (Of course, your daughter was pushed to ask because of the concrete need for your signature--but she could have chosen to forge it!) Don't try to defend the rightness of your decision, but just tell them that this is your decision based on your best judgment, after listening to them, and that you're sorry it is so distressing to them. Let them have their feelings about it.

4. Invading a child's privacy rarely pays off. Now you have to feel guilty for doing this, and that undercuts your sense of the legitimacy of your own decision-making. You didn't like reading what your daughter had to say in her journal, which she did not wish to share with you, and now don't know what to do with it. This is a typical consequence of invading a teen's privacy.

The sentiments your daughter expresses in her journal are typical of teens--that their parents are ruining their lives (with complete omission of all of the things the parents have done specifically to ENHANCE their lives). Just take a look, overall, at whether you're giving your daughter increasing independence and responsibility for making her own decisions. That's how she'll learn who she is and who she wants to be. You have to let her become more separate from you. Holding onto your authority for the sake of keeping her 'close' won't work.

Thanks for your letter; I'm sure many parents will identify.