Adolescents contest parental authority, and they should. Normal! But while parents may lose some traditional influences on their kids, many types remain and are also super important. Learn more below about provisional and affirmative influences — and more! — that you can still have with your teens. if you are at your wit’s end — this read can help make you feel that all is not lost!
Come the onset of the child’s adolescence (usually around ages 9 to 13), parenting gets more complex. Some traditional command authority is challenged as the young person starts separating from childhood and growing in two powerful ways.
The child starts detaching for more independence and differentiating for more individuality. In both cases, self-determination is asserted as more freedom calls.
In response, now parents must manage a changing mix of holding on and letting go. While they continue to maintain family membership requirements for the young person to depend upon, they also start allowing more freedom of action and choice of definition. Now the 10 to 12 year coming of age passage is underway.
Gradually repositioning in response to this developmental change, the task for parents is to gradually work themselves out of their traditional structural, supervisory, and support job which they do when the young person becomes older and experienced enough to assume ultimate self-management responsibility.
It’s challenging: As the young person’s world of experience becomes larger and more compelling, parents find they have a less dominant role to play than with their changing child. At this stage, parents can feel less central and influential than before.
It can feel humbling for them to reflect upon: Now they appreciate how many formative influences on the daughter’s or son’s growth that parents don’t control. Consider a few examples of what I mean.
There are characteristics, the innate human nature with which the child is born. Parents don’t control this.
There is chance, the ongoing play of luck that favors or disfavors opportunity. Parents don’t control this.
There is life change, the force that keeps upsetting and resetting terms of existence. Parents don’t control this.
There is choice that personally decides what the child will or will not do. Parents don’t control this.
There are companions whose peer influence is beyond the reach of parents. Parents don’t control this.
There is culture, the power of popular media to dictate growing fashion and ideals. Parents don’t control this.
It’s not that parents don’t have an ongoing impact on their developing adolescent; but it’s more complicated now that she or he is no longer just a family-centered little child. As more worldly attractions compete with interest in family, as self-determination increases, as generational differences become more apparent, as social experience becomes more compelling; parental sway can be harder to assert.
And yet, parents still have many sources of influence that fundamentally matter. Consider 12 for parents to remain mindful of.
Although in less direct control over the adolescent’s world of experience, and in less command, parents have many ways to exercise significant influence with their more liberated teenager who still needs their loyal and steadfast care.
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Reference: [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/surviving-your-childs-adolescence/202207/how-parental-authority-can-diminish-during-adolescence ]
