Teenagers pulling away from family -- or do they get pushed away?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Here’s another way to look at it.

Girls are nearly always dealing with a totally different set of expectations, therefore what seems like not a big deal to you may in fact be an objectively big deal in a girl’s life. You may assume you are missing critical context. The stakes are way higher for girls when it comes to social expectations, especially at that age, especially in the era Rilchiam is probably talking about.

This is evident, for example, in the way autism looks different in girls and women because women are far, far more likely to have put in the time and effort necessary to learn how to make friends, to the point of practicing facial expressions, eye contact in the mirror, mimicking how people act on TV, because their social survival was pretty much dependent on it. Which incidentally makes it harder to diagnose, because the social deficits are not as obvious on a standard ADOS. If you’re wondering why a raft of women are currently being late diagnosed with ADHD and autism, it’s because this distinction was not well understood in the past and a slew of neurodivergent girls were overlooked.

I was a weird girl, and it took a very long time for me to find my way, socially. But I made a choice pretty much from the beginning I would rather be myself than accepted. And by the time I got to high school, I was mostly tolerated by everyone but my mother.

82

It’s also plausible that while men may have just as many trivial triggering incidents from childhood as women do, they’re less likely to mention them, because they’re less likely to get challenged on their aversions. Men are more allowed to say “eh, I just don’t like” [whatever it is], rather than being expected to justify their avoidance.

E.g., lots of men still sedulously avoid anything coded “effeminate” (pink, sparkly, whatever) because back in childhood they got mocked for being “girly” or “gay” when they naively liked something of that description. But nobody’s calling them out on, say, not wearing pink, so they don’t bother explaining the long-ago negative experience they internalized about it. Even though the experience may well have been “at worst unpleasant, inconvenient, maybe even slightly hurtful, but in the grand scheme of things, isn’t actually that big of a deal”.

83

“Subjectively”. Just because someone believes something is a “big deal” does not necessarily make it so. Which is the problem because it creates a situation where some seemingly innocuous situation becomes a triggering event, the next thing their partner knows they are in a fight and don’t understand why.

Yeah, because that’s our job as parents. Otherwise teenagers often make stupid life choices and some of those can have lasting consequences.

Except here’s the trick. Statistically speaking, your parents probably have no idea how to be particularly successful because most people aren’t. And whatever world your parents lived in to get to whatever level of success enabled them to raise children is probably very different from the one the kids grew up in.

84

I’d say trying to influence teens’ lives is reasonable.

Expecting “No. Becasue I said so!” to work well with a 16-yo only demonstrates a parent with 16 years practice at failing child-raising through the use of the authoritarian model.

Oddly enough, the better the job you did on growing and stretching, not stifling nor coddling, your youngsters, the less you need to exert “influence” over their teen decisions.

To be sure kids vary widely and even perfect parenting can’t overcome a handicap, whether that’s autism, oppositional defiant disorder, low IQ, or sociopathy.

But in the main, parents reap from their teens what they sowed with their toddlers & pre-tweens.

85

What does make something a big deal, if not the subjective experience of it?

86

I think maybe you meant something more like “just because someone thinks something is a big deal doesn’t mean it’s reasonable” because @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness is correct - there is no objective definition of what qualifies as a big deal.

87

I mean, my mother has borderline personality disorder so I’m well aware that people’s perceptions can get skewed about what’s reasonable, fair or unfair. But you implied that women, in general, are somehow incapable of judging the importance of events in their own lives - lives you have no experiential context to understand. That is really condescending toward an entire gender. And your attitude about those things probably has more to do with your fight than you realize. If your position is “That thing that hurt you is in my own subjective opinion not a big deal” of course she’s gonna get mad. You’re never going to get out of an argument by invalidating someone’s feelings.

88

I absolutely agree.

And yet.

Dealing with a teenager and her ENORMOUS feelings about everything can be exhausting. It’s difficult sometimes to hear sobs about something and not be like, holy christ, child, way to overreact!

And yet.

I know she sometimes thinks the same thing about me and my reactions. What is, to me, a sign of withering contempt and hateful disrespect is, to her, just a normal facial expression or a quotidian foot-stomp.

A major part of parenting is keeping perspective. A teenager won’t have the same perspective, won’t be able to consider the long term, won’t be able to hold multiple ideas in their head at the same time. If, as a parent, you can’t do any of that either, you can’t effectively parent the kid.

As a parent, when my kid has ALL THE FEELS about something, and I know that these feels are going to be gone in fifteen minutes, I still need to acknowledge the feelings. I need to read the situation. Is it time for advice? Is it time for some constructive criticism? (“I know you think it’s unfair that you got in trouble for talking in class, but that’s actually a pretty reasonable request from your teacher”) Is it time for commiseration? Or is it time to leave the kid alone for a bit to let them process?

I’m pretty far from always reading the situation correctly, but it’s incumbent on me at least to try; and it’s incumbent on me to make sure that, no matter what I choose, I’m communicating lots of love for the kid.

89

I really feel like I have a teenager sometimes.

I assumed we were talking about adult women retrospectively judging events from their own childhood. When it comes to kids, there’s a part where parents have to help them sort out the magnitude of things, I absolutely agree.

A while back my son was getting upset about something, and they’d been doing “big problem” “little problem” in ABA. I said, “This is only a little problem.” He said, “Don’t say that! It’s a big problem to me!”

And like, fair. The question as a parent isn’t really whether the thing is worth getting upset over, because the upset is happening, the kid is experiencing it as a big deal. The trick is to help them deal with all those outsized feelings, and, ideally, learn to reason through them.

I’m a very emotional person, so my default assumption about myself tends to be, “This is probably not as important as it feels.” I’m not always correct but I’m usually correct. I used to have to go to other people and ask, “Am I thinking about this reasonably or being irrational?” And over time I got the consistent message about myself that my judgement was correct, so I can usually figure it out on my own now.

The thing is, nobody ever taught me emotion regulation. My Mom managed anger by burning shit to the ground. That’s what I thought you were supposed to do until my Aunt explicitly told me otherwise one day. But she still never told me what to do instead. So instead I just tried to suppress my anger. Anger was a scary, destructive emotion.

I had to teach basic emotional regulation to myself, as a young adult. I had to do even more work on that after I had a child. In Dialectical Behavior Therapy they call it acting from the wise mind. We have to somehow teach our kids to use the wise mind. I would never tell anyone their emotions are wrong. But I am confident saying we need to manage these emotions more effectively. We need to look at how they are affecting our behavior and consider the possibility that our emotions aren’t really in line with reason. That’s a tricky balance to strike without invalidating the emotion.

90

I read back over things, and I think you’re right–I was focused on the OP, and misread what msmith had written. Sorry, and thanks for the thoughtful response!

91

What they said. And this:

There’s a perfect example of that in this thread. Yes, another thing I remember from a long time ago. But I think it persists because it is such a perfect microcosm of what SDMB was at that time.

OP: “I’m single, unattached, no roommate, new in town so I don’t know anyone, no party or gift exchange at work, and now my mom tells me that she and dad are only getting Christmas gifts for my niece and nephews, nothing for my brother and me. I wouldn’t mind, except there goes my chance to get even a holiday candle or a fruitcake to mark the occasion. Am I right to feel bummed out?”

Other posters: “Yeah, that sucks. Maybe you could drop just a hint to your parents that one token gift would be nice, under the circumstances? Meanwhile, hoping to make you feel less bad, here are some anecdotes about the times our families disregarded us.”

But then some people started coming in with, “Goodness, I haven’t gotten a Christmas or other gift from my parents in years, and I couldn’t care less! Wanna know why? Because besides having children of my own, I have a long-term relationship, many friends who live nearby, a house, and plenty of disposable income. So if it doesn’t bother me, I can’t see any reason why it should bother someone who has none of those things!”

Some of them seemed to take for granted that the OP was having this big tantrum and lashing out at her family. She wasn’t; she was trying to manage her emotions so as to avoid making anyone else uncomfortable. And one of them declared, “Fifty dollars buys next to nothing!” He stated it as a fact; IMO, that’s an opinion, and subjective as all hell. But he wouldn’t back down: a ten-dollar gift wasn’t worth having, so OP’s parents would have to spend $50 or more on her, which would be money they wouldn’t have to spend on the grandkids, so OP was immature and materialistic for allegedly wanting them to do that. “And an adult should be mature enough to be happy when a child opens a gift. A child won’t be made happy by watching an adult open a gift.” I’d call that subjective; nobody in my family got that memo. “Oh, and I know the OP is immature because she called herself potentially a bitch, and curse words make it a rant.”

So yeah, that was a doozy of a thread. (And I think the real reason it lives rent-free in my head is because I regret not having opened a Pit thread, so I could have freely told certain posters to shove a Christmas tree up their ass.)

Left_Hand, you sound all right!

Yep, for my mom, if the slightest thing went wrong, or not according to plan, it was The End. Of the Fucking. World. And since she was bad at planning, that happened a lot. I was well into my twenties before I really learned how to approach a problem in a constructive way.

92

My position is yes, you need to be sensitive to people’s feelings. They feel what they feel.

My kids also sometimes feel like my wife and I are horrible monsters because we send them to school and don’t let them watch TV all day instead of doing homework.

So sorry about your feelings, but sometimes you have to do shit you don’t want to do.

It’s also not an argument I need to “win” in unmeaningful way. My daughter can make a wonderful, thoughtful, logical response highlighting all the reasons she should be able to watch TikTok for 8 hours. My retort doesn’t have to be any wittier than simply unplugging the router.

93

You’d be amazed (or maybe not) how many of my husband’s clients act as it they are helpless in the face of their children’s desires.

“He stays up past his bedtime watching YouTube.”

“Then take away his tablet at night.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

94

A lot of that is really not “I couldn’t do that”, but rather (if they were honest with themselves & the doc / counselor) “I won’t do that because the kid’s probable response is more hassle to me than I’m willing to put into parenting today. Or any other day. I just don’t care that much.”

I sometimes think that many fathers’ ideas of parenting end at conception. Mothers usually carry it on all the way to delivery and even a couple months after that. Usually. After which even many Moms’ attendance at the parenting biz becomes spotty at best.

The percentage of present but derelict parents does not have to be large to create a vast horde of practically unparented kids.

Darn shame.

95

My son can’t stand not getting his way. It is a serious problem at school. When he’s in a certain mood, he will have raging meltdowns that include highly aggressive behavior. It’s emotionally and sometimes physically exhausting to deal with him in this state.

We still tell him no. I don’t care if it takes a half hour to get him settled, no is no. Otherwise he’s going to get the message that this sort of behavior is effective at getting his way.

Eventually he will figure out that hearing “no” is a part of every day life, he will develop his little cerebral cortex, and he will have the coping skills necessary to handle not getting his way.

But if we caved every time he threw a fit, he would never learn those skills.

I’m not saying I never made a poor parenting choice because it was easier in the moment. I definitely have. But not this particular one.

96

You are a shining beacon of thoughtful long-sighted parenting. And probably 1 in 100.

My niece is a professional foster parent. She cares for kids taken from their parents / caregivers by CPS. The large majority of the kids she’s been responsible for (80 some and counting) are not the victims of abuse in the classic sense of physical or psychological beatings like you endured.

The vast majority suffer from severe mental and emotional neglect. And what little attention they did get was negative. Their parents / caregivers housed them and fed them. Sometimes inadequately, but that mostly from lack of money, often because necessities like street drugs took priority. And that’s about it. Not left feral, just mostly left ignored.

So that’s the couple percent at the opposite end of the spectrum from you. There’s still 90-95% somewhere in the middle. Some darn good, some darn bad, and some downright evil.

97

This was everyone in 2006… right when I was a teenager.

98

The idea of kids not reaching their full potential just breaks my heart. That’s always been true, long before I had a child. Not every kid is going to be a success story, but every kid deserves a chance to be a success story, and many are denied that chance. I hate how arbitrary and unfair it is.

99

And it seems like the choices get narrower all the time. If your child can prove they’re a genius, they get to go to a well-funded school that fast-tracks students to top colleges. Kids who are just average – or who come off as average because no one’s ever tried to tap their potential – have to stay in the schools where they’re basically warehoused. So they stay average, and it’ll never be known what they could have been or done. How about every kid getting a decent education?!

Swords_to_Plowshares, what do you mean? You were a teenager and your family decided that you were too old for Christmas presents? That sucks, if so. {{{S_t_P}}}

100

What world do you live in where that’s true?

If you’re already in a rich school district or a private school then yes, that might be true. If you’re in an average to poor district there are no such programs. They were defunded decades ago if they ever existed at all.