Parenting teens always feels a hot stove
When everything seems high-stakes, how do we let teens make mistakes?
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“Can I go to that concert in the city next month?” “Can I make my Instagram public?” “I’m thinking about dropping out of college.” As a former teenager, I know that being able to wrestle with situations like these can lead to a lot of learning and growth. And as a mom of five kids, two teens and three young adults, my life is full of opportunities to let my offspring make their own decisions, both high-risk and low-stakes.
The problem? As a modern parent, I can’t always tell the difference.
By now most parents of teens have heard the metaphor comparing teenagers to toddlers, and risky decisions to hot stoves. Back off and give them space to figure things out, we’re told - just keep them away from the “hot stoves” of young adulthood.
But what do we do when every decision feels like a hot stove - often, in fact, a blazing inferno?
From saying dumb, offensive things on social media to experimenting with drugs and alcohol, society doesn’t have a lot of cultural tolerance for young people and their foibles - nor the (bad or absent) parenting that we smugly assume led them to those mistakes. Nor are we, in this reactive, 24/7 media, protective parenting culture, always very adept at assessing relative risks.
Social media has turned parenting increasingly performative, as well as tuned us into the opinions and judgments of thousands of people whose opinions it once would not have occurred to us to care about. 24/7 media means we’re hyperaware of dangers and potential downfalls that our parents may not even have considered possible. There’s no excuse anymore for being ignorant of literally anything. And our kids are walking showpieces of our failure or successes as parents.
So whether it’s because we fear judgment from others or worry about a negative outcome for our kids, we’re not very good at distinguishing between a true life-or-death situations and the character-building mistakes we want our teens to make.
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