Parenting teens always feels a hot stove

When everything seems high-stakes, how do we let teens make mistakes?

“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.

Because really, how are we supposed to know? Letting a high-schooler fail a class instead of leaping to the rescue could be just the learning experience that helps springboard them into a new era of personal responsibility! Or…it could be a soul-crushing failure that leads to a downward spiral of depression, a lifetime of underemployment, and eventual financial ruin.

Yes, I’ve gone through this entire possible downward spiral in my head while deciding how hard to crack down on an under-performing kid.

And what my gut was telling me - that this particular human needed to learn from cold, hard experience - didn’t at all match up with the societal and cultural message that high school performance is the gateway to lifelong success, value, worth, and happiness. And that’s just one possible way we can let our kids experiment with failure. Will the results be disastrous and deadly? Or powerfully positive? We can’t know, but the temptation to always lean hard in the direction of “better safe than sorry” is strong.

But maybe there’s another way - one that allows our kids the freedom to learn and grow, and helps them develop the tools and intuition to keep themselves out of boiling water - while also giving them a soft place to land.

In this conversation I talk with Ken Ginsburg, MD, a pediatrician who specializes in adolescent-parent relationships. The framework Dr. Ginsburg suggests is much richer than a simple risk-assessment, and centers around modeling compassion, perspective, and resilience. I learned a ton from this conversation, and I hope you enjoy it!