Is Your Teenager Hard To Understand?

IS YOUR TEENAGER…
HARD TO UNDERSTAND?

Adapted from the book Self-mastery… A Journey Home To Your Self
by spiritual life coach Hu Dalconzo, Copyright © 2002

Your children’s teenage years are the first stage of their adulthood, rather than the last stage of their childhood. “Teenagers are apprentice adults.” Psychologists mark puberty as the beginning of adolescence and they mark the end of adolescence at around age twenty-five, but for too many adult-children, adolescence never ends.

The four stages of your children’s early development were built upon one another. If any of these stages were marked with unmet dependency needs, then your children’s adolescent stage of development will be greatly hampered. If this is true for your adolescents, you have your work cut out for you because it will be that much harder to help them learn how to fulfill their unmet emotional dependency needs.

A HU NOTE: Even teenagers who have had wonderful childhoods will have a difficult time dealing with their adolescent stage of development because it is an emotional-hormonal storm; but for adolescents whose parents were adult-children,it can be a hurricane of confusion, shame, anger and guilt.

Your teenager’s emotional intimacy skills are developed upon three primary factors: (1) The degree of functional intimacy that they observed between you and your spouse. (2) The amount of quality bonding time that they received from their parent of the same sex. (3) Their caretakers’conscious and unconscious beliefs and attitudes about sex.

Remember that adolescence is not the last stage of your children’s childhood; it is the first stage of their adulthood. This is why “filling the holes” of your children’s unmet emotional dependency needs using proven holistic parenting methods is so important.
The primary purposes of the adolescent stage of development are: (1) To establish a unique, emotionally mature adult identity. (2) To develop a healthy attitude about sex through exploration. (3) To become a Self-empowered adult who is capable of leaving home and living independently.

LOVE AFTER LOVE
The time will come, when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror.
And each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, “Sit here. Eat. Relax.”
You will love again this stranger who is your Self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart, to itself,
to this stranger who has loved you all your life.
whom you ignored for another, but who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs and the desperate notes.
Peel your self-image from the mirror.
Sit. Here. Now. Feast on your life.
Fall in love again with your Self and with all of life.
DEREK WALCOTT

In a perfect world, your children’s teenage years would be safe enough for them to experiment with various adult roles, ideas, styles and behaviors, but the real world, exemplified by the evening news and events like 9-11, keeps showing them again and again that they are not safe. This is why it is very important for you to do all that you can to help your teenagers to feel safe and secure enough to experiment with adult roles because that is how they will learn to be mature adults.

Remember that it is normal for your teenagers’ experiments to be in opposition to your lifestyle. That is why I suggest that you “bite the parental bullet” and give your teenagers permission to experiment with as many functional adult roles as possible. They need to feel secure enough with you and their other caretakers to experiment with adult roles. They need to keep experimenting until they discover which adult roles work for them and which do not. Adult role-playing is how your children build the Self-confidence they need to leave home and become Self-empowered, emotionally mature adults.

A HU NOTE: Commit to your teenagers that, “I’m here to teach you how to master your adult abilities, strengths and skills. I promise you that I will model for you how to communicate your feelings in a mature, highly functional way… I will teach you how to protect your boundaries, so that you will feel safe and secure in the world.”

It is normal for your teenagers to have mood swings because they are trying to balance “their Self” between the two worlds of adulthood and childhood. It is normal for them to feel ambivalent about themselves and the world in general because of the hormonal upheavals and mood swings that are a normal part of their adolescent development.

In order for your teenagers to grow up and leave home, they need to “justify” leaving home by making their parents (you) look unattractive, bad or wrong in numerous ways. Adolescents use their peer group as a vehicle to achieve distancing. In a sense, the peer group becomes the new parent. Teenagers are always trying to “fit in” with their peers. However, by conforming they lose their own individuality because they do not spend enough time developing their own unique and individual adult strengths and abilities.

It is extremely important for you to emotionally detach from your children and give them the space to grow up and be Self-sufficient adults. Your emotional detachment will allow them to depend on themselves more, so that they will learn how to find their own ways in the universe. Also, your detachment will help your children to feel less guilty about leaving the family, which will decrease their need to emotionally act out to make you look unattractive.

A HU NOTE: Let your teenager know that, “I will make it safe for you to leave home and distance your Self from the family because
distancing is a normal part of adolescent development.”

Another aspect of raising adolescents that most parents have a hard time emotionally dealing with is sexual experimentation. When your children begin puberty and they develop secondary sex characteristics, it is perfectly normal for them to experiment with sex just as I hope you did.

Teenagers experience a hormonal explosion, which creates a newfound sexual energy that drives them to want to reproduce. It is normal, natural and necessary for teenagers to explore their sexuality. It is your parental job to “respond with ability” and deal with your children’s sexual experimentation in a mature way, based on your individual morals and ethics, so that your children can be open and honest with you about what they are doing with their sexual partners.