Summary Chapter
( from Childproofing for Adolescence by Ashley H. Beitel, Ph.D.)
Ready or not, life delivers our children into adolescence. Their bodies morph, their peers cajole, and the world outside entices. Soon, we may hardly recognize the kids they used to be.
See if any of these questions apply to you:
T F Do you ever wonder why your teenager does things that seem to make no sense, what-so-ever?
T F Do you wonder if there is anything you can do to spare your sweet little child from the turmoil of adolescence?
T F Do you worry about the day when your daughter thinks she’s old enough to stay out all night, with whomever she pleases, doing whatever she chooses?
T F Are you already the parent of an adolescent who can darken your day with one look or one word?
T F Do you ever feel like your responses to your child’s behaviors are sometimes out of proportion to what they did?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then keep reading.
For nearly three decades I have sat with clients who told me what was missing in their lives and relationships. I have helped parents and teens understand each other better, helped young therapists think more deeply about the relationships they create with their clients, and learned firsthand what it means to be a parent.
Here is what I have figured out. Although it is generally important to take things slowly as parents, I believe that you and your child are in a race. It is a race to maturity, pitting developmental time against social and biological time. In other words, time, hormones, and social pressures will deliver your child to adolescence, but will your child arrive having learned hard-earned developmental competencies with which to handle the demands of adolescence? Or will he or she simply arrive because his or her body has morphed and society and peers say it’s time?
Losing this race can cost you dearly. When kids reach adolescence unprepared to handle the demands, they often spend most of their energies trying to stay clear of loneliness, worthlessness, or humiliation. Lacking the competencies they should have learned, they are left to come up with solutions for fitting in with peers and feeling good about themselves. . These “solutions” often end up being the things we parents most dread –drugs, alcohol, sex, mind numbing avoidance, or thrill seeking. These behaviors can scare us, anger us, or render us helpless. Many times it’s sleepless nights. Too often it results in words we wish we could take back and lasting scars that are hard to repair.
On the other hand, kids who are well-prepared reach adolescence freer to pursue sources of satisfaction, build healthy relationships, and feel good about themselves. Kids who have gained competence in areas such as emotional regulation, self-discipline, and genuine self-esteem during childhood are developing the resilience needed as an adolescent to handle the challenges peers and society throw at them. They take on challenges instead of avoiding them or expecting others to do the work for them. They have begun to define what they like, what they are good at, and what is important to them. They are becoming good at telling others how they feel and why. They care how others feel and seek to understand why. They increasingly take responsibility for their actions instead of blaming others or letting others step up and do what needs to be done.
If you are the parent of a preteen, this is a book about helping your child reach adolescence well prepared to meet the challenges they will face. If you are the parent of a teenager, this is a book to help you understand the meaning of upsetting behaviors and learn how to identify and rectify the unfinished parts of development that contribute to those upsetting choices. This is a book about growth, which can and should start wherever you and your child are at the moment.
The process I lead you through in this book is not unlike the way I help therapists learn to think about their work. They bring me their notes or transcripts and we analyze what took place. In the process, they think more deeply about their work. You will be engaged in the same process, first with the help of my analysis, eventually with your own ideas and plans. We want our children to learn to think before they act. We too need to learn to analyze before we act.
We not only want our kids well equipped to handle adolescence, but to continue on a developmental path that leads to healthy adulthood. We want our kids to grow into adults, who know who they are, take satisfaction in what they do, and form loving relationships. In other words, they have successfully developed as individuals and as partners in relationships. Adults who are struggling have often been unable to do justice to both themselves and their relationships simultaneously. Many times, they feel like they must choose one over the other. Kids who arrive at adolescence unprepared developmentally struggle with the bind between developing true selves and staying connected with others. Some become whatever it takes to stay connected while others hide from potential humiliation and rejection.
In order to handle the difficult demands of the teenage years and grow into autonomous adults capable of loving relationships, our children must move from dependence to independence, from external direction to internal direction. This is the work you and they have to do.
How to Make It Happen
Okay, now that we understand where we want to go, how do we make it happen? We make A MESS! A MESS is an acronym I developed to go with the process which will lead you and your children toward the goals we’ll be working toward.
Here is how it works:
A – Attunement
Attunement, or awareness, starts with an appreciation of what characteristics healthy adults possess. In other words, where do we want to our children to end up? With that in mind, what is the developmental pathway that gets them there? Before we start a trip, we pick our destination and then find a map that leads us there. Effective parenting starts with the end in mind and works backwards to an appreciation of what course gets a child to that end.
If you have more than one child, you know that children are different. Therefore, attunement means that you are aware of your child’s unique abilities and interests and as well as their personality. If your child is shy, sensitive, or reluctant to try new things, you will provide quite different opportunities for him than his bold, adaptable, energetic brother. Goodness of fit between child and environment is critical and you, the parent, are responsible for that from the beginning. The final piece of attunement is the ability to assess progress and recognize important goals that need to be met on the developmental path.
MESS – Mastery, Engagement, Self-Soothing
Once a parent is attuned, they can identify goals that their children need to Master. We want them to master essential developmental competencies, such as relating to others, showing compassion, and solving problems independently. Parents then help their children Engage with the challenges of mastery, such as completing chores on their own, or doing the math homework necessary to understand new concepts. In order to sustain engagement, and tolerate the anxieties and frustrations surrounding inevitable failures, parents help their children learn to Self-Soothe. This approach involving Attunement plus Mastery, Engagement and Self-Soothing is a central theme of the book.
So, in other words, we want to make A MESS of our children: (A)ttunement-(M)astery-(E)ngagement-(S)elf-(S)oothing. Making A MESS is a good-humored acronym I trust you will easily remember. But the approach to parenting and the process of developing self-direction and self-reliance in your children it represents is quite serious and quite effective. The A MESS approach has application throughout your child and adolescent’s development.
A MESS is an approach for promoting healthy development, beginning with you as a parent and ending with your children learning to do it for themselves. It applies to teaching your child to get ready for school in the morning or handling the independence of college. It applies to settling squabbles with her sister or giving and getting empathy and respect in her relationship with her high school boyfriend.
Choosing the acronym of A MESS was done in the spirit of good humor and ease of remembering, but don’t underestimate is potency. It represents a synthesis of the best that the fields of psychology and clinical practice have to offer, foundations I will describe below.
Foundations
This book and my methods build upon the best that developmental and clinical psychology have to offer: Stanley Greenspan’s description of healthy child development, Sidney Blatt’s understanding of personality development and psychopathology, Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein’s work on developing self-discipline and resilience, John Gottman and Daniel Goleman’s work on developing emotional intelligence, Lawrence Steinberg’s work with parents and adolescents, and Carol Dweck’s writings about the growth mindset. If you are not familiar with their work, you will be by the end of this book.
Robert Brooks describes what it means to be a charismatic adult*– a person from whom a child gathers strength. As you work through this book, you will learn the mindset of a charismatic adult, one who accepts children for who they are, fosters islands of competence, helps children engage challenges and learn from setbacks, teaches problem solving and self-regulation, and unconditionally believes in the child’s potential for growth. As you learn to make A MESS, you will learn to think and act like a charismatic adult in your child’s life.
These foundations show us what the course through childhood and adolescence looks like, what characteristics lead a child toward healthy adolescence and eventually adulthood. From them we have the destination and the roadmap.
Learning via Vignettes
I think we all learn best with real life examples we can relate to. This is why, drawing from my years of clinical practice, I have created vignettes involving five kids and their loving and well-intentioned parents. As you read, you will begin to link their dysfunctional behaviors to missing developmental competencies and in the process begin to view these adolescents more compassionately. The five kids and families I present are fictional, but realistic composites of themes and concerns I have often seen regularly over many years.
Analyze Before You Act
As you read these vignettes I constantly ask how you would change a mess into A MESS. I follow each vignette with an analysis of the interaction and then ask you what is missing. For some of the difficult adolescent situations, I offer a What If? possibility for an alternative response that incorporates the competencies and processes described above. Often this What If? involves a charismatic adult. The vignettes are designed to provoke thought.
I also help you learn a special approach for analyzing behavior before responding to it. This approach, called I-E-B-R, stands for (Issue – Emotion – Behavior – Response). It is based on the assumption that most behaviors, as foolish as they may seem, have functional bases. Very often, behavior is in the service of managing some intolerable emotion. And that emotion arises because of some issue that is not well understood or managed. Therefore, responding (i.e., punishing) without an appreciation of the emotion and issue involved could make things worse, not better. The I-E-B-R approach will help you analyze the bases for behaviors, the issues and emotions that are fueling them, before you respond. This approach will also help you identify developmental goals for your child to work on.
My goal is not only for you to analyze before you act, but to teach your child to do that as well. At each point in development, our role is to work ourselves out of a job, because our children have assumed responsibility for self-direction and self-regulation. You and your child learn to feel close through your support of their growth, rather than through sustained dependence.
Organization of the Book
The book is divided into 4 sections – Part 1: Adolescence – Always in a Bind, analyzes the compromises and conflicts of these five teens and helps us take a more compassionate view of adolescent behavior and consequently, how to respond. Developmental competencies necessary for handling adolescence effectively are taught in the context of our A MESS framework; Part 2: Make a Mess of Your Child shows us the process of making A MESS in action; Part 3: Take a Look at Yourself, examines how parental issues come into play; and Part 4: Passion, Purpose, and Charismatic Adults, concludes with the possibility of better outcomes for each of the five kids as they discover sources of passion and purpose with the aid of a charismatic adult in their lives.
Parent Toolkit
Interspersed in the book are boxes labeled Parent Toolkit. These appendices contain explanations of Big Ideas in developmental psychology, such as delay of gratification or zone of proximal development; ways of thinking about kids such as speed vs. mastery or within vs. between child comparisons; practical applications of parenting approaches such as The Bedtime Ritual, The Magic Formula for Motivation and strategies for promoting responsibility; and self-analysis with topics such as Whose Issue Is It? These Parent Toolkit pieces are designed to teach and entertain and can be read in any order you choose. Those of you, who want something immediately usable, will find them short and applicable.
Your Turn
I actively involve you in the process of thinking deeply about parenting, deriving your own solutions, as well as looking at your own role in problems. There are a number of opportunities labeled Your Turn where I ask you to actively derive, argue, or envision. For instance, before giving you a set of healthy adult characteristics, I ask you to create your own list. Similarly, you will consider what must be the childhood pathways necessary to reach these healthy outcomes. I will ask you to identify the missing developmental pieces for each of these teenagers and what you would recommend to turn their ships around. In the second part of the book, I will ask you what these kids need in order to change the outcomes we witnessed. This book emphasizes the potential for growth, regardless of when we begin. Some of you are in the midst parenting adolescents and need a more compassionate way to view your kids. Others have not reached that stage and have the advantage of planning backwards to know what you want to keep clearly in mind.
What’s In It For You?
I also ask you to look carefully at yourself as you read. The IEBR approach also applies to our behaviors and what elicited our urgency to act. For instance, when our response is out of proportion to the child’s behavior, then we need to ask ourselves what intolerable emotion and issue were we trying to manage. As you may have noticed, the more worried we are, the more controlling we get. Then control becomes the focus instead of the worry, its source, and its healthy resolution.
I will try to leave you with usable pieces at the end of every chapter. So what are some of these promised pieces? Along with identifying the developmental pathways to healthy adulthood, you will attach meaning and compassion to “screwy” adolescent behavior. You will analyze before impulsively responding to behavior. You will respect your child’s uniqueness and help them develop their genuine interests into meaningful purpose. You and your child will recognize failures as opportunities for learning rather than sources of humiliation to be avoided. You will help your child become an effective problem solver who comes to you for advice rather than shamefully hiding from your disappointment.
Learning to Think – Differently
Yes, this book is long, but that’s because it is about changing patterns of thinking and that takes time. By the end you may recognize that some good thinking can replace quite a bit of unnecessary action. Instead of impulsively rushing to rescue your struggling child, you may be able to calmly offer constructive encouragement. Instead of immediately punishing infuriating behavior, you may be able to help both of you figure out where that behavior came from and why. Instead of guaranteeing safety by means of control, you’ll find effective ways for your child to assure their own safety and your peace of mind. Instead of battling with your defiant teenager, the two of you can find ways to problem solve together.
By the end of the book, each of you will be anticipating what I am going to say; you will have your own opinions on what should happen; you will be actively disagreeing with my analyses; and you will think more deeply about the complex process of parenting. The goal of a good therapist and author is to no longer be needed. The goal of a parent is to be less needed at the end of each new challenge for self-reliance.
(Quiz results)
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So how about that little quiz you took? Don’t worry. By the end of the book, you will easily pass it. Here is a bit of what you can expect: T F Do you ever wonder why your teenager does things that seem to make no sense, what-so-ever? All behavior makes sense; at least functional sense. As I promised above, as you learn to employ the IEBR approach, you will go in search of what (functional) purpose your child’s regrettable behavior served, by becoming more attuned to your child or by asking. It is amazing what five (nonjudgmental) “why” questions in a row can yield. Eventually, you want to teach your child to undertake a similar search, because this will become the basis for “analyze before you act” or at least, figure out what went wrong. T F Do you wonder if there is anything you can do to spare your sweet little eight-year-old from the turmoil of adolescence? This is the promised purpose of the book. Adolescence need not be the “shock and awe” as it is often portrayed. Developmentally well-prepared kids have more success holding on to the parts of themselves that are important and satisfying when faced with peer pressures to compromise them. Kids who learn to problem solve, argue effectively, and effect change in their relationships with their parents find ways to do that more effectively with their teenage peers. Children with secure relationships with their parents and sources of genuine self-esteem are less likely to suspend good judgment to hold on to relationships with peers who are leading them astray. So, when your sweet little eight year old is an adolescent, he will seek your advice as he faces inevitable challenges and setbacks, instead of fashioning regrettable responses to the threats of humiliation or alienation alone.
T F Do you worry about the day when your daughter thinks she’s old enough to stay out all night, with whomever she pleases, doing whatever she chooses? You mean when she leaves for college? Our goal is to prepare her for just such a day, when we can trust her judgment, choosing relationships wisely and knowing how to command respect and caring. By the time she leaves home, she will know what is right for her, be able to assert herself to get it and say “no” to what is not right. She will have learned to argue effectively; she will know that she deserves healthy relationships and can move on when others ask her to make unhealthy compromises. She will learn to soothe herself rather than rely on external sources of distraction, numbing and stimulation or others to make things right. She will know how to form intimate relationships in terms of empathy and compassion and she will expect that in return. Her friends will be people who value her for who she is, with her own thoughts, feelings and talents. T F Are you already the parent of an adolescent who can darken your day with one look or one word? You will learn “whose issue is it.” If he or she can darken your mood, you will gain competence in figuring out what issue in you was touched. When there are conflicts between you, you will become better at figuring out where the conflict belongs. If it belongs to the child, you will figure out a way to put it back where it belongs. A very simple example of this is taught via the Bedtime Ritual, which creates a process where the urgency to get ready for bed resides in the child, not the nagging parent. Finally, you will appreciate the value of genuine curiosity. We want our kids to hold on to their natural curiosity. We need to hold on to our natural curiosity about our kids. Finding a way to do that which is genuine and does not feel judgmental will be a fine gift for everyone involved. T F Do you ever feel like your responses to your child’s behaviors are sometimes out of proportion to what they did? And you thought this book was focused on kids? Actually, it is as much about us as our kids. Many times we are far more involved in controlling, nagging, punishing, and correcting our kids than is reasonable. How would we feel if someone talked to us that way? The IEBR approach is a good way for us to take a look at ourselves. Throughout the book, I ask you to do just that, first by picking on the parents in the vignettes, but then by asking you to do the same. Much of what we do as parents that is over the top or unnecessary is the result of emotions we find intolerable. Too much control is often the result of the consequences we fear for our children. Instead of battling with your child over control issues, you will become skilled at figuring out what worries you and why, and then translate that into a process of inquiry with your child that leads to them learning that the best way to avoid parental control is to learn to handle it themselves. Self-regulation. Isn’t that what we want in place before they leave home? |
- The term charismatic adult first appeared in an article entitled Teachers Have Enormous Power In Affecting Child’s Self-Esteem by Julius Segal, Ph.D. in the October 1988 issue of the Brown University Child Behavior and Development Letter.