How do you talk to your teen when their only focus is the screen in front of them?
How do you help them to build a core of self-esteem in a world obsessed with appearances?
In this empathetic, down to earth and eminently practical guide from one of the UK’s leading adolescent psychoanalysts, Ian Williamson will help you through every possible hurdle in the teenage years.
We Need to Talk is your new go-to-guide to navigating the often tricky adolescent years, with the endgame being what every parent wants: a healthy, happy and resilient child.
Ian Williamson trained as a child and adolescent analyst at the Society of Analytical Psychology before working at a variety of NHS centres as a specialist in mental health problems. He is the co-director of the Queen Anne Practice in Marylebone, London, as well as a lecturer in Jungian child analysis at Essex University. Over his career he has had over 50,000 face-to-face consultations with teenagers.
Ian Williamson is a genius at understanding not only the problems (or, as enlightened parents call them, ‘exciting challenges’) of raising adolescents (or, as enlightened parents call them, ‘sporadic lunatics’) but crucially giving you practical ideas about how to do the job.
He has ideas which are much better for parents than flouncing out of the room shrieking ‘I’m sending you to boarding school’ then eating an entire family size bar of chocolate. And he tells you what they are, in user-friendly lists so in a moment of crisis, one can just run to the book, instead of the chocolate, and look it up.
Childrearing is not as it was. Children are not left free to roam around, potter about, and turn up again for supper. Technology has altered everything, the availability of porn has altered everything. Drugs have altered everything. Parental aspirations have altered everything. Gone are the days when children should be seen and not heard. Aspirational parenting culture involves a plethora of activities, texts, emails, electronic devices, and complex schedules which makes the job of a parent look more like that of an air-traffic controller.
Ian understands all this, and his guidance and suggestions work. He has spent twenty-five years at – as he puts it – ‘the coalface’ of modern childrearing. He writes with a refreshing straight-shooting style, full of humanity, reassurance and humour. Many of his phrases would sit well on a kitchen mug or computer mouse-pad:
‘It is not an infringement of an adolescent’s human rights to have to do what he is told.’
‘They will respect you in the long run if you behave in a respectful way towards them.’
‘Raising an adolescent sometimes seems to consist of a series of World War Threes about nothing in particular.’
‘Don’t put their happiness at the heart of your parenting. They will feel a whole lot better about themselves and the world if you put preparation for adulthood as the priority.’
‘Adolescents have their own internal logic, which isn’t logical at all, being as it is, largely determined by what they want to have or do right now.’
‘The three most important qualities, are a good work ethic, emotional resilience and a capacity to make and sustain relationships. If they have those in their locker going into adulthood they will do fine.’
‘You don’t have to persecute yourself if you don’t get everything right. Good enough will do.’
This is a massively helpful, reassuring, and humorous insight into adolescence, as well as a stellar self-help manual. As a self-help book aficionado – as well as a parent – I would put it in my top ten all time greats and couldn’t recommend it more highly.
WHEN I THINK of adolescence I think of a wonderful 13-year-old girl who came to see me after asking her mother and father if she could talk to a therapist about her ‘worries’. Her parents were concerned. She seemed the most normal and happy of children; she was doing well at school and had good friends. Had they missed something?
No, they had not missed anything. Their daughter was having her first collision with adolescence. Hers was the most comprehensive and coherent account of the impact of adolescence on a teenager that I have heard before or since.
The girl sat in front of me with a look of bewilderment on her face …
‘What’s happening to me?’ she asked. ‘It’s like yesterday I was one person and today I am someone completely different. Something has happened to me. There used to be certainties in my life. I used to love my parents, go to church. I believed in God and was happy playing with my friends. But now everything’s changed and nothing is certain any more. I feel angry with my parents all the time but I don’t know why. I’ve suddenly begun to wonder whether I really believe in God. And it gets worse … Everyone at school is talking about boys and sex. I don’t want a boyfriend, but should I have one? When do you know you are in love? When do you decide to have sex? I’ve also begun to worry about dying. Truly, my life is one big mess. I want to go back to the old certainties. Honestly, it’s like a living hell.’
Nothing, quite nothing, can prepare a person for the trials and tribulations of parenting an adolescent. A mother or father can talk to experts and friends, watch documentaries and read manuals until they are blue in the face and they might like to think they have it taped. But then their beloved child turns 13 – or 11 or 15, or whatever age it is – and suddenly life becomes a roller coaster, with new stresses bursting out of the dark hither and thither, grabbing and assaulting the uninitiated from every angle. Whatever form their offspring’s adolescence takes – and the variety is infinite, I can assure you – no parent is spared (even if they say they are), and there is never scope for complacency. Every parent can be absolutely sure that it makes the strutting and tantrums and chaos of the toddler years seem like a walk in the park.
As children grow older, the ups and downs of the preschool years become a distant memory and usually give way to a period of calm and order. Children largely, although not always, do what they are told: they go to bed on time, are generally cheerful and seem to accept the family order of things. When they reach about 12 – and sometimes younger – you might catch a glimpse, or more usually a whiff, of something changing. You know adolescence beckons. You’ve heard the nightmare stories from friends but you believe you’ve done a better job and it’s not going to happen to you. It is a sort of conscious denial. But then the signs begin to become more frequent and intense. Over supper you discuss what might be wrong with your daughter. She seems distracted, moody and argumentative. Has something happened at school? Is she ill? The answer is none of the above. No illness. Nothing tangible has happened. She is simply becoming an adolescent.
What makes parenting during this period so utterly bewildering, exhausting and hard is the nature of adolescence itself. The sweet child, cooperative and biddable one day, is a cantankerous, argumentative pain in the neck the next. From the parents’ point of view, there seems to be no rhyme or reason for these tectonic shifts in mood. There are, of course. They are called hormones, but they are invisible and work in unpredictable and mysterious ways. The adolescent’s instability and swings and tempers can begin to completely dominate family life. The carefully constructed order and civility of the household, which had remained more or less intact for years, seems suddenly threatened by the actions of a mini, or in some cases not so mini, terrorist within.
It is worth holding in mind that, although it is mightily difficult for the parent, this period is also extremely difficult for the fledgling adolescent. This may not manifest itself in angry outbursts – although it often does – but instead in fear or anxiety and depression that arise out of trying, perhaps consciously for the first time, to make sense of the changes in their bodies and their place in the world.
But beneath the routine adolescent maelstrom that is complicated and challenging, there now lies a more insidious and worrying trend and it is one that we ignore at our peril. The number of adolescents suffering from mental health issues is increasing at an alarming rate. Consider some of the statistics:
The picture these statistics paints is a serious cause for concern. What is going on? By and large the teenagers of today are healthier and better educated than any previous generation. So what are these adolescents so depressed and anxious about? Are we missing something and, if we are, what is it and what should we be doing about it?
It is my view that we need to radically recalibrate how we are bringing up this age group. We need to focus less on the (inevitably elusive) provision of perpetual happiness and more on how realistically and securely to prepare our teens for adulthood. This should remain our priority in these testing years and is something I will come back to again and again in this book. As part of this we need to bear in mind the three most important qualities our teens need going into adulthood:
These are the crucial elements on which we as parents must concentrate if we are to successfully help navigate the well-balanced and stable development of our children. If you think that a less than demanding task then you have seriously underestimated the power of the technological revolution. Our teenagers nowadays are being lost to the addictive world of distractions and gratifications provided by electronic toys, online games, pornography, social networking, smartphones, and so forth.
As a practising child and adolescent analyst, most of my adult working life has been spent sitting in a consulting room listening to children and parents talking about their lives: the highs and lows; the triumphs and failures; the worries and traumas. Despite the insular nature of this working environment, I am at a sort of coalface and thus privy to the subtle – and not so subtle – shifts in the way the environment and prevailing culture impact on our lives.
Over the last years those shifts have been more seismic than subtle. What I seem to be witnessing is nothing less than a destructive attack on the way intelligent adolescents relate to themselves, to each other and to the world around them. This is happening not just to a minority of the many people that I see, but to each and every one of them. It is, quite frankly, ubiquitous, like a plague sweeping through my consulting room. I am in absolutely no doubt whatsoever that it will have serious consequences in the longer term.
THE CAPACITY OF adolescents to sustain meaningful relationships with partners and friends both now and in their adult lives is being swiftly and systematically dismantled.
I believe it is not the historic hormonal havoc that is at the heart of adolescent struggles, although this plays its part, as it always has done. No, this destructive attack upon our teens’ mental health is a result of contemporary forces far greater than a breaking voice, the development of breasts or the eternal desire of youth to push aside the influence of the older generation and forge their own way in the world. Our teens are at the very core of a communication and technological revolution that seems ever more incredible – faster, slicker, more realistic – and shows little sign of slowing down.
Most teenagers use their phones for 18 different activities; from photos to videos to social networking … They are able to access these distractions, excitements and entertainments almost literally in the blink of an eye. Such is the all-encompassing nature of these irresistible new technologies that it is possible for our teens to delay, distort and even avoid any true engagement with the outside world and the people in it. Technology is a godsend to the adolescent, as those of you with teenage sons who spend their lives in their bedrooms playing computer games will know. Feeling frustrated or bored? Experiencing a difficult situation, worried or anxious? There is an instant route out of reality; just press the button and watch the screen with its alternative, more obliging universe explode into life. Lose yourself in it and – relief! – you can immediately reach the point of believing that the real world no longer exists.
What would happen to someone’s relationship with the world and others if the whole of their life was devoted to meaningless distractions that once used to be the stepping stones between periods of deeper thought and reflection? What impact would it have on a person’s capacity to think, to reflect, to feel? Indeed, what would happen to experience itself, if these meaningless meanderings became an end in themselves, and then a full-blown addiction?
In this new world it hardly constitutes a great leap of the imagination to realise that these adolescents are spending more time with their phones and computers than they are with people face-to-face, and that they are becoming more attuned to these ‘toys’ than to real human interaction.
Will it mean that their primary relationships will soon – if not already – be with their ‘toys’ as opposed to with each other? Is our relationship with our children being compromised by their relation to these machines? The answer is yes. An even more worrying question is whether our children’s relationship to themselves is being compromised. And the answer to that, again, is another unequivocal yes.
Fast-forward to the next generation and what impact will all this have on our offspring’s capacity to manage and process their own children’s feelings and thoughts, if they have never learnt how to manage and process their own? And what kind of impact will this have on the psychological and emotional health of these children? How will they sustain a relationship with anyone if they don’t have one with their own parents, let alone with themselves?
We need to get thinking about this, urgently.
However, there is no need to panic. If you get some idea of what is going on, what it is you are trying to achieve as a parent and how you are going to go about it, you will find the process of raising adolescents more enjoyable and less hazardous than you think.
There are thousands of parenting books detailing how to deal with your developing child’s every breath. In a way we mistakenly believe these books provide a sort of insurance against the mayhem that accompanies adolescence and indeed life. This is an illusion. I guarantee that when your much-loved teenager is out later than his curfew or is not picking up his phone, and the crazy fantasies about his imminent death start to swirl around your head, the fact that he was breastfed or fed on demand, or that you devoted your life to his every need, will be of no consolation whatsoever.
My ideas and thoughts about parenting have evolved over a long career working with children and their families, as well as from bringing up four children over the past 25 years. I would estimate that I have held 40–50,000 face-to-face consultations in my working life to date. This might not qualify me as an expert but the least you could say is that I’ve picked up a few things along the way.
This book is by no means comprehensive – you cannot magically become an effective parent just by reading a book, if anything because every child is different and the relationship between parent and child changes from week to week, day to day, and even from minute to minute (especially with capricious teenagers).
What we need to hold at the forefront of our mind is that our main job as parents is to prepare our children for adulthood and not to perpetuate some fairy-tale notion of perennial bliss. This cannot be done without a good deal of conflict. This book will guide you through many of the pitfalls of parenting an adolescent. It will help you sort out what to focus on and what to ignore. It will give you strategies to help you minimise those exhausting Groundhog Day encounters that are a feature of adolescence. Above all, it will help you understand why you are taking a particular line and as a result help you remain steadfast in the face of your adolescent’s truculence and hostility.
Parenting adolescents has never been more challenging than it is today. It requires us to take positions on matters we have little experience, and even less understanding, of. It is my view that if you can focus on helping your child cultivate a good work ethic, develop emotional resilience and nurture their ability to sustain meaningful relationships then you won’t go far wrong.
WHENEVER WE EMBARK on a meaningful project, either personal or professional, the very least we do is give some thought to questions such as:
The curious thing about parenting – probably the most important and demanding of projects any of us will undertake – is how little real thought goes into it. We invariably set out with a few books, a lot of advice and misinformation and, with any luck, a huge reservoir of love. If truth be told, from there on in we busk our way through it and hope for the best.
Once our children hit adolescence, however, the whole project takes on an unfamiliar shape. Tried-and-tested parenting strategies learnt in the earlier years go out of the window. The most ordinary of parental requests suddenly is to the adolescent an infringement of their human rights and would seem to give rise to World War Three.
WHAT CHARACTERISES PARENTING adolescents is its turbulence and uncertainty: the uncertainty of who they are and what they think and feel; the uncertainty of the future and who they will become. The turbulence arises as a consequence of the enormous upheaval that comes with adolescence and the compulsory nature of the process. The urgent need to try and make sense of it all gives the parenting work with them a compelling and intense quality.
Adolescence is rather like a compulsory train journey from somewhere comfortable and familiar to somewhere as yet unknown. There are hold ups, uncertainties, detours and breakdowns along the way, but eventually the teen will arrive at their destination: ‘adulthood’. The really crucial point here is the compulsory nature of the process. The adolescent can’t get off the train and they can’t stop it. This is why there is such a lot of moaning and arguing, a lot of firefighting and gnashing of teeth, but not much in the way of a plan. It’s exhausting not so much because adolescents are so demanding and chaotic, but more because we as parents are constantly in denial about what constitutes the adolescent process. We’re always fighting it rather than working with it.
Adolescence is essentially a chaotic metamorphosis of mind and body. Much to our frustration as parents, it does not take place in an orderly or linear fashion. If you understand that internal and external chaos is the normal adolescent state then you will get a lot less stressed about your teen. So many of the mistakes we make as parents are futile attempts to eradicate the essence of adolescence. Time and maturation takes care of much of the irritating stuff, but if we spend all our time focusing on the wrong things we miss the really important things, like building a strong work ethic, developing emotional resilience and sustaining meaningful relationships. A good example of this is our attitude to mess; messy bedrooms and teens that don’t clear up their mess. Mess is irritating, I grant you, but in the grand scheme of things does it really matter if your teen’s bedroom is a tip? Instead, if your adolescent is cruising at school and just doing okay, I would argue that we then have an important issue to deal with.
For the parents of many adolescents the answer to the question ‘What is going on in their brain?’ might be ‘Not a lot’, but that would be a serious underestimation and, while the neuroscience might be a little dry for some, it’s worth a brief look.
Dr Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, Maryland, USA, used MRI scanning to unlock the workings of this complex organ. He discovered that a child’s brain is not the finished article by any means. He noticed that there is a second spurt of intense activity that occurs during adolescence (the first winds down when children are very young, about two years old). During this period of intense activity, which peaks in the prefrontal cortex at around the age of 11 or 12, just as puberty is getting underway, the brain goes into overdrive. In a process known as ‘blossoming’, it produces branches at the end of the brain cells. These are called dendrites. What happens is that ‘experience’ causes the neurons to fire and the branch connections bridging one cell to another become stronger. Conversely, branches that don’t fire, shrink, wither and eventually disappear. This process is called pruning. So it is that experiences (good and bad) crucially shape the neural networks and have a massive impact on how the adolescent brain is wired.
What this boils down to is that adolescence provides a window of opportunity within which young people fashion their personalities and outlook. We as parents have a very important role in managing this. Our interventions, our dialogues, our sometimes fraught and frantic attempts to get them to link actions with consequences, are absolutely critical to the way their brain gets wired. The way that adolescents manage relationships, communicate with others and see themselves, as well as their attitudes to impulsivity, and indeed to life, are a result of the triangular interaction between them, their environment and us.
This is where our management of technology becomes so important, a topic I will discuss at some length in Chapters 8 and 9. If much of this critical period is spent in front of a screen then it will undoubtedly affect your teen’s neural network. Every hour spent in front of a screen is an hour of face-to-face time lost.
One circuit, for example, that develops in the adolescent brain is that which controls strong emotional impulses. The more we encourage adolescents to think before they act, the less likely they are to do something stupid. That’s why it’s important for us to keep banging our heads against those verbal brick walls that adolescents are so good at putting up. Accountability is the adolescent nemesis; teenage nirvana is a world without accountability. However, teenagers who are never held accountable for their impulses and actions have difficulty developing the control mechanism, which can have, at best, unfortunate and, at worst, tragic consequences. This is a painful and frustrating battle that often erupts into full-scale war as the adolescent rages against a world where actions have consequences. As a parent, you therefore have to be steadfast in your quest to push, pull or drag your adolescent into this grown-up world. Don’t relent in the face of the ‘I won’t do it again, I promise’ or ‘Give me another chance’ pleadings. Your sanctions or punishments don’t have to be draconian but make sure you stick to them and don’t back down. None of the consequences you give them will be as painful as the fallout from a real-life collision in early adulthood.
A father came to see me about his 14-year-old son, Charlie. He was at a loss to know how on earth to deal with his behaviour. He seemed to be an involved and switched-on dad but his son’s burgeoning adolescence had blown their relationship off course. Posturing and threatening behaviour on the part of his son had replaced the civility and order of their earlier relationship.
‘It started a while back when I took him to his football club in the car,’ Charlie’s father said. ‘He began to criticise my driving. He would give a running commentary throughout the whole journey: “You’re over the speed limit”, “You’re driving too slowly”, “We turn left over there.” At the end, I felt like throttling him. He’s 14, for God’s sake, and he’s never driven a car in his life! I told him as much but he had the cheek to tell me he’d learnt to drive on the Internet and was a much better driver than me. He was making a completely ridiculous argument but he clearly believed it. It gets worse. This has now spilled over into family life. He makes snide comments about everything I say and tries to undermine my authority with his two younger siblings. I am ashamed to say I lost it and walloped him. I’d just had enough.’
Charlie’s story gives us a glimpse into the world of the adolescent. The familiar themes of grandiosity and belligerence come to life in his wrestling match with his father. Charlie’s posturing and threatening behaviour is in reality a clumsy first attempt at exploring his developing potency and masculinity. A quality of these exchanges is that they are nearly always annoying or aggravating and they need to be handled sensitively. It is all too easy to ‘cut them down to size’, which is shorthand for humiliation. How else can your adolescent learn about how to be a man or woman? They need to butt heads with someone safe in order to explore and process their identity.
As one scrawny, challenging 14-year-old once said to me in a therapy session: ‘You know you think you know everything, but I could take you out [beat me up] any time I want.’ (To which I replied, ‘We would both get into a mess if we tested that out wouldn’t we, but I get your drift.’)
I explained as much to Charlie’s father and reassured him that his son’s behaviour wasn’t a sign of impending delinquency. I advised him to try not to get into a wrestling match or resort to punitive comments. I suggested he pay close attention but ignore it and, if he couldn’t, then to make a gentle comment such as, ‘You really want to wind me up today.’ Whatever you do, I said, don’t get into a wrestling match as it just makes matters worse.
If only it were that simple! The proverbial arm-wrestle is one of those rites of passage so common for parents of teens. I could write a book about all the ones I have got into with my own children, all of them pointless, infuriating and exhausting, and not one of them with a good outcome. So what are they about and what can you do to minimise their impact?
The first point to bear in mind is that it takes two to tango. In other words, your teen needs your full attention and involvement to generate the requisite emotional drama – it is critical for them to have an audience. So when you sense a confrontation developing, either walk away or, if you can’t, stay neutral. If you do disengage your teen is likely to accuse you of not caring or not listening, plus or minus a bit of abuse. Don’t rise to their goading; it’s just a ruse to keep you in the game. Secondly, your child’s rants are essentially monologues, a sort of adolescent stream of consciousness. If you keep butting in with your alternative view then the emotional temperature will inevitably go up. Remember, your teen wants an arm-wrestle not a constructive dialogue.
You won’t avoid these conflicts completely, but you will lessen their incidence and their impact if you try to keep out of them. Try to remember that however defeated you feel you have one major advantage over your adolescent: adolescence is all about the ‘moment’ and your teen cannot see the big picture, while you most certainly can. So when you are in one of these confrontations and you appear to be losing, remind yourself that it’s only a pyrrhic victory. Your teen will not have factored in that you can suspend their allowance, ground them or take away their mobile phone. Try to focus on the long term, not the short term.
PARENTING ADOLESCENTS IS more difficult and complex than it used to be.
What has made the parenting of adolescents significantly more difficult and demanding over the last 10 years is that the two phases of adolescence (see Chapters 2 and 3) have artificially morphed into one. The onset of adolescence (usually around the age of 12, but sometimes earlier) is now accompanied by a headlong stampede into the world of adolescence proper (ages 15–19) with barely a pause for breath. There is no longer that vital incubatory period where the fledgling adolescent gains a chance to adjust to their startling hormonal changes, their new and emerging body and thoughts, and the demands that are being made of them from every angle.
The reasons for this are complex. The earlier and earlier sexualisation of the adolescent is one factor. But other developments, including the Internet – especially online pornography, smartphones and social networking sites – have catapulted the younger adolescent into the equivalent of Dante’s inferno. Exciting though it appears on the surface, it is a world he or she is spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with. The often alarming speed of the changes to their bodies creates a generalised temperamental instability. It comes in tandem with separation anxieties and fear of loss, often experienced as insecurities about their identity and a fear of dying. There is also the thorny but critical issue of their sexuality to be sorted out. All told, this is a mighty project.
The spectre of sex and sexuality doesn’t help matters, for it begins to infiltrate their thoughts and actions just when everything else is so unclear, and causes all manner of confusions. It is no wonder that at this age girls, especially, can become more prone than ever to eating disorders and acute worries about their bodies. Boys often develop compulsive and hypochondriac anxieties. Concerns about their virility and the strength and size of their penis also predominate during this period. These worries express themselves in the form of challenging, confrontational and ritualistic behaviours. It is as if boys need to test their strength and potency by bashing themselves against something stronger (more often than not a parent). It is irritating and upsetting but necessary.
So what is the fallout from all this change and how do we manage it? All of the above is the noise and background hum of adolescent development but what requires our attention as parents is the fallout from this psychological work. Boys often manage their anxieties through the adoption of grandiose thinking and omnipotent fantasies. Girls, on the other hand, become overly preoccupied with their bodies and how they look. They are often unable to exert much control over this way of thinking and being. As parents, we experience our teenage sons and daughters intermittently as inaccessible, unreasonable, moody and unreliable. It is possible to have quieter, less turbulent, even fun times during this phase, but you won’t have much luck trying to bring continuous order to the proceedings.
Below are some tips on supporting your adolescent through this turbulent time:
In the midst of all this turbulence it’s worthwhile holding these tips and questions in the forefront of your thinking. If you can keep your eye on the bigger picture it will help you work your way through the myriad of collisions, disputes, arguments and joys that characterise adolescence.
The transition from child to adult is painful and difficult. Our job is not to smooth the path for our teen and give them a false sense of the world, but to help them navigate their way through it. Whether or not they are happy during this phase of their lives is, I’m afraid, beside the point.