The up-sides of parenting teens
Aileen Hickie finds teens can energise parents. “You might get a bit jaded about certain subjects. They get so excited that it re-energises you to know more about it. They spur you on. And I like that they take risks in their thinking. I think we become cautious over the years.
The dire warnings about the nightmare teens start when your child hits the age of 10. Other parents – and for some unaccountable reason, even non-parents – smile knowingly and, with an air of superior awareness, utter words guaranteed to make any parent-of-a-tween uneasy: ‘you just watch out when she gets into her teens’ or ‘wait ‘til he’s 15’.
What, you wonder? What do you mean? How bad can it be? And filled with a nagging dread, you wish for a counter-narrative – someone who’ll cheerfully say ‘hey, there’s a lot that’s good about teens’.
Aileen Hickie, mum to one daughter who at 21 has safely exited the teens, as well as four children who – at 19, 17, 16 and 13 – are still firmly teenagers, heard all the scare stories. “I did worry. I worried mostly when my first was about to become a teen. I was told I’d be pulling my hair out, climbing the walls, that at 15 she’d be drinking in the house, going AWOL, that teens throw angry outbursts non-stop and there’s no getting through to them.”
In the end, says Aileen, who’s CEO of Parentline, it was nothing as bad as she feared. “Yes, there are highs and lows, difficulties and stresses. But these arrive at every stage of parenting. Parenting teens isn’t any worse.”
For Aileen, a lovely surprise of parenting teens is their sense of humour.
“I’ve also loved their physical capability as they get older and I’m not just talking about sports. They can do stuff – get their own food, empty the dishwasher. It doesn’t mean they’ll do it! But they’re physically capable of doing stuff you wouldn’t have trusted them with before.”
It has been hugely surprising and interesting to see how different her three daughters, Andie, 21, Aimee, 19 and Millie, 17, are from each other. “They’ve all been brought up by the same parents, in the same household, with the same set of rules. And yet they’re so different – physically, in how they think about things, in their interests and friends and in how they engage with us,” says Aileen, who’s married to Today FM’s Matt Cooper.
She loves that Andie and Millie have a very strong social conscience around global issues. “Sometimes I have to run away from the conversation – they can become very politicised and trenchant in their opinion.” There’s a sense, she says, in which you get to know your kids on a whole new level during the teen years – like with Aimee, whom she never quite realised was so “driven and focused”, particularly about getting into a traditionally male-associated career area.
“All my children are much more driven than I was. I was in the ha’penny place at their stage around intellectual, social and emotional development. I wouldn’t have been as opinionated, politicised or vocal as they are. And I love that they are.”
She finds teens can energise parents. “You might get a bit jaded about certain subjects. They get so excited that it re-energises you to know more about it. They spur you on. And I like that they take risks in their thinking. I think we become cautious over the years. They were zip-lining recently. I wouldn’t be great for heights, but I thought ‘they’re doing it, so I will’ and I found I loved it.”
Her son, Zach, 16, she describes as “a brilliant risk-taker”, always wanting to try something new. “We’ve been kayaking a good few times because he likes it. I never saw a kayak before five years ago. Now I really enjoy it. It has opened my eyes to things I’d never have tried or known I could do.”
Senior clinical psychologist Dr Yvonne Quinn says it has become part of the social narrative to see adolescence as a really tumultuous time that can be quite fraught for parents. “That doesn’t reflect the totality of the experience,” she says, emphasising that adolescence’s a time of immense change – and to explain it as ‘just hormones’ is over-simplistic.
“Adolescence brings significant changes in physiology, hormones, sexual development – it also brings huge neurological change. Our brains go through a major renovation project during adolescence. The brain undergoes pruning, so we can’t expect it to work as fluently as in adulthood.”
Nor is adolescence over by age 18 – the neurological brain changes continue until the mid-20s. “The notion that adolescence ends at 18 is a social construct that sets teens up for failure,” says Dr Quinn, who wants to flag to parents that the work of adolescence is to test boundaries and to explore what’s novel and exciting. “This is happening psychologically. It’s a necessary thing – the young person’s doing what their brain’s set up to do.”
If parents can shift their perspective and understand the teen isn’t trying to be difficult, but behaving in line with their brain development, it would help everyone, says Dr Quinn. “They wouldn’t see their child’s behaviour so personally – instead, they’d have greater compassion and understanding.”
She also bins another myth, which sees adolescents moving from dependence to independence. “The move for young people is away from parents towards a lean on peers, so they’re able to give and receive care from peers.”
Parents should see this as a move from dependence to interdependence because – despite the move towards their peers – adolescents still need their parents to be their guiding light. “So the young person knows they can continue to return to the primary relationship with their parents, to a place where they can feel understood and soothed – because often they won’t feel that in their peer group.”
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