As my sagacious adolescents will parrot to me, the teen years constitute the span of life typically devoted to differentiation, to identity building and to the individualized selection of behavioral norms. Improbable? Okay, in truth, what my children really say is something similar to “Mom, you don’t have to like the nail polish; dressing like this you is part of my separating myself from you and you want me to be healthy, right?” or something like “Mom, you don’t get “understand” teenage boys. We haaave to do this. It’s part of who we are. That’s okay, though, Mom, we still love you even if you don’t get it. Besides, we shower regularly.”
This phase of growth, however, is not only about learning who you are as a particular entity, but is also about learning who you are as a member of a group. One vital group, to which teenagers belong, is the family. There are several ways in which teens negotiate their roles in this group. Sometimes teens are direct and assertive, sometimes they are direct and passive, sometimes they are indirect and assertive (known as “passive aggressive”) and sometimes they are indirect and passive.
A child who is displaying atypical maturity will act in a direct, assertive fashion. Such an offspring might, for instance, ask for extended privileges in the following way; “Mom, the festival ends after the buses stop running. May I stay at Stacy’s house instead of taking a cab home, by myself, at night?” or “I have to take college entrance exams next week. Could you please cut my chores for a few days?”
This sort of communication is easy on the ears and often is responded to with compliance. As expected, this sort of exchange of ideas is the type teens grow into, often painfully slowly.
Meanwhile, our children convey their ideas to us in less than ideal ways. One of the more usual forms of teen talk is the direct, passive type. Consider “Mary’s staying at Susie’s and so is Joan. What do you think?” or “When my older sister took her big exams, you let her take a break from chores.”
In the above cases, the teen is still taking ownership for her or his desired outcome, but is having a hard time spitting out his or her request. Both increased self-esteem, which often comes with age, and experienced positive outcomes, which often comes with practice, help a teen slide from direct, passive exchanges to direct, assertive ones.
A bit more difficult to navigate, but also age-normal, are communications in which teens “take responsibility” for the existence of their discourse, but not for their messages’ content, per se. For instance, they might utter “yup, I knew I was supposed to call you. At least I’m home and at least I woke you up to let you know I got here safely. Oh, by the way, the buses stopped, so I hitched” or “no way, to-day, am I helping out here and I CAN shout if I want to. You gotta’ understand my stress. I’m telling ya tests rot.”
Such transactions undergird a great portion of parental woe during children’s teen years. While passive aggressive interchanges are ordinary and are often quickly shed for more sophisticate d modes of behavior, while they are foremost in our children’s arsenal of skills, they exhaust us.
Less usual, but more worrisome, are communications which are both indirect and passive. Most parents receive information from their sons and daughters via these conduits and most parents abhor them. This sort of meaning making takes a lot of head work, on the part of parents, as well as requires a lot of conscientious deep breathing.
Indirect, passive communication might look like this; “Other kids’ moms don’t get twisted up if the kids are out late. Get a chill pill, Mom. I’m here” or “no way am I helping. You’re a piece of work. Get a grip.”
This sort of idea exchange is difficult, at best, hard not to respond to, under most circumstances, and entirely provocative most of the time. This kind of communication is why mothers flee quickly upon noticing their children returning from school.
Fortunately, children grow up. Thereafter, they tend to speak to us primarily with direct, assertive language patterns. Then they present us with grandchildren and we are able to witness/participate in immature patterns of communication once more.
Until we merit seeing our children’s children, it’s useful to keep in mind that teens aggravate their parents into attending to them not because they are malicious beasts but because they are unskilled rhetors. They neither hate their parents nor are interested in investing more than a smidge of their energy into familial talk. After all, there are cars, term papers, parties, and the like which get higher priority for their attention.
Thus, the next time your teen turns up the volume on his or her most horrible tunes, tries to “defy” by dint of spiked, multi-colored hair, tells you you’re the worst parent in the world (mere hours before insisting only you can provide necessary hugs), crayons protest signs and marches around the neighborhood as a means to increasing his or her funding, or otherwise attempts to coerce you into regrettable responses, keep in mind that your offspring is functioning at the highest level with which he or she is familiar. As is true with less than perfect discourse, those other wonderfully adolescent behaviors are just highway markers on the route to maturity. Besides, were our children not to declare their independence through impossible talk and acts, we might have to pay someone to entertain us.
