What Changes During Adolescence?

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Parenting is a process of constant learning to create adequate knowing.

The parenting process is more emergently experienced than deliberately planned.

In making decisions, parents must not allow themselves to be swept up in the urgent adolescent tyranny of now.

Parenting is such a presumptuous occupation. I mean, who really knows how this job is supposed to be accomplished? Trust to self-appointed “experts”? I don’t think so. The most they can do is to be thought-provoking. In the end, every parent with every child has to create their own best practices.

Personally, I believe in parenting with humility—with an absence of arrogance (prizing one’s rightness and wisdom too much: “I know all the answers!”) and of ambition (depending self-esteem on the child’s performance too much: “I expect my child to make me proud!”)

Humility acknowledges three hard facts of parenting life:

Parents don’t “know” as much as they’d like.

Parents don’t “control” as much as they’d like.

Parents don’t get it “right” as much as they’d like.

And these operating realities get more pronounced once the child enters the more complicated passage of adolescence. Now the push for more detachment for independence and freedom of action, and the push for more differentiation for individuality and freedom of expression, both energize the process of growing up. It was simpler parenting the closely attached and similar child.

How Much Can Parents Really Know?

Start at the beginning. Through birth or adoption, a stranger is given into their primary care. Now they have to get to understand the individual “hand” of innate human characteristics they have been dealt, and then to learn how to play this hand to foster healthy growth. Starting from ignorance, there is a lot to discover, and then they have to stay current with developmental changes that........

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