Protect When You Must, Permit When You Can

Motherlode Blog: Raising Teenagers: Protect When You Must, Permit When You Can

I don’t think this comes as news to anyone here, but it can be a real challenge to parent and to educate adolescents. My own specimens (boys, 11 and 15) spend their days vacillating between energetic and catatonic, optimistic and morose, ebullient and apathetic. Some days, I doubt that they will be able to forge a safe and successful path into adulthood without my constant help and intervention.

Fortunately, Dr. Laurence Steinberg says this is not the case. In his new book, “Age of Opportunity: Lesson From the New Science of Adolescence” Dr. Steinberg explains that sure, adolescence is challenging, but it is also a time of great opportunity. I loved the book, so I reached out to him and asked for advice on how to best parent and to teach adolescents. His take? Given some information about how the adolescent brain is wired, and a few tips on how to parent children who can have trouble accessing their reserves of self-control and motivation, the children will be all right.

First, a primer on the adolescent brain. While human brains reach their full size by age 10, that brain is far from fully cooked, neurologically speaking. Adolescence is a time of an extraordinary reorganization of resources in the brain, particularly with respect to the prefrontal cortex, the center of self-regulation, and the limbic system, the seat of emotion. Dr. Steinberg suggests that we view adolescent brain development in three overlapping stages:

1. Starting the engines: When puberty first hits, the limbic system becomes more easily aroused, and young teenagers can shift between extreme, euphoric highs and unpredictable, precipitous lows.

2. Developing a better braking system: During middle adolescence, the prefrontal cortex slowly inches toward maturity, which will eventually allow teenagers to master self-control, and yes, they will return to a more reasonable and mature cognitive and emotional state.

3. Putting a skilled driver behind the wheel: Once the brakes of self-control are functional, it’s a matter of fine-tuning, of practicing until those brakes work every time, in all conditions.

There is not much we can do to rush this process of neurological maturation along, but what parents and teachers can do is to help children practice their burgeoning skills of self-control as they emerge. The children who are most likely to emerge from adolescence with a strong sense of self-control, motivation and competence, Dr. Steinberg writes, are those who have been parented according to three goals: warmth, firmness and support. Children raised by warm, firm and supportive parents – what Dr. Steinberg refers to as “authoritative” parenting – emerge from adolescence with more well-honed skills of self-regulation, and are much less likely to fall victim to delinquency, addiction, obesity and premarital pregnancy.

Dr. Steinberg provides the following prescription for helping children navigate adolescence and figure out how regulate their feelings, thoughts and behaviors:

Be Warm. Warm parents react to children’s emotional needs so they can muster the bravery required to function away from parents, under their own initiative. Warm parents are affectionate. They show their children that they not only understand their emotional needs, but also will respond to them. They provide a safe haven and are involved in their child’s life.

Be Firm. Firm parents establish clear rules, even clearer expectations, and predictable consequences. Most importantly, they follow through with those consequences when expectations are not met. “Children acquire self-control by taking the rules that their parents have imposed on them and imposing them on themselves,” Dr. Steinberg writes. Firm parents are consistent and fair, explain their rules and decisions, and avoid harsh punishment that is out of scale with the wrongs committed.

Be Supportive. The best way to support children is by “scaffolding,” Dr. Steinberg writes. Scaffolding is just what it sounds like; the supports parents erect around our children should support them only as much as they require, and as they become better at managing themselves, those external controls should come down. Parents who set children up to succeed, praise efforts rather than outcomes, help them think through their own decisions rather than making decisions for them, and refrain from being overly intrusive, will be able to dismantle those parenting supports gradually, and as they do so, their children will find that they are capable of standing tall on their own without crumbling when the world shakes them up a little bit.

I don’t think adolescence will ever be easy, either for my boys or for me, but I am trying to keep up my end of the deal by removing one piece of their scaffolding, every day. When my older son violates curfew, or my younger son takes off into the woods with my saw and his knife to whittle a staff out of a sapling, I look to my favorite piece of advice from Dr. Steinberg’s book, propped up in the back of my desk: “Protect when you must, but permit when you can.” Because that, I can do.

Jessica Lahey is an educator, writer and speaker. She writes about parenting and education for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vermont Public Radio and her own blog, Coming of Age in the Middle. Her book, “The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed,” will be published by HarperCollins in 2015.

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