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Key points
- People use the concept of time to order life experience and prioritize choices.
- Parents and adolescents have many tensions around time — from the urgency of now to "taking forever."
- Maturity is making choices by consulting the fullness of time — what past history, present opportunity, and future consequences each advise.
Time is a measuring concept we use to order our experience — contrasting what is past from what is present from what is future, and prioritizing our choices for deciding when to schedule doing what.
Lose our sense of time and we can feel disorientated and confused: “What happened?” “What now?” “What next?” Our sense of time provides coherence and stability. No wonder we’re preoccupied with time. It has so much casual and consequential use in the management of our daily lives.
Time Is Complicated
To appreciate its complexity, consider how we routinely talk about time. We spend time, we keep time, we make time, we save time, we gain time, we lose time, we plan time, we’re on time, we’re behind time, we’re ahead of time, we’re out of time, we have an easy or hard time, we pass time, we take our time, we rush time, we waste time, there’s plenty of time, there’s no time, time is over, there’s the first time, the last time, the next time, a right time, a wrong time, there’s work time and free time, there’s mealtime and bedtime, there’s a good time and a bad time. Sometimes it feels like we live in a dictatorship of time. Is it serving us, or are we serving it? Throughout each day we are preoccupied with time, and must make many decisions accordingly.
Tensions Over Time
It’s natural that the management of time would be a continuing issue of discussion between parent and adolescent. For example:
About compliance time: doing it now or in a while?
About mindful time: remembering or forgetting?
About association time: with family or friends?
About productive time: using or wasting it?
About social curfew time: earlier or later?
About private time: open or unavailable?
About experience time: old or new?
About task time: work or play?
Compared to living with a biddable child, disagreements over time between parents and adolescent tend to become more frequent. Why? Because now the youthful drive for more freedom of independence and individuality is increasingly expressed. “What I do when, and how I look, should be up to me!"
Parenting to Maturity
To varying degrees, adolescents are immature because they have so much life experience to gather. There are capacities to grow, definitions to try, skills to learn, and worldly understandings to acquire. This is why the coming of age passage is not an overnight transformation but unfolds over 10 to 12 years, starting in late elementary school and not winding down until the college-age years. Adolescence is the long road to independence.
Maturity Requires Time
Not only does maturity take time; it is also about time.
One way of thinking about maturity is the ability to simultaneously maintain three time perspectives when making personal decisions: considering present purposes, past lessons, and future consequences before making a life choice. This takes focussing on existing complexity, reflecting on past experience, and forecasting possible outcomes. This continually takes asking three questions.
- What is important right now?
- What is important to remember?
- What is important to anticipate?
Maturity takes time in deciding — looking at, looking back, and looking ahead before choosing what or what not to do.
Because maturity requires this three-time thinking it can be hard to do when only urgency of the moment seems to count. "What's past is over! I won't think about later! Now is all that matters!" It is this tyranny of now that can sometimes be costly to impulsive or pressured adolescents, when past learning and future possibilities are denied to satisfy immediate desires or demands. Without fully looking at, without looking back or looking ahead, only satisfying immediate urges or circumstances can seem to matter. “I just do what I want at the time!”
And of course, substance use can be the enemy of mature decision-making when it makes past education (knowing better) or future possibilities (thinking ahead) disappear from consideration, when it muddles mental functioning in the present: “I drank so much only the moment mattered!”
Practice Maturity
Parents need to help their teenager learn maturity by practicing three-time thinking.
- Question the present: What is problematic in choosing this now?
- Consult with past: What do lessons from past experience have to say?
- Consider the future: What outcomes might result from making this choice?
Parents and adolescents often operate in different ‘personal time zones.’ This reality is to be expected. While the teenager may be preoccupied with what immediately matters, parents must encourage seeing the bigger picture. This means considering the full complexity of now and taking a longer term perspective — by looking back at lessons learned and ahead for consequences that might occur. It takes maturity to teach maturity.
For them all, maturity matters.
