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Adolescence
Parental Frustration With Adolescent Delay
With a growing teenager, it can take longer to get requests promptly met.
Posted February 5, 2024 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Come adolescence, a young person insists more on what they want and resists more of what they don't want.
- In addition to facing more active resistance like argument, parents also face passive resistance like delay.
- Parents may expect compliance to take longer and must be patient and persistent in pursuing what they want.
Parenting an adolescent is not the same as parenting a child, in part because now there is a growing authoritative shift as the teenager wants to be more in charge of who they are, how they are, and what they choose to do.
Because of this desire for increasing self-determination, a timely response to parental requests can become harder for parents to get. It’s not that youthful cooperation is denied by refusal, but it is more often contested by disagreement and (the topic of this post) by delay.
Growth has created a reversal. Whereas the child waited more for parents to do what she or he wanted, parents tend to wait more for the adolescent to do what they want.
Adult upset with this loss of more timely childhood compliance is a waste of energy. It’s better to learn to work with the youthful change you’ve got. To some degree, their child’s adolescence is a game-changer as gathering independence creates growing resistance to parental control.
Command to consent
Start by considering the developmental change. The more dependent-minded child grew up in the age of command, mostly believing that she or he had to do what parents wanted when they wanted it: “I have to do what I’m told.” The more independent-minded adolescent, however, grows up in the age of consent, now knowing that parents can’t make or stop the young person without the teenager’s cooperation: “Doing what my parents want is up to me.”
Adolescent resistance
One part of the growing power of independence is the teenager is becoming more resistant to parental requests and demands. There is active resistance in the form of more adolescent questioning (“Tell me why?”) and argument (“I don’t agree!”). And there is more passive resistance in the form of postponing (“I’m busy now!”) and delay (“I’ll do it soon!”)
This passive expression of growing autonomy can be wearying for parents: “Now everything we want takes longer than we want! We have to keep repeatedly asking until we finally get it! And when we feel worn out with waiting and reminding, it can feel easier just to let it go, stop asking, or even do it ourselves!”
No. Parents need to keep after the adolescent cooperation and family contribution they want and need. At stake is learning for now and later that in caring relationships, all parties must give some support.
Putting-off statements
As growing independence (freedom of action) and growing individuality (freedom of definition) drive adolescent development, they increase preoccupation with doing what one wants, how one wants, when one wants. A result is the teenager putting off what parents want by common objections:
“Not now!”
“I’m busy!”
“In a minute!”
“I heard you!”
“I’ll do it later!”
For the young person, protecting growing adolescent freedom is more frequently at the expense of doing what parents want right away.
Delay is complicated
Adolescent delay can feel like a double standard to parents: “It’s supposed to be OK when we have to wait for her to do what we asked, but it’s not OK when we’re busy or need time to consider what she wants!”
Delay is complicated to deal with because it’s not refusal, but it’s not immediate cooperation either. Delay plays for time and shows how compliance is up to the teenager. This is the issue, like the adolescent saying: “You can tell me what; I can tell you when; and when I get enough ‘when,’ I’ll do what you asked—at least partly.”
Delay with parents is part of the working compromise that gradually empowers the teenager to take more charge over the terms of compliance. Delay is not disagreement or denial; it is deferral—putting off doing what parents have asked for, not doing it right away.
Dealing with delay
So what are parents to do? Rather than get frustrated, impatient, and angry with adolescent delay, I think it works better to simply expect this change as part of the growing resistance to being told what to do at a more developmentally independent age. The older your teenager grows, the less inclined they may be to immediately satisfy parental directives. However, while parents need to expect more delay, they must also hang in there to pursue sufficient family membership contribution.
To this end, they can exercise
- Patience—“We know it often takes asking more than once to get what we want.”
- Persistence—“We don’t give up, insisting until we finally get what we want.”
- Exchange points—“We may withhold what you want until we get what we want.”
Because increasing adolescent delay is to be expected; it is not worth getting aggravated about. Rather, steadfast parenting is required: “You may delay what we want, but when our need or your welfare is at stake, we will keep after you with our pursuit because that is the loving [albeit sometimes unpopular] job that is ours to do.”
