Change Your Self, Change Your Teen

I do my best therapy with teens by doing therapy with parents.

Parents matter. Not only because of the decisions we make or the strategies we use, but also because of the way in which the adolescent’s sense of self is shaped by the mirroring of parents. Teens who claim that they don’t care what their parents think or how they are being viewed by them are lying through their teeth.

Here are three parent mantras that can work miracles (or at least help parents avoid making things worse!):

Mantra 1: It’s not your teen’s job to make you feel good about yourself.

Every parent is a sucker for this. Self psychology theory highlights how the mirroring selfobject plays a primary role in developing and maintaining a cohesive sense of self. The response from the other, the “object,” serves as a mirror reflecting back a picture of the individual—positive or negative, worthy or unworthy, valuable or degraded.

We usually think of this process in terms of how children are affected by parents. But this identifies the way it happens in reverse. We parents, too, rely on our kids to make them feel good about themselves. We shouldn’t, but we do. The child is selfobject mirror to the adult. This mirroring process from child to parent leads us parents to overreact to the behaviors, achievements, mood states, and even core personalities of our kids. It’s as if we are constantly scanning the behavior of our child and secretly asking the question: What does this say about me? And thus we are extremely vulnerable to narcissistic injuries when our child fails at a task, acts shy at a birthday party, doesn’t keep their room clean, or simply voices autonomous opinions.

The conclusion of this sequence, far too often, is that we parents aggressively turn against the child or teen for making them feel ineffective or anxious.

I remember the story of a second-grade teacher who felt chronically ineffective in his work. Furthermore, his 5-year-old daughter was clearly a handful, as 5-year-olds tend to be. One day he came home and her toys were scattered throughout the house. He told her to pick them up, and she ignored him. He raised his voice and told her again, and she had a 5-year-old smart-aleck answer. Then he picked her up and sat her on her bed, screaming at her that she had better listen to him, now!

His next words, in relating this story in his marital therapy session, have always stuck with me: “I let these second-grade kids run all over me all day long, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let that happen in my own home!” It was all about him. When he heard himself say these words out loud, in front of his concerned wife and me, he started to cry. He told us that it just sounded so pathetic.

The message for all of us parents is that this psychological process is normal and human—and quite dangerous. The more that we can recognize (with full emotional honesty) how we are overreacting to our kids as mirrors of ourselves, the greater capacity we have to keep it in check.

Mantra 2: The story you tell yourself about your teen makes all the difference.

As humans, we are hardwired to form coherent narratives about the events in our lives, and we are always telling ourselves a story about our kids. Constantly. Like all stories, they are merely subjective versions of the facts. These narratives are based on a thousand historical factors and years of social conditioning, sometimes extremely valuable and sometimes extremely distorted.

When a teenager withdraws, the parents have to develop a story to explain this. Is he clinically depressed? Is he purposely being disrespectful and ungrateful? Is this normal teenage behavior? Is he on drugs? Is this a healthy sign of separation, setting the stage for individuation? Is there something wrong with us?!

Family therapist Jane Nelsen has advised parents this way: “Count on teenagers to be obnoxious. Step back and try to see it as cute.” That requires a new narrative, and it makes a difference.

Furthermore, kids can sense how their parents perceive them. Some parents don’t quite believe this, but it can have a profound effect when we visualize our child or teen in a positive way, with a positive vision of the future for this young person. Maybe it’s psychological, maybe it’s cosmic, maybe it’s just a way of calming the parent. But I know that when I assign parents the task of writing 10 things they are grateful for about their son or daughter, things often improve.

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Mantra 3: Nothing works always.

The most important rule about parenting is that there are no true rules. There are guidelines, which in general seem to work reasonably well most of the time with many kids and many families. But that’s about as definitive as we can be, and when parents rigidly adhere to a parenting strategy they often stifle their own creativity and fail at the task.

This reminds me of a story I once heard from the mother of a son. She had learned, from reading all the best books, that the preferred way to help build true self-esteem in kids was to say, “Wow, you should feel really proud of yourself!”instead of “I feel so proud of you!” One day, when her son was 14, she said this preferred sentence to him and he looked at her, vulnerable and stricken, and said, “How come you never tell me that you’re proud of me?” She explained her philosophy, reassured him of her pride in him—and was reminded that no advice about raising kids is always right.