How Two Separations of Adolescence Can Create Parental Loss

Source: Carl Pickhardt Ph. D.

Parenting is not for the faint of heart because it demands first one hard letting go and then another, sometimes causing parents to sorely miss what must be given up.

So consider how adolescence is necessarily bounded by two parental losses:

• At the beginning, around ages 9 to 13, Early Adolescence creates the separation from childhood. Now the young person doesn’t want to be treated and defined as a little girl or boy anymore. This is a time for moving on. The loss: “We will never have our adorable and adoring child again.”
• At the end, around ages 18 to 23, Trial Independence creates the separation from family. Now the young person wants to leave parents and make it on one’s own. This is a time for moving out. The loss: “Our living place will never be our child’s major home again.”

The First Loss: Separation from Childhood

Used to living with a closely attached child, parents can expect the adolescent will continue to prize closeness to them, will readily comply with their requests, and will be content to happily fit into their traditional family circle.

But with the onset of adolescent change, there is more contesting parental demands and pulling away from parental company. Now self-determination and redefinition in the company of peers feel increasingly important, while more worldly temptations call from outside of the family.

At this time, parental loss can be experienced as a comparative lessening of many characteristics that parents grew accustomed to and prized with the child, so they can feel hard to let go.

What are some common “lessenings” that parents experience as childhood ends and adolescence begins? Consider a saddening few. Compared with how it felt with the child, the parent can sometimes experience the adolescent as: less intimate, less playful, less affectionate, less confiding, less honest, less compliant, less similar, less communicative, less admiring, less appreciative, less predictable, less companionable, less familiar, and less agreeable.

Parents who often have the hardest times with such losses can be those who take these changes personally as a rejection of them, when what the adolescent is really rejecting is the old operating definition of being a child. While the adolescent transformation affects parents, it is not about parents. It is about the young person differentiating and detaching for more freedom to grow, acting these changes out in relationship to parents.

Most important for parents to remember is that none of these normal losses mean any lessening of love. As in the title of my 2018 book, “Who stole my child?” parents can sadly wonder, missing younger times. Best to be grateful for the early intimate years together and then enjoy and affirm growth that is unfolding: “It’s exciting to watch you try new things, to hear about your changing world, and to see you take more charge of your life.”

As developmental change starts growing them apart, which adolescence is meant to do, parents can stay connected with the teenager in a couple of ways.

First, they can bridge growing differences in their teenager with personal interest: “Can you help me appreciate the new music you love listening to?” And second, they can maintain initiative for positive contact: “Let’s do something fun together this weekend.”

The first separation does not need to be an unhappy or estranging time.

The Second Loss: Separation from Family

Around ages 18 to 23, physically leaving home to establish a living base of one’s own is a big step. However, it can often be easier to be the person leaving than to be the one left behind who fondly remembers old times. The young person has so much to be preoccupied with and look forward to, while parents may sadly mourn family time that has passed.

Now begins the changing of the terms. At home, the adolescent fits into the requirements of parents; but residing away, the young person lives according to personal preference and emerging individual lifestyle. With her or him living at home, parents still felt more part of the adolescent’s life. They were more in the know, they had more of a say. But with the independently living older child, they can now feel more disenfranchised, more peripheral, less of a priority, at more of a social and emotional distance, and less kept up to date and in mind.

Again, this does not mean loved any less; only that they are more outsider to the young person’s newly independent life. From sharing the same household, they are now occupying different households. So, how are parents to stay connected as their life and their grown child’s life diverge?

First, they can equitize the old positional difference in their relationship. With the young person living at home, they still had a vertical relationship, a superior positional influence which they asserted. With the young person now living away from home, they shift to a horizontal relationship, the young person no longer answerable to their authority but treated on an equal footing now. “From here on, conduct of your life is up to you.”

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Second, they can shift their role in the relationship from being manager to being mentor, offering counsel if asked. From longer life experience, what they know may be of service to their grown child who is just starting out. “Think of us as a second head upon your shoulders, always ready to share with you what we have learned, should you desire.”

Now an ongoing companionship of mutual interest, respect, and caring can carry on.

Managing Separation

Separation is one form of change – that process that continually upsets and resets the terms of everyone’s existence all their lives by substituting one set of circumstances for another. Change does create loss of the old, which sometimes can feel devastating. However, it can also create gain because the other side of loss is often freedom of the new – freedom from what used to be and freedom for what is possible now.

So, adjusting to adolescent change, while accepting pain from loss of childhood and increasing distance, parents can look for the gifts of growth. What gifts? While parenting a child is wonderfully endearing, worth cherishing, and hard not to miss, parenting an adolescent begins the coming of age passage for little girl into young woman, and for little boy into young man. And what is more magical and worth celebrating than that?

How might parents celebrate their growing and grown young person? Simple really: They can cheer and encourage their older daughter or son on: “Keep trying!” “Good thinking!” “Way to go!” “We love you!”

Supportive parental interest counts for a lot.