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Key points
- Parental example is always instructive, the teenager deciding whether to follow it or not.
- Parents can mentor an older adolescent by sharing, when asked, choices that did or did not work for them.
- Parents can confide mistakes they made so the teenager can learn from the errors of their ways.
Fundamentally, what parents give their teenager is who and how they are, by present and past example.
Present example
Interaction is always educational.
Thus, parental behavior in disagreement with the teenager can be instructive, influencing how the young person interacts on these conflicted occasions with them, and may approach opposition in other caring relationships later on.
For a good example: “My parents listened and stayed calm, stuck to specifics, answered my questions, cared about my feelings, explained where they stood and why, and talked out with me what needed to be done. At the end of disagreements, we knew each other a little better than we did before.” Thus, well-conducted, conflict can increase intimacy.
For a bad example: “Getting impatient with the arguing, my parents would lose their tempers, then so would I, all of us listening with our minds made up, angry words causing hurt feelings, maybe apologizing after, but feeling tired and sorry, dreading the next time we would disagree.” Thus, ill-conducted, conflict can inflict injury.
How parents act and relate with their child and adolescent is always part of what they teach. So, be self-conscious about the example that you set. Parents are primary instructors this way; to varying degrees, children learn to imitate their parents: “In some ways, I learned to be like my mom.” “In some ways, I turned out like my dad.”
Past example
Then there is confiding significant personal history. To tell or not to tell your adolescent about teenage mistakes you made or even do as a grown-up now can be a troubling question for parents.
They don’t want the young person to take this confession as permission to do the same, and they don’t want her or him to think less well of them because of what they shouldn’t have done. Besides, it can feel like being two-faced to talk about doing what’s right and then confessing to wrongdoing.
However, it is not hypocritical to say to your teenager, “Consider not doing what I once did to my cost, because by not repeating some of my mistakes you might avoid some of your own.”
Parent as mentor
The younger adolescent, more self-preoccupied with personal change and peer companionship, and more dismissive of what older advice has to offer, may not always be that interested in hearing parental history and what it has to teach.
Come the end of adolescence, trial independence (ages 18–23 years), however, adolescent respect for the worldly knowledge of parents can increase as assuming independent functioning feels more daunting to master.
Now the parent is no longer in the business of controlling their grown child’s decisions but can be in the business of sharing lessons from longer life experience, if asked. “Did you ever get into this kind of jam, and what did you do to get out?”
So, when requested, parents can share from life experience what worked well, what worked badly, and lessons learned from both.
Thus, at this last adolescent stage, parents shift roles from managing the young person’s life to providing mentoring from longer life experience. When asked, the mom or dad is now available as a trusted resource about struggling to meet daily challenges: “I can’t tell you how to live your life, but I can tell you some of what I’ve learned from trying to manage mine.”
Confiding past mistakes
Now there can be parental confiding of past personal mistakes that can have a positive impact on the adolescent who decides not to repeat the errors of parental ways.
So, to end on a personal note about the power of parental confiding, I close with this.
I was about age 14 when my mother, one of the more honest people I’ve known, sat down on my bed early one morning and began talking like this: “Carl, there’s something that I did, which I need to tell you about.” I thought: “Is she in danger?” No, not exactly that.
Basically this is what she said. “Last night I went to a party, had too much to drink, and weaving home in the car was stopped by a police officer for driving erratically. At first, I just protested in anger: 'I am not!' And when that didn’t work, I resorted to threat: 'I’ll have your badge!' From bad to worse, that’s how I ended up in night court where I lost my driver’s license for six months because of driving under the influence. I thought you should know what can happen when drinking does your thinking so maybe this won’t happen to you.”
Now I did my share of adolescent adventuring growing up, but from my mother’s bravely confiding a mistake she regretted, drinking and driving was not among them. Thanks, Mom!
While parental instruction has the power to educate and teach, parental example has the power to demonstrate and show.
