How Adolescence Increases Loneliness for Teenager and Parent

Source: Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D.

What is loneliness? Perhaps it is a painful sense of feeling disconnected and alone, cut off from good companionship, missing that company.

Loneliness can feel like not being included, noticed, understood, accepted, valued, or liked. Maybe countering loneliness is partly why people are such social animals—needing to feel adequately connected and accompanied in life.

Loneliness in adolescence

Adolescence is the 10 to 12-year period of growth starting with the separation from childhood (around ages 9-13) and ending with the entry into young adulthood (around ages 18-23.)

This redefining growth is driven by three empowering and painfully liberating drives that all create more disconnection and loneliness in the changing parent-adolescent relationship.

• Now one must detach from childhood and parents to claim more freedom of independence. In the process, some companionship from old attachment to parental company can be lost: “We don’t hang out as much at home as we used to do.” There can be loneliness from missing old contact with parents and family.
• Now one must differentiate from childhood and parents to express more individuality. Increasingly, peers can feel like a more fitting company than parents with whom some similarity has been lost: “We don’t enjoy the same interests anymore.” There can be loneliness from missing old commonalities at home.
• Now one must disagree with parental authority to assert more autonomy. As one increasingly desires to control what one does and doesn’t do, there is growing abrasion with parents over who is in charge: “We don’t get along as smoothly as before.” There can be loneliness from missing old compatibility with parents.

In each case, growing up requires giving up some old family closeness that will be missed. “We’re not as comfortably connected as we used to be.” No wonder the company of peers becomes more powerfully important. “I want to hang out with my friends!”

So, for a girl or boy to become an adolescent, some childhood closeness, commonality, and compatibility with parents must be let go, creating occasional loneliness on both sides of the relationship. This does not signify a lessening of love, only that the time for growing separation has arrived.

Coping with loneliness

Part of coping with loneliness from detachment is accepting the growing distance in the relationship and managing more separation. What can help is if parents:

• Maintain positive contact. “Let’s take a break and make some time to have some fun together.”
• Ask for what you need to know. “Could you explain more about how you feel and think this way?”
• Give attentive listening when spoken to. “Let me repeat what you said to make sure I heard you right.”

Part of coping with loneliness from differentiation is accepting the growing contrast between you and managing more interpersonal diversity. What can help is if parents:

• Bridge differences with interest. “Can you tell me more about how we see things differently?”
• Use non-critical expressions of concern. “Can you say if something is the matter for you?”
• Treat your adolescent as an instructor. “Can you teach me what I don’t understand?”

Part of coping with loneliness from disagreement is treating conflict as an opportunity to build better mutual understanding. What can help is if parents:

• Turn disagreement into grounds for discussion: “Let’s see if we can learn from each other’s point of view.”
• Use conflict as a chance to increase intimacy: “I’d like to know you better about this and for you to better know me.”
• Treat growing opposition as asserting more independence: “It’s good for you to speak up to me when you disagree.”

Middle-school loneliness

It’s hard to write about adolescent loneliness without touching on middle school, which congregates young people at the vulnerable age of separating from childhood and beginning their coming-of-age passage.

They don’t call middle school “lonely school” without a reason.

At this vulnerable time, self-consciousness about physical or sexual changes and social instability with peers can cause insecure young people, striving for social place and survival, to treat each other more meanly. Recipients of this mistreatment can feel vulnerable, isolated, and acutely lonely. “The only attention I get is bad or none at all!”

Enter seven common forms of social cruelty that can become more frequent in middle school as more lonely young people strive to find a stable social place:

• Ignoring: “We won’t pay attention to you.”
• Teasing: “Something is wrong with you.”
• Exclusion: “You can’t join our group.”
• Rejection: “We don’t want your company.”
• Rumoring: “We will spread gossip about you.”
• Ganging up: “We are all against you.”
• Bullying: “We are going to push you around.”

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At this more sensitive age, to be on the receiving end of any of these mistreatments can be acutely hurtful. One can feel painfully alone. Not only should parents encourage their daughter or son not to engage in these hurtful behaviors, but they should also speak about receiving them.

They might say something like this. “Should any of these mistreatments come your painful way, please let us know. We want to be there to support you. Being treated meanly doesn’t show anything is the matter with you; it just shows something mean about them. During this harder time, maybe we can help you find an additional social experience where you are welcomed and are treated well, as you deserve to be.”

The connection commitment

As a bulwark against loneliness, what their detaching and differentiating and more frequently disagreeing adolescent needs from their parent is their connection commitment: “No matter how different, distant, and divided we become, no matter how much disagreement comes between us, you can always rely on the constancy of our love, the availability of our company, our desire for communication, and the assistance of our help when you have need.”

What about such defiant adolescent declarations of independence: “Just quit bothering me!” “Stay out of my life!” “Let me be!” Accept them, understand them, respect them, but don’t follow them. Keep connecting by staying in continuing social, emotional, verbal, and physical touch.

Why? Because while growing apart is what adolescence is meant to accomplish, and more separation is healthy, isolation in the family is not. The coming-of-age passage and the uncertainties of peer companionship are too challenging and risky for parents to back off and leave the teenager entirely alone.