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Adolescence
Adolescence and the Influence of Increasing Disorder
Becoming more disobedient and disorganized can mark the outset of adolescence.
Posted May 9, 2022 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- With the onset of adolescence, order becomes a focal issue in two ways: giving obedience and staying organized.
- Entering this older world of experience, it can become harder to do as told and more difficult to keep track of everything.
- Parents need to provide a secure family structure to depend on, and sufficient oversight for important obligations to be met.
Separating from childhood and entering adolescence around the late elementary and early middle school years creates two growth challenges concerning order for the emerging adolescent.
One is more difficulty following orders (for example, questioning and ignoring instructions). The other is more difficulty keeping order (for example, the cluttered backpack and messy room).
In each case, order is about control.
Please keep in mind that I am not talking about insurrection and chaos here, only that the young person typically grows somewhat more resistant and scattered at this changing time of life, and so can become more challenging to parents on both counts.
Order and disobedience
Order is about being in charge of what is happening. The growing desire for more independence and being one’s own boss can create more opposition to being ordered, to being told what one must and cannot do. So as parents strive to maintain authority to support their custodial responsibility for providing guidance, oversight, and support, they can face more active and passive opposition from their adolescent in the forms of argument and delay. “Why do I have to?” “Not right now!” “I’ll do it later!” While the child lived in the age of command, often believing parents had the power to order and make them obey, the adolescent has entered the age of consent, now knowing that parents can’t make them or stop them without her or his cooperation.
The thinking sounds like this: “You can tell me what, but I can decide when; and how much I give of what you want is up to me!” Timing and degree of compliance feel more like a matter of personal willingness now. Although still living on parental terms, the adolescent starts asserting more terms of her or his own.
Thus the young adolescent can become more disorderly in response to parental rules and requests, and sometimes more disobedient. Now more insistence may be required to get what they want as parents can find their child less readily cooperative with requests and compliant with rules. “We have to put up with more disagreement and must keep after her to get things done.” To some degree, the adolescent rebels out of childhood as parents encounter more opposition to orders than before.
Order and disorganization
Control is being able to comprehend what is going on. With a wider range of experience opening up as the simpler, sheltered world of childhood is let go and left behind, the adolescent would like to put this new complexity in comprehensible order. “I want to understand what’s going on.” Not being able to do so, one can feel disorganized, causing anxiety on that account. “What now?” Thus the young person can feel at the mercy of growing changes that physically and emotionally and socially make life more surprising and unexpected. Because the adolescent world is more complicated than childhood, it is easy to feel ignorant, confused, and overwhelmed. “I can’t keep up with all that’s going on!” “I can’t find anything!” “I forget more than I remember!”
As the push for more independence and personal freedom gets underway, early adolescent growth and the world of experience get more complex in a hurry. For example, middle school is more organizationally complicated than elementary school with multiple teachers creating instructional demands instead of a primary one. Now life becomes less simple, orderly, and in control. Meanwhile, fitting in with peers and social belonging becomes more competitive, while growing bodily changes occur that are unpredictable.
With so much to attend to, it’s easy to feel more confused, more scattered, and distracted, making it harder to concentrate, follow directions, and predict how things will be. Now it’s easy to feel disorganized as more complexity creates a lot to keep up with and catch hold of. To some degree, the adolescent sacrifices the security of childhood for the unfamiliarity of growing older.
In neither case of growing disobedience or disorganization are parents warranted to express impatience or criticism of what are normal growth changes: “Don’t you talk back to me!” “Can’t you remember anything?” Instead, they need to provide necessary support as the young person struggles to catch hold.
What parents can do
In the face of more disagreement, parents need to stand fast with important demands, follow through with their requests to completion, broker increasing differences with discussion, and maintain a family structure of rules and restraints in which the young person can responsibly grow. “Our job, during a more resistant time, is to provide you with consistent daily limits and demands on which you can securely depend.”
In the face of more disorganization, parents need to provide ongoing supervision of what needs to be managed. This means helping to create and follow a schedule, to set prompts for remembering, to calendar obligations, to straighten personal space and keep track of possessions, and to set and observe priorities. “Our job, during this time of distracting complexity, is to help you pay continued attention to what needs doing.”
Bottom line: Come the opening of adolescence, compliance with orders can be harder for the young person to give and personal order can be harder to maintain. In each case, parents have important support to provide.
