So, now it is time for the next confession—I am a lazy parent. Now that my children are teens and tweens, I find myself very guilty of laziness. Not physical laziness, the frantic energy I expended from the time they learned to toddle still lingers in my body, usually arising at times of cleaning or stress. No, I mean mental laziness. I don’t put the thought and time into my interactions with my children that I used to when they were visibly learning and growing. Part of it stems from being so close to the finish line, I guess. They are almost adults and our relationship is shifting, from me being dictator of the world and provider of all things to confidante and (hopefully) voice of sanity in the madness of adolescence. I like the idea of them being an adult and so I treat them as one until something occurs that jerks us both back into little kid/big trouble. I realize I haven’t taken the time to explore this middle ground they occupy, between little people and adult, and my laziness creates friction between my children and me.

Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that every time I talk to my children, I am looking them (almost) in the eye, staring at an adult-like face, reasoning with someone who sounds like they are much more mature than they really are. I forget how young they really are. I am always so impressed when they act more mature than their years, I marvel how adult they have become. However, I frequently ignore how old they really are, not acknowledging how naïve, and unprepared they are and what little experience they have in navigating this adult world. I do not cut them enough slack when they act their age. 

It is an issue I share with other parents, this difficulty in reconciling your child’s emotional and mental maturity with this person who looks like and wants so hard to be a rational adult. A constant refrain I hear from other parents is the “I can’t believe the lack of common sense…” We as parents should know better. It’s more a lack of experience; our children have “book sense”, all the things we and society have taught them, yet they lack the “common sense” learned from applying that knowledge again and again in real world situations.

Recently, a family friend’s teenage daughter was lamenting the fact that her parents “hate” her. I tried to soothe the waters with platitudes; I am sure they love you, it’s menopause or man-o-pause and not you, it was probably a bad day. But in her eyes, they do “hate” her. A teen’s perception is their reality, highly colored by their lack of experience. Having no basis for comparison, no “common-sense” real-world experience to benchmark against, makes these first-time experiences so much more powerful than they would be for an adult who has been in this situation a time or two. When you have nothing to compare it against, situations appears more serious and painful than we as parents intend it to be. It’s one of the issues tied into teenage suicide; after the fact, people realize how much these kids were hurting and how hopeless they felt.

What I should have revealed is that this is a frustrating age as a parent. Our eyes deceive us constantly. The almost adult child we see hides the no longer teddy bear-cuddling little boy or girl inside, the child who still thinks of their parents in terms of mommy or daddy and expects that unconditional love. I think our children have a hard time reconciling the all-knowing parent they grew up with and the confused, contradictory, cranky parent they experience as a teen.  No wonder they give us little respect:-) 

If the rational, patient person you had known and loved for 12/14 years suddenly vocalized their disappointment about, disdain, and disapproval of your every action constantly, I can see any savvy experienced adult having problems with this. Try it on for size with a teen with little life experience and it quickly escalates into a battle of wills, with mutual eye rolling and many conversations to friends about how “they” just don’t understand me. So, now I am learning to take the time to be less of a “grr” parent and put more thought and energy into my parenting at this age. I don’t know if it will lessen the eye rolling and snide comments, but I don’t want to be on the receiving end of the “your child thinks you hate them” conversation that I get to have with my friend this weekend. So now, it’s time to put the blindfold on and deal with the little person in front of me as they really are and not the shell I see before me. So, how about you?

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