Raising Independent Children

 

Raising Independent Children

It is not what you do for your children,

but what you have taught them to do for themselves,

that will make them successful human beings

                       Ann Landers

You know the scenario, you are supporting your teenage child to start a new school and without meaning to you are very helpfully arranging their bag the night before and making suggestion after suggestion about what they might have for lunch, which bus they will get home and what time they will start their homework.   Letting go of our young people is hard but it is also the thing that we desperately want for each and every one of our children.  Which is why it is remarkable to observe (and participate in!) the steady increase in what the media often refers to as helicopter parenting. 

This term essentially reflects a parent’s desire to be excessively involved in their children’s lives, to pave their way to success and to protect them from painful experiences such as failure.  And this is understandable, we all want successful happy children, whatever that may mean for individual families.     But when we take the position of doing everything for our children, we actually take away their opportunities to develop their own life skills and undermine the development of their sense of agency,  which is essentially believing that we have the power to affect our own lives.

Many of us do this unwittingly.  We are trying hard to be the best parents/carers we can be and sometimes, without realising, we start to consider our children as an extension of ourselves and become overly invested in their success.  As parents we often feel better about ourselves when our children are achieving and conversely often struggle a great deal when our children are not reaching the expectations we have set in our own heads.  These expectations will be influenced by a number of factors – the things that are most valued in the society we live in and our own upbringing and values from our families of origin.  

Researchers in this field have referred to overparenting as the longest umbilical cord ever and some have identified technology as being a primary facilitator of over parenting.  We all have anecdotal evidence of children starting high school and phoning their parents from the toilet’s multiple times in a day.  And while it can feel good as a parent to be able to resolve the problem it is actually extremely unhelpful.  We not only take away their opportunity to use their own agency and self-advocate by finding a teacher who can support them it can also hijack our own day especially if we are unable to resolve the problem.  Developing agency in our kids is so important, it is the core of psychological wellness and although it can sometimes feel counterintuitive, allowing our children and young people to manage hard things (like the first day at high school) is how we support the development of this.    And the good news is that when our kids develop agency and believe that they can influence their own lives through their own efforts this reduces stress and anxiety and increases all sorts of positive outcomes including better emotional wellbeing.

A very useful concept to consider in this context is what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset which essentially means that when we make mistakes instead of thinking I can’t do this (fixed mindset) we can learn and develop from these mistakes. Children with a growth mindset generally believe that hard work (and sometimes appropriate support) can make them better at something which underpins important strengths such as perseverance and grit.  In order for our children to have opportunities to develop this mindset they need to have opportunities to fail, something that can actually be really difficult if we are constantly hovering to ensure that this doesn’t happen.  Of course, this needs to be age appropriate and considerate of the individual context of each of our children, it’s not about setting our children up to fail but rather encouraging them to take age appropriate risks. So, the next time when your child is trying something new for the first time try and resist the urge to dive in to help, instead take a step back and give your child what Jessica Lahey calls the gift of failure. 

Naturally our role as parents evolve as our children get older and the type and intensity of the support our young people requires changes.  Dr Christine Carter, the author of A New Adolescence, suggests once our children reach adolescence, we need to consider the idea of freedom with limits.  This does not mean that we suddenly bow out of our children’s life because the research is really clear that remaining involved and available (but not invasive) to our teens is incredibly important in terms of their health and wellbeing. Ironically, given the level of pushback most parents experience, it can be very stressful for teenagers when parents don’t set some limits and hold that boundary.    With this in mind Dr Carter suggests that we move from the position of manager into a position of coach with our young people.  And she shares some top tips about how best to manage this

·       Speak to them like you would speak to someone you really respect (which can be incredible difficult especially if they are struggling to be respectful back)

·       Give them a choice about what they would like to talk about

·       Tell them how you feel rather than how you think (I am worried about all the phone calls I am receiving from school instead of I think you are ……)

·       Use open ended questions – what matters most to you about this right now (following up with say more…)

·       Support their autonomy by expressing confidence in their own ability and emphasising the truism that we can’t change them

·       Surf their resistance like a wave – it is normal and expected for our teenagers to resist us and sometimes (not always) we have to accept this and try something different

Our job as parents is essentially to put ourselves out of a job.  We want our children to think for themselves, we don’t want them to blindly follow other people, we want them to be able to analyse, synthesise and reach their own decisions.  We need to support them and encourage them to ask for help but we also need to be respectful of their fundamental need to do things on their own including managing the consequences (with support) when these plans back fire.  This is what builds their resilience and their independence because whatever the outcome, although painful, they were able to survive.   

So, the next time we get back from school drop off and our teen calls us to say they have forgotten their homework.  What do we do? What we want to do is to immediately jump in the car and deliver their homework BUT maybe what we should do in order to support their independence and self-agency is to empathise with the situation but allow your child to experience their own distress AND their own survival of the missing homework!