The Joys and Complexities of Parenting Adolescents

Every once in a while, a piece of writing captures an experience so profoundly that it goes viral and becomes a frequent topic of conversation. A recent essay in The New York Times Magazine, “Raising Teenagers: The Mother of All Problems,” by writer and theater director Rachel Cusk has been much discussed; I wanted to share some of it with you.

In her essay, Cusk analyzes the transition for parents as their children come into adolescence. She describes this journey eloquently by capturing the shock of a new person inhabiting the body of the person we thought was our child.  She says, “Lately I’ve become aware of a dissonance, a dislocation, as though a familiar text had suddenly become illegible to me. What she needs is different from what I think she needs. Perhaps it always was, but she’s had to grow up to be able to tell me. Sometimes — when I’m brushing my teeth or chopping vegetables, when I’m not thinking about her at all — she’ll come and stand next to me and say, Give me attention. At other times, like now, I feel I’m forcing myself on her, like an insistent hostess forcing food on her guests. I don’t want to force, to insist, even at the risk that what I cherish will be wasted. Parenthood suddenly seems like one long litany of force, of insistence, of exposition and declamation; it seems, suddenly, to have contained too much of the sound of myself. When you declaim, you can’t listen. When you insist, you miss the opportunity to learn something new.”

Cusk’s essay reminds me of the time that a psychologist friend said that being the parent of an adolescent resembles being a consultant. Like a client, the teen is rarely available when we want to talk, but we better be ready when s/he wishes to speak with us.  Parenting a teen means being on call 24/7, even when we are finally winding down and ready to crawl into bed for those few blissful moments of reading the same passage that we read the previous three nights, but we could never remember because we were so exhausted at the end of the day.

As Cusk reasonably points out, one of the reasons that the adolescent years can be so traumatic for parents is that the author of our family’s story is changing.  “Until adolescence, parents by and large control the family story. The children are the subject of this story, sure enough, the generators of its interest or charm, but they remain, as it were, characters, creatures derived from life who nonetheless have their being in the author’s head. A large part of parental authority is invested in the maintenance and upkeep of this story, its repetition, its continued iterations and adaptations...But it is perhaps unwise to treasure this story too closely or believe in it too much, for at some point the growing child will pick it up and turn it over in his hands like some dispassionate reviewer composing a coldhearted analysis of an overhyped novel. The shock of critique is the first, faint sign of the coming conflict, though I wonder how much of what we call conflict is in fact our own deserved punishment for telling the story wrong, for twisting it with our own vanity or wishful thinking, for failing to honor the truth.”

Cusk also beautifully describes the developing social and political awareness of older teens and their righteous indignation over injustice. “I become aware of their verbal dexterity, their information, the speed of their thought processes...They’re like a pair of terriers with a stick: they’ve got their teeth into the world and its ways. Their energy, their passion, their ferocity — I regard these as the proper attributes of youth.”

Before we all give up hope, however, we need to remember that one of the charms of adolescents is that they change, and they grow up. In the same way that the sullen 14-year-old is dramatically different from the sweet, huggable 10-year-old, the more mature and sophisticated 18-year-old is remarkably dissimilar from that argumentative 15-year-old.  (This in no way mitigates the turbulence of the summer between high school and college that can be a constant battle over independence and routine, between separating and hanging on.)

Cusk concludes her essay by describing a lunch with one of her daughters at a café.  “My daughter is happy, happy in the sunshine, happy to see me. I am happy to see her, too. It is as though we have absconded together from that mild prison, home; as though we have gotten away from what binds us and found each other again on the other side of it, both of us free...Lately she has become so independent that watching her live is a kind of spectacle, as though she were walking a high wire with a skill I didn’t know she possessed: I watch her from below, proudly, my heart in my mouth.”

Rachel Cusk’s essay allows us to acknowledge that just as our children are traveling down a road new to them during adolescence, so are we as parents. Like all worthwhile trips, there will be challenges along the way that will test our families and us. But we’re not alone on this journey, and in most cases, we will get through it. However, neither our children nor we will ever be the same again, and we can only do the best job we can along the way.