If you are a psychologist, you may want to skip this post. The short text below may offend your sensibilities.
In reality, of course, the blogster agrees with most of what is said in insightful articles like Rebel with a Cause: Rebellion in Adolescence. There are, after all, decades of learning and counseling behind the article. Even more importantly, there is serious neuroscience behind explanations of erratic, illogical, detrimental behavior patterns of young people. And, reluctantly, we have seen studies that look at other mammals and try to get insights into humans, not just adolescents.
Luckily for the blogster, the interesting aspect is To what degree a young person needs to rebel varies widely.
In most of the standard advice and explanations regarding adolescents, what the blogster finds lacking is this: children are great bullshit detectors, first when it comes to their parents, later also with regard to other adults, like teachers.
What appears to be an innate desire for fairness, shown to exist in apes, too, can complicate life for the young adult as he or she sees the discrepancies in what we tell them and how we actually behave.
One of the most shocking experiences the blogster recalls a few decades into life is the day the clear parental statement of "do not lie" broke down.
A neighbor was coming to the house.
The doorbell rang.
Go tell her I'm not home.
A very young, and at that moment very confused, future blogster went to the door, greeted the neighbor and duly answered the question with "mam is not home".
The situation would not have been a problem if the instruction had been something like, sorry, mam does not feel like company, she'll get back to you shortly.
A cultural norm passed down from adult to child.
Here is an equally distressing example of a norm passed from adult to child and on to another child from there. In a school yard in middle USA, kids run around a newly arrived classmate during recess, chanting: You go to hell, you go to hell. The child is standing there, crying. All because the child had told others she was a buddhist.
If your kid is the buddhist, you cannot prevent this from happening but you can be supportive.
Consistency, predictability, and respect work with other mammals, so why don't you apply them to your children. Oh, and those of others you come in contact with.
A widely used approach to adolescents is "offering and accepting a challenge". Whether that takes the form of a soccer mam shuttling offspring from one activity to the next or kicking a ball across a dirt field or - hold your breath - child labor may not matter all that much.
Although we support children working on "real" projects, but on their own schedule and supervised as necessary.
While the urban middle class idea of adolescence may not include a twelve year old proficient in motorcycle repair, or an equally proficient twelve year old cook and baker, these skills are probably less dangerous than playing football and more useful.
And they may make all the difference one day when discrepancies of what we teach our children and our way of muddling through life erupt in what we conveniently call an act of rebellion.
Hey, even part of the political pendulum swings we see may simply be the result of our kids recognizing that we have not lived up to the ideals we professed.
In other words: we should give our children more credit for their ability to observe the world around them.
Allowing adolescents as young as 16 to vote in elections, as they can in some countries, seems to be a good step in the right direction.
The blogster prefers a rebellious teen over the average greedy 40 year old or the standard disillusioned 50 something any day.
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