Kids can benefit from learning to take a few healthy risks. Raising a teenager can be a frightening business. Why aren’t they home? Who are they with? Why haven’t they called? Yet our kids are safer now than they have ever been, according to family therapist and social worker Michael Ungar, who wants us to ease off our teenagers and allow them to experience risk and responsibility.
In his new book ‘Too Safe for their own Good’, he explains why managing our teenagers’ lives may be hindering their development. “There is something good that happens when kids are pushed into risk and responsibility.
We are hard-wired to learn from experiences that push us just to the edge of our capacities,” says Michael. Instead, he suggests, modern parents cocoon their teenagers from any possible danger, thinking they are doing the right thing, whereas not so long ago there was no such thing as a teenager. “Kids used to make that transition to adulthood much earlier in life without the stress and the worry because, by necessity, they had to work for their families, leave home and become adults. “Today we see them differently as a society, even though kids haven’t changed a lot developmentally since then. We tend to want to elongate this transition.”
Michael says the trend to have smaller families in modern society means parents put a lot more emphasis on those children and have the means to dote on them more than if they had the six, eight or 12 children our forebears produced. “There was no way a parent could go to every soccer practice and attend every single event in their child’s life, so children were expected to raise themselves a little bit more.”
our families are also economically more stable, which means middle-class parents become much more risk averse. “We tend not to want to expose ourselves to anything that might take away what we’ve created and we acutely feel any threat, such as thinking that if our child walks out of the house, something bad is going to happen, so we need to control them.”
And he blames the media for creating unrealistic images of child safety. “We expect the media to report on every awful event that happens to a child, but sometimes we lose perspective in this 24-hour-a-day news world. These things are not happening on our back door. Bad things happen to a very small number of people living in a more dangerous context,” he says. “Even by New Zealand statistics, a disproportionate number of bad events happen to a small number of people. And statistics show that people who have been a victim once are much more likely to have it happen again.”
Michael encourages parents to set reasonable boundaries for their teenage children and if they are broken, then resist getting angry and instead explain the consequences of their actions. “Say they have a curfew of midnight and they don’t show up until 2am.
I find that the families I work with have better results once they stop getting into anger and just explain the consequences to them, such as not sleeping and having a bad day at work the next day because of it.” He also talks to parents about finding a way to say “yes” to their teenager instead of a flat “no”. “oost teenagers who are out of control are signalling to their parents that they are desperate to be older, more responsible and independent, so saying “no” isn’t going to work. But finding a way to get some of those things they want, like helping them get a part-time job and therefore their own money, can be a compromise while allowing them to experience some independence.”
When Michael talks to groups of parents, he asks them all what they were doing at 17 or 18 and is always met with giggling and embarrassment in the room. “They recall what they got up to and then I say to them, ‘Right, you’ve got 24 months to get your kid ready to make the same decisions.'”
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