Life Lessons Learned from Working with Adolescents
For three decades now, about half my life, I’ve been immersed in the work and energy of this particular time in life. This doesn’t include my own adolescence where my Inner Adolescent is still quite influential in my day-to-day life, or those years when my two sons traversed the bumpy road from childhood to adulthood. So let’s make that about 50 years of immersion in Adolescence*. I’m not sure why my life and my heart were pulled down the path of being in service to adolescents and Adolescence. But it has.
More than being simply engaged with adolescents and Adolescence I’ve been submerged, consumed, riding the wild waves, dancing with it all, and at times undone by all that Adolescence brings. I’ve reveled in every bit of it, even when it’s been exquisitely painful. Valuable life lessons can be learned when working with adolescents.
1 - The skill and practice of not taking things personally
Teenagers can do and say snarky, disrespectful, rude, ungrateful, inconsiderate, and hurtful things. This isn’t because they are snarky, rude, etc. Well, they are, but they don’t mean to be. Or if they mean to be, it’s usually because they don’t know how to express their feelings more appropriately. Teenagers fumble, fall, and fail quite often in their social interactions. It’s part of their learning curve.
Here are some reasons why they do and say what and how they do and say:
brain and nervous system development, which includes impulsivity, age-appropriate egocentricity, compromised executive functioning;
the culture we live in and what’s been modeled;
their emotion dysregulation and their inability to manage difficult emotions;
how we as the adults in their lives handle our emotion dysregulation.
While it’s hard, the very best strategy during a confrontation with unpleasant teenage behavior is to not take it personally. This will help the storm pass much more quickly, and we teach kids how to be with us and with their own emotions by modeling how we are with them and with our emotions.
2 - You’re either going to learn to self-regulate or get right there in the mud of it all
To segue from item #1–There is nothing like adolescent energy to activate our parts which can range from: the intolerant authoritarian; to the crotchety old person with no humor; to the anxious parts that feel completely out of control; to the Law Giver (yes, with capital letters); to an inner toddler who is prone to temper tantruming; or to our own Inner Snark. If you can’t self-regulate, go with the last one. And be sure to do it right, with the right tone of voice, the wicked humor, the adolescent energy, but also with a strong measure of mature, adult perspective and kindness.
Don’t be mean. If you’re mean, intolerant, authoritarian, and laying down the law, yelling, or giving them the silent treatment, then you’re in the mud, rolling around, getting all dirty. It might feel satisfying at the time, but the internal backlash and backlash from that teenager will be damaging to them and to your relationship with them.
3 - The gift of fully engaging life—Everything matters.
A lot.
See if these sound familiar:
They realize the jeans they were going to wear that day are in the dirty laundry. They have a meltdown, can’t go to school, and you’re the worst parent ever.
Their boy/girlfriend of 2 months broke up with them, and they spend the entire school day in the bathroom, while their friends stream in and out to give comfort, commiserate, or threaten retaliation.
They fail a test that will drop their semester grade an entire letter grade. They are demoralized, ashamed, and begin to spiral into depression, possibly even suicidality.
That person they’ve been crushing on for weeks now said “hey” to them in the hallway during passing time. They come home floating, giddy, and talking nonstop to their best friend.
They just got their first paycheck ever. They decide that they absolutely must place an online order for that full-bodied shark onesie (including the shark head, teeth, and all) and a chicken nugget pillow in the shape of a dinosaur. (This is a real thing, folks.)
They start an internship at a small local office, are assigned their own workspace, so they go to the local nursery and buy plants for “their office.” (I still have my son’s peace lily that he purchased for his internship at a website design company at age 15, over 20 years ago. The plant is gorgeous.)
Everything holds equal emotional weight—the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. Adolescents embody and participate in the full gamut of human emotions. They, too, are immersed in their adolescence, in their adolescing, their journey of becoming. Everything matters. While we adults know we can ride those roller coasters with a bit more trust that “this too shall pass,” the adolescent is on that ride and only knows the experience as their entire life in that one moment. There’s a great gift in that. Be here now. Full participation in what we’re doing here on Planet Earth, in this one life we’ve been given.
4 - How to be a seeker, a searcher, a shiftless wanderer
In my experience, it is the nature of Adolescence to wander, and it is the very act of meandering that forms our identity. The prominent child psychoanalyst Erik Erikson proclaimed that this need for movement in adolescence comes from a “native exuberance” of this stage of life and must be harnessed by societies “in the service of their historical aims.” Woe to the society that fails in this regard, he implies, as young people who have nowhere to direct this native exuberance and agitated discontentment will come together in small groups and engage in harmless games and foolishness at best or “cruel prankishness, and delinquent warfare” at worst. They will spend their days shiftlessly “Wanderschaft,” shiftlessly wandering.
Perhaps it was not within the realm of possibilities presented to Erikson at that point in cultural history that allowed him to consider that wandering might be about something more than discontent, that wandering has a value in and of itself, that it could be more than the means to arrive at the end of the journey, that there might be a yet-to-be-discovered reason for the meandering.
I’ve come to trust the necessity of this so much that our company is called The Shiftless Wanderer.
Conclusion
The adolescents we work with and that ever-present Inner Adolescent are some of our greatest teachers . . .
if we’re ready to be true students of life.
*I use the upper case “A” in Adolescence and Adolescent(s) to indicate the archetypal Adolescent—this particular transformative energy that transcends chronological age, culture, time, and geography. The lowercase “a” refers to teenagers and the developmental stage we are familiar with.
Photo by: Cavan for Adobe