Adolescents in the Basement

August 12, 2026—Sounds like the name for a punk band, doesn’t it?

Adolescents in the Basement
Teens in the Cellar
Youth Down Below
Underground Kids

Okay, I’m terrible at thinking of band names! However, I have come to realize that there is a particular phenomenon with teenagers in basements.

My kids got up to all manner of things in the basement in our house as they went through Adolescence. Once, I came downstairs to my 18-year-old son’s basement bedroom, only to find a girl in his bed. I woke them from a sound sleep and escorted the young lady out the door. And I’ve heard from quite a few of the parents I coach and counsel about their teenagers in their basements.

I had one client tell me that his mom had come down in the middle of the night to let the dog out, and he and his friend had been doing lines of cocaine in the basement. It was 3 AM. They were wide awake, chattering, legs bouncing. And he said she had no clue! They gave some excuse about doing some kind of school project. All those years, she hadn’t had a clue that he’d been involved in drugs at the time.

Dark places, creative places

Basements can be really scary places! And they can be places where dark things happen. Of course, it doesn’t have to be a basement. It just needs to be some tucked-away place, away from the oversight of parents and authority figures—a place where teenagers push the edges, break the rules, violate boundaries. Unbeknownst to the adults until it is discovered and/or confessed.

But I also know that basements can be places of creativity. A friend of mine has this amazing craft and scientific exploratory world in the basement for her teenage daughter. The art studios in the last two homes I’ve lived in have been in the basement.

I think it’s important not to equate dark things with bad things. “Bad” is an evaluative descriptor. There are morals and judgments all tied up in that word. Just because we don’t like something, don’t approve of it, it scares us, we don’t understand it, or we don’t understand the reason for it, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.

I’m not condoning teenage drug use in the basement! And I’m not saying that morals and judgments are wrong. I see that this is material for a separate blog, so I’ll end this part of the discussion here. Let’s turn back again to basements and teenagers in the basement!

You’re lucky if you have a basement, and you’re lucky if you don’t!

Preparation or protection?

The advantages of basements? Teens need a place to hang out, a place to be away from the main living spaces and have a life of their own. They have privacy, a place to decompress, a place for confession with friends, a place to be with some of those morally questionable thoughts and behaviors, and a place to reflect on them without interference from Mom and Dad, who desperately want to save their children from the same mistakes they made.

That’s really what this blog posting is about—the understandable, and yet questionable, impulse on the part of parents to save their teenagers from their Adolescence.

It’s a fine line between protection and preparation.

A fine line between protecting our kids from the world and preparing them for it. And sometimes the preparation for the life they are in and the life ahead of them comes after the fact. After the harm has been done, the mistake has been made, the embarrassing, shameful things they’ve done, the decisions they make that set them back.

And none of that is about us as much as it may feel like it is.

What we can’t prevent

I remember when my oldest son was in his senior year of high school. Very smart kid! Making straight A’s, in the honor society, on the board of his Spanish club. Destined for great things. I was so looking forward to graduation, when I knew I would be sitting in the bleachers, the proud parent as his name was called for awards and scholarships.

Then one night in the middle of his senior year, he came home with boxes and said he was quitting school and moving out of state with his older girlfriend. He was 18 years old, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I was devastated. I said horrible things. My dreams and fantasies of being able to go around and say, yes, I’m the mother of that amazing kid who won all those awards, were gone.

But I also remember—and this is the thing that has stayed with me over these last 20+ years—the letter addressed to me that he slapped down on the counter before he went off to pack his things. Yes, in his basement bedroom! (Different son from the one who had the girl in his bed.) His words didn’t register at the time. I was too upset. I didn’t get the meaning of them until much later. But he said, “I don’t know why I have to do this, but I do. I have to go.” He trusted something in him that I didn’t and couldn’t trust—in him or in me.

It wasn’t until a year later, when I stood in that same kitchen and slapped an application for grad school on the kitchen counter and told my husband, “I’m going to go back to school and become a therapist whether you like it or not,” that I understood something of what he had meant. I remember saying and feeling that it was something I had to do at all costs. Because it would have cost me more if I didn’t do it. I knew that even if I lost my marriage and my family, it was something I had to follow.

I came to that decision—that I had to go and do this different life—while I was sitting at my table in my basement art studio, breaking all kinds of rules about art making that I didn’t even know existed. I just knew I was being propelled by something within me. Something that demanded I respond and go where I felt I was being led.

The work of becoming

The marriage survived and thrived. My oldest son graduated from high school and went on to have an incredible career as a naval officer. My client sat in my office all those years later, after doing his lines of cocaine in the basement right under his mom’s unsuspecting nose, a successful businessman, his journey down the substance-abuse rabbit hole behind him. Many lessons learned the hard way, but learned well.

We can’t prevent Adolescence from happening by moving into a house without basements. We can’t prevent the calling to step ever more fully into the world, risking failure and shame. We want to arm our kids with what they need to make the repairs, to get back on their feet, to take accountability, and to find meaning in the sometimes difficult fallout from decisions that they later come to regret.

This is the work. This is the good and hard work. As I have said too many times to count, what other work is there to do in this life but to continue to make our way to becoming fully human?

And sometimes a key part of that work happens underground, in basements.

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