Teenage rebellion and obnoxious behavior are considered a normal and universal part of growing up.
But is this assumption valid?
First of all, we have to distinguish between rebellion and individuation. Individuation refers to the inevitable and necessary psychological (and biological) process of becoming one’s own person. At some point in the adolescent teen years, a young person starts to form his or her own opinions about people, viewpoints and life activities.
What many people refer to as rebellion is actually nothing more than individuation. “My child is no longer acting like a child.” A parent must be careful not to take this personally. In fact, it’s a healthy and inevitable part of growing up.
“Rebellion” implies a rising up against something. Colonists in the American Revolution rebelled against the British royalty. Oppressed black people in the American South rebelled against Jim Crow laws and other attitudes or measures designed to enforce discrimination in various business or public settings.
To rebel against something is to appraise what you oppose as invalid, unacceptable or intolerable — perhaps even unjust. Sometimes rebellions are purely emotional, and not based on any particular standard of right or wrong, at least none consciously held. In other cases — the American Revolution an unusually dramatic example — a rebellion is based on a very specific and highly articulated standard of justice.
Of course, emotions are ultimately based on reasons, whether those reasons are rationally held and defended, or not. In that sense, any adolescent who rebels — not merely individuates, but rebels — is doing so for some set of reasons.
“I am now convinced that adolescents do not rebel against parents. They only rebel against certain destructive methods of discipline almost universally employed by parents. Turmoil and dissension in families can be the exception, not the rule, when parents learn to substitute a new method of resolving conflicts.” Thomas Gordon wrote this in “Parent Effectiveness Training.” He’s on to something here.
I once asked the parent of a highly functioning twenty-something if her teenager had ever rebelled. She replied, “No, there never was a serious problem. We never gave her anything to rebel against.” In other words, she explained, they always used reason with the young person, even when setting rules. The rules were based on “if-then” assumptions where the young adult was permitted, within certain parameters, to do as she pleased, so long as she paid the emotional or financial cost for it. Things like cars and clothing were not treated as entitlements, at least not beyond a basic level. As a result, their daughter grew up feeling more or less in charge of her destiny, and when she experienced frustration or disappointment she tended not to blame it on her parents, but either on herself or the factors involved (including her own errors in thinking) that led her to the frustrating experiences.
Authoritarian approaches to parenting almost inevitably lead to rebellion. The rebellion may be quiet and the teenager might resentfully keep it to himself; or it might be out in the open. Either way, it’s a rebellion. By “authoritarian” I don’t mean the setting of rules. Until a young adult is able and willing to fend for himself, a parent of a teenager obviously must set rules. But it’s the kind of rules and the way those rules are set that really appears to matter. Consider a curfew. Let’s say the young person has to be home by 10pm or 11 pm. Why? The authoritarian parents will say and convey, “Because I say so. So long as you live under my roof, you will do as I say.” This might work fine for a little child (who doesn’t want to stay out late anyway), but it will not work for a young adult or teenager. It will only foster or inspire resentment and rebellion. On the other hand, the same rule could be enforced this way. “I’m saying you have to be home by 11 pm. If you’re not home by 11 pm, you’ll be tired when you get up and I don’t want to drag you out of bed. And I don’t want to see you do worse in your school (or job) than you otherwise would.” This is an example of an if-then approach. “If you stay out late, you’ll pay the price in the morning, and so will I.” The young person is free to understand, not understand, agree or disagree with it. It’s ultimately up to the parent to decide how much discussion to have over such matters. However, it’s in the parent’s self-interest as well as in the interest of the young person to have these discussions. In some cases a parent might agree to a later curfew, on the premise that, “If I have to drag you out of bed in the morning, or there’s some other evidence of impaired performance, then we’ll have to switch back to the earlier curfew.”
Granted, there is no guarantee that every young person will respond well to this approach. You can’t look at approaches to parenting that way. I hear lots of parents say, “Nothing works, including that reason-based approach.” What they usually mean is that they cannot control everything the young person does and thinks, and unless or until they find an approach which accomplishes that utopian condition, they won’t consider it effective. Good luck with that.
What a reason-based approach to teenagers accomplishes is that it provides a method consistent with human nature (i.e. as reasoning creatures, not ones who operate by commands or instinct), as well as a method that respects the level of conceptual development of the teenager. Teenagers are in the stage of cognitive development that researcher Jean Piaget referred to as “formal operations,” which means a higher level of abstract thought than a young child. A teenager can now think in terms of right or wrong, fair and unfair. It doesn’t automatically make their standards right, but it does mean they’re capable of thinking this way. And if you attempt to treat someone with the conceptual capacity of a teenager as if they still have only the conceptual capacity and brain development of a small child — well, you are signing up for a state of rebellion.
Nowadays in particular, most adults send teenagers mixed and contradictory messages. On the one hand, we tell them not only via our approach to politics and ethics, but also by our actions in daily life, that they are entitled to happiness, that they can be anything they wish to be and — indeed — are entitled to have a happy life and to be provided everything that they wish. “If other kids’ parents are buying everything they want, and permitting them all they demand, then I must too.” Then, in frustrating if not cruel contradiction, we throw them out into the world at twenty-two or so and tell them to be rugged, self-responsible individualists. Now I’m all for rugged individualism if that means utilizing your own reasoning intelligence and self-responsible action, over time, to attain what you want. But you can’t treat a young person one way throughout his entire childhood, and then expect him to act, feel and value in a completely opposite way suddenly and all at once, at the predetermined appropriate age of 21 or 18.
It’s my own view that while levels of intelligence and educational level vary, most people are not inherently stupid. But a lot of the ideas we instill in children, and hold up to ourselves, are downright ignorant, stupid or contradictory. The idea that people (including young people) should instinctively know how to act in life, especially when we haven’t (in most cases) trained them to properly use (and value) their reasoning minds, is one of the more stupid — and destructive — ideas out there. Sometimes this not-quite-named contradiction is what adolescents are rebelling against, in the first place.
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