How to survive the turbulent teens

Johannesburg - However good your intentions are, however selfless you are in your dedication, there is no such thing as the perfect parent.

Even if you get through the early years with relative ease, the moment your child hits her teens, the game play is changed, your tried-and-tested parenting skills don’t apply, and the course ahead is invariably as wobbly as your adolescent’s hormones.

Like me, you might have armed yourself with books about how to navigate this unknown terrain. And like me you probably found them preachy or too academic, and in the heat of a meltdown with your teenager, you were unable to remember or apply what you read anyway.

Not so the new book by Joanne Fedler, Love In The Time Of Contempt. Finally, here is a book that explains, in an entertaining and compelling way, what your teenager is going through physically, psychologically and socially.

But, like a been-there-done-that best friend, she gently takes your hand and lights the way, because she knows what you’re up against, and she’s on your side. And let’s face it, we need a friend like her on this scary, often solitary, road.

Aside from enoying her engaging writing style, I latched on to it like I would a much-coveted DIY manual, taking comfort from Fedler’s experiences with her two teenagers, a boy and a girl.

“As they manifest into their own people, you might not even like your teenager,” she confided in an interview while she was in South Africa in March (Fedler and her husband and children live in Sydney, Australia).

These are the sorts of truths she freely expresses in her book, giving a voice to our deepest fears or secrets as parents, and in doing so, making it okay. But more than sharing her first-hand wisdoms, Fedler is a mine of useful information she has gleaned from other parents of teenagers, as well as experts including psychologists and sex therapists.

Some of her advice sounds obvious, but if you’re a parent to a teenager you’ll already know that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach. And some of us aren’t aware of a few fundamentals. For example, as Fedler writes: “Teenagers don’t have a full brain yet – the prefrontal cortex that controls the ability to make important distinctions like who controls the pocket money only kicks in around the age of 24.”

The random development of the teen brain is well documented, but Fedler couches it in accessible language. “In the first 12 years of life the brain grows like weeds, in every direction, which explains why small kids pick up new languages, musical abilities, swimming and sport so easily. Then, come adolescence, there is a massive thinning out or pruning as the old structures of the brain get discarded and new connections are forged to make the brain function more specialised and sophisticated,” she writes.

The scary news for parents, she writes, is that the pruning process is driven by activity, so the activities our teens spend the most time on (X-box, video games, watching porn, Facebooking, texting, watching TV, playing guitar, taking photographs, writing poetry, watching sports) determine the connections that will be strengthened and reinforced.

“Our kids’ brains become stronger at whatever they’re engaged with. This is one hell of a powerful reason for us to limit the number of hours they spend in mindless, addictive, brain-squelching passivity,” says Fedler.

Given this perplexing sequence of brain development, and the wild hormonal influxes turning our children into sexual beings, rebellion in a teen is entirely predictable, Fedler assures. But she also warns that you’ll feel like their tantrums and outbursts are your fault, and that this is normal too. “We can’t help but reflect on our early parenting decisions and wonder, ‘did I get it right?’ Now it’s too late. The fruits of our f***-ups have fermented and have been bottled and corked,” she half jokes, then sensibly alleviates your anxiety with the chapters that follow, which focus on the fact that resilience – in anyone – is built on adversity and testing the boundaries.

“We are meant to parent imperfectly. Our mistakes mark the start of the important conversations we must have with our kids. They need to learn to discern, to forgive, to work things out for themselves.

“If we always got it right, we’d starve them of the ingredients they need to grow into rounded, thinking, self-reflective human beings,” she assures.

However, a point that Fedler drives strongly throughout her book, and in our interview, is that if we want our teenagers to evolve into responsible adults with the same value system that we embrace, we have to consistently live out our values and “get our story straight”.

“Our deepest embodied and practised values seep into them. Not what we say, but what we do and who we are,” she says.

All very well, but your values may give rise to some unexpected conundrums, like when Fedler’s son, Jordan, was rude to his French teacher. She admits she swung from anger with him, admonishing: “I am sick of getting emails and calls from your teachers. Don’t be rude!”, to realising that “compliance is not one of my values”.

“I want my kids to have the backbone to confront authority, not to be intimidated. Being defiant is how they develop those personality muscles. And we are their laboratory,” she writes.

There are no guarantees, of course. Kids often stray from our values, or as Fedler notes: “They may form themselves in contrast. The measure of our own adulthood lies in our ability to tolerate and respect difference – to accept that our kids might turn out fundamentally different to who we are. They have to make it through our backstory in order to find their own story,” she writes.

Fedler is quick to point out that she is not a psychologist, but her expertise is built on experience and, frankly, nothing is quite as convincing for another parent as the anecdotes and advice of another parent who has, or is going through, these turbulent waters themselves.

She does engage experts, and references other writers on the subject of adolescence, but only to flesh out perspectives on concerns like porn, depression and gay relationships.

Fedler’s own motto is “always be connecting, shortened to ABC”. She explains it best herself: “The arteries of my connection with (my kids) must be unclogged and clear. My gestures should draw them in, not push them away. I need to remain interested but not curious. Involved but not interfering. They must sense my presence at all times, like someone who’s got their back, not hovering overhead.”

Being in the vortex of parenting a teen myself, Fedler’s book was like manna from heaven to me, acting like a warm hand on my back as I identified with almost every scene she bravely depicted.

If you need a shoulder, and some excellent advice couched in humour and humanity, I recommend it.

TEEN ACRONYMS AND WHAT THEY MEAN

IJK – I’m just kidding

IJS – I’m just saying

IJWTS – I just want to say

IJWTK – I just want to know

J2LUK – Just to let you know

J4F – Just for fun

J4L – Just for laughs

JAF – Just a friend

JAS – Just a second

JATQ – Just answer that question