The Constant Stress of Raising a Teenaged Boy

How much should you trust your teenage son? Remember when he was just a sweet young boy? Kind of hard these days isn't it?  

Up until recently I’ve trusted my 15 year-old son a great deal, at his request and to keep the peace in my house.

 I let him handle his own grades and don’t check up on every assignment because he says as a sophomore in high school he should be responsible for that. Then the mid-terms came in this month, and there were four Cs. 

He is taking very difficult classes, but every kid is different and for my son to get four Cs it means he has done absolutely nothing. So now he has until Monday to turn in all of his assignments, and then we will go through Edline together. We’ll see what we find.

I also trusted him that he was where he said he was mostly because I had to pick him up and often drop him off there. So far that seems to work.

But lately I just feel like something is changing.  It seems like lies flow as easily from him as truths. 

So I did what I rarely do, and searched his room and found nothing. He left his cell phone in the car yesterday and I read the text messages – nothing. No sexts, no talks of drugs or drinking or wild parties. A couple of “we’re going to a girl’s house” when the evening was supposed to start out at a boy’s. But the girls are watched like hawks – I know because I watch mine. So I haven’t found anything that has happened.

I also read his Facebook page which has an awful lot of girls on it and one intriguing post from April within the same minute “I’m in a relationship,” “I’m single.” I have to assume it was a joke.

He does talk to me, not so much about the personal stuff, but about school, project he’s working on, the lacrosse team he’s trying to put together, etc. 

He’s impossible a lot and fighting with his father who I am no longer married too, in the bitterest of ways. It’s so hard to know how much of this is just 15, and how much might be attributed to other things. I don’t see any indication of drug or alcohol use (he is on the It’s Academic Team and is a storehouse of more information than a human brain should be able to hold).

One thing I’ve learned with the fighting is to not get drawn into the vortex of the argument. Say what I have to say, tell him the conversation is over, and walk out of the room. If he tries to come back and fight again, just continue not to respond. This will eventually lead to an apology and things will be OK again.

The fighting with his dad escalates because his dad picks fights. And everybody gets madder an madder until it gets really scary. 

This is kind of a rambling post, but to all the moms of teenagers out there, I feel your pain. Don’t forget that it’s a phase and it will pass. Just watch, listen and communicate. And try not to lose your temper.

Your kid will make it through and so will you.

 

They say the girls are much worse.

When Parents' Battle - Kids Often Turn to Alcohol and Drugs

A woman who has Stage Four cancer and is fighting for her life was dumped by her husband, and sued for custody of the children in a North Carolina court. The father has seen his children 2-3 times for one night in the last couple of months. 

Despite being sick, this mother has attended every school event, taken her kids to their various lessons and friends’ houses and practices, and given them all the love and energy she has to give. He worked for a management consulting firm and traveled all the time. She is raising those kids. And he’s taking them away from her, probably out of anger, and probably because he’ll find someone else and it will be her job to raise them.

The woman with cancer’s husband was abusive, physically and emotionally, and she cheated on him. He won the custody battle and the kids will be moving to Chicago. I think they are 5 and 9 or something like that. I was appalled as are many others, who’ve been listening to her make the talk show circuit. From what I gather he is using the kids as a pawn to hurt her while she is dying. They don’t want to leave her and are traumatized.

Even if you are divorced for awhile, parents still get furious with each other. I went to my ex-husband the other day and asked him to increase his child support, which  simply doesn’t cover his share of the kids’ expenses. Right now financially, he is way ahead of me. As the kids get older their expenses go up. I was reasonable and calm, and talked about trying to work it out between us.

I thought we had come far enough that we could behave like two reasonable adults.  Bad idea. He exploded. “I am not your friend, I don’t like you, I am not responsible for the choices that you’ve made in your career, I’m going to call my attorney,” which of course he did. Now I'm going to get dragged into a lawyer's office again, which of course he knows I can't afford. I don't know how he lives with anger like that.

Talking to the Other Parent Without Rage

The mother who is dying was asked how she talks to her kids about their father. She said that her son asked her “Why does daddy hate you, and you hate daddy.” Her response was “I don’t hate daddy, I just don’t like the things he is doing.”   

She then talked about how she is trying NOT to turn her kids against their father because they love him and that relationship is important to them. That sounded very well scripted to me. We all get upset when we feel abused by another person, a man in particular. And that’s very hard to hide. 

My kid’s father makes a big point of saying that he leaves the kids out of these things. But the truth is they overhear unintentionally, they listen at doors, they see their mother crying, and they feel their father’s rage. Kids figure it out, and they know when you're not telling them the truth. As they get older, I think it's better to be honest without including all the gory details.

Family Trauma Can Lead to Drug and Alcohol Abuse

There is a lot of data out there that shows kids who experience ongoing family trauma are much more likely to use drugs and alcohol. I did. It’s an escape, a way of feeling better for a short time. If they have the addictive gene or whatever it is that causes some people to abuse alcohol or drugs, this kind of family trauma can easily push them off the edge. 

No divorce is easy and I’m not saying that if two people are truly unhappy with each other they should stay together. The kids they raise will be awfully screwed up too. In fact, divorce can be a good thing because your relationship with your children becomes solely yours once the other person is gone. You are free to be a happy, healthy parent on your own. 

But with divorce, comes consequences. As my son's former therapist told us several years ago, "It's not that you are getting divorced or already are. It's how you treat each other that they will respond too." In other words, if you want to screw up your kids, behave terribly towards the other parent. Chances are you'll successfully scar them for years to come.

So to all of you who are getting divorced, or even have been for quite some time, remember this. The way you act towards each other, gets absorbed every day. The worse you are, the more likely your kids are to turn towards drugs and alcohol to dull the pain. Is fighting with your ex worth that? I don't think so. But obviously some parents do.

Teen Decision-Making Hampered by Brain Development

Your teen may look all grown up to you but his or her brain is not. Next time your teen stresses out and does something she shouldn’t have that requires making a judgment call, try to remember this is your teens’ brain on normal.

Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health compared the brain activity of healthy youth with healthy adults in an effort to gauge their responses to a perceived threat. People looked at a series of photos and immediately recorded how afraid they felt. 

Here’s what they found.

Teens ability to size-up a situation is limited

Teen brains process fear differently than those of adults. Why? Adults use three parts of their brains to make decisions about fight or flight, teens use two. Both use the hippocampus, or the part of the brain that stores memory and the amygdala which activates the "fight-or-flight" response to stress. 

But teen brains don’t make complete use of the late-maturing dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The DLPFC helps with decision-making, because it is deeply involved in helping the brain categorize information and objects into different groups. In adults, DLPFC activity increases as their brains registered more fear than safety. In teens that doesn’t happen.

Ever notice how your teen stresses over decision-making more than you do? That’s because his or her brain didn't register all of the information given and process it quickly. As a result, teens are more likely to take a situation at face value and less likely to question a situation that feels normal but might not be. 

Ever wonder why your kid has to do all those organizational charts in elementary school? It’s to jump
start the DLPFC function. 

So the next time your teenagers make a bad judgment call, remember it’s not completely their fault. And talk to them about decision-making, explaining why they should take a moment to think about what they do or say, before they act. 

Research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. You can find a link at http://www.nimh.nih.gov/science-news/2011/teen-brain-less-discerning-of-threat-vs-safety-more-vulnerable-to-stress.shtml. Researcher is Jennifer Lau, Ph.D., of Oxford University (formerly at NIMH).