When it comes to young people navigating the last (and hardest) stage of adolescence, trial independence (ages 18-23), I believe Simon and Garfunkel had it right: "The closer your destination, the more you're slip sliding away."
Why is that? I believe ambivalence is the answer. The goal of independence, claiming all that freedom that comes with moving out on one's own, looked so alluring when the journey of adolescence began back in late elementary or early middle school. Come the end of high school, however, independence takes on a much more daunting aspect. Most young people feel unready stepping off into the final stage of adolescence when they must keep their footing while they try their wings.
Now the complex demands of independence turn into something unexpectedly hard because the only way to truly claim independence is by assuming full responsibility for self-reliance -- making one's own choices and dealing with one's own consequences with no evasion, excuses, or blame.
However, at a time when to some degree most young people are feeling unprepared, breaking commitments, making mistakes, lacking direction, feeling lonely, falling in and out of love, debt spending, feeling overstressed, fearing the future, indulging in extremes, exhilarated by freedom, escaping from obligations, living in the moment, and having maximum access to alcohol and other drugs, responsibility can be very hard to consistently take.
In counseling, listening to young people who have moved out and are struggling with the challenges of trial independence (18 - 23), the angst of this final adolescent stage can sound something like this.
"I expected independence meant finally being old enough to live life how I wanted. But no, it doesn't mean that at all. It means I'm too old to live on my parents' terms, but I can't live on my own terms because now I have to live on society's terms - fitting in and doing what's expected and following the rules to make my way. At least at home my parents loved me. But out in the world no one cares. They don't care what I do, if I do, or how I do. And if I don't, that's my problem, not theirs! I thought independence would make me free! Instead, I'm trapped worse than I was before. I was freer from responsibility when I lived at home. It's not fair! Why did I fight my parents so hard to let me go if independence was going to turn out this way? It's like getting what I thought I wanted only to discover I really don't want it all. I don't like how it is, I don't want to go forward, I can't go back, I'm not getting anywhere, I don't know what to do with myself, and when I do, I can't make myself get it done, at least right away. I feel totally lost!"
So as the song writers said, the closer to true independence a young person gets, the more often they're "slip sliding away," partly wishing for or even returning home for more dependence on parents.
And now, for many young people, along with feeling lost in transition comes a period of confusion. To the young person's dismay and to parental concern, this confusion is often expressed by thrashing around from one relationship to another, from job to another, from one extreme to another, from one escape to another, from one scrape to another, scrambling to catch hold, wondering if they ever will.
Caught between adolescence and young adulthood, many a young person feels like they are stuck in a nowhere world. Floundering for direction, they feel anxiously suspended between letting go the secure trapeze that connected them to a familiar past and not yet having in their grasp the trapeze that will swing them forward into an uncertain future.
This is when the path leading into young adulthood seems out of reach. "I just can't catch hold," is a statement commonly heard in counseling with young people at this disconnected age. To make matters worse, they can compare themselves to parents who appear like adulthood is no problem, have made this transition long ago, and usually don't remember how difficult this adjustment was.
The primary agent of ambivalence at this age is procrastination. Young people put off what they know needs to be done because if accomplished in a timely way it will only bring them closer to the dreaded state of independence that in some ways they want, and in other ways they don't.
This is the crowing irony of adolescence - it begins and ends with rebellion against authority. The early adolescent resists adult authority declaring through words or actions: "You can't make me!" And the young person in the last stage of adolescence, trial independence, resists authority as well, but now it is against their own -- a lonely, frustrating, self-defeating struggle against their procrastination: "I can't make me!"
So the final battle for independence in adolescence is the young person against themselves, facing ambivalence, lapsing into avoidance and delay, fighting to defeat the forces of procrastination, until somehow, some way, this obstacle is mostly overcome and liberating (and confining)independence is claimed at last.
For more information on dealing with procrastination, see my 6/21/09 blog: "Procrastination: How adolescents encourage stress." www.carlpickhardtcom
Next weeks' entry: Developmental delay and a ‘compressed adolescence.'
