Raising a Moral Teenager: Two Conflicting Myths

Parents and other adults are famously frustrated with teens who they see as selfish, uncaring and unable to stand for important principles. Teens, adults commonly lament, are thin reeds who are far too easily buffeted by the whims of their peers. How can parents and other adults help teens become less vulnerable to the destructive whims of peers and more able to stand up for important principles?

While many kinds of strategies may be helpful, at the heart of adults' struggles to help teens stand on important principles are two pervasive (and conflicting) adult myths. Rather than seeing teens' behavior as a function of a developmental stage-as we would the temper tantrum of a four-year-old-many of us are distressed and angry because we mistakenly believe teens' capitulation to peers signals spinelessness, a lack of will. We view our teenagers as young adults who should be expected to take responsibility for their actions like other adults. Often parents and other adults are highly critical of teenagers who fail to divulge to adults, say, that there is going to be a fight after school. In the film West Side Story, Officer Krupke famously drips with disdain for Riff and his gang, the Jets, because they won't tell him the location of a planned rumble between the Jets and the Sharks. And when we see capitulation to peers as a sign of weakness, often our first instinct is that strong punishment can correct it or that children can be exhorted out of it. As a Boston parent told me: "We can't let our kids off the hook when they worry so much about snitching on their friends. We need to tell our kids to be strong, that they have to stick up for what's right."

But as a good deal of psychological research has made clear, important as it is for us as parents to stand for certain principles, when we dismiss or don't fully grasp children's fears of peer rejection we are not really seeing who our children are-- we are badly mistaking the basic nature of the adolescent self. Because for many adolescents, especially in early adolescence, the self derives its meaning largely from how it is known by peers. There is little outside this interpersonal self upon which to exert leverage or to hold one's ground, and so to risk peer rejection is not simply to endure a bout of loneliness. It is for many adolescents to feel, as psychologist and adolescence researcher Robert Kegan observes, that they "are losing the self itself." That's one reason teens may be tied in knots about whether to snitch on their friends-- the threat of losing the self, of being friendless, is more concerning than the risk of serious punishment.

But many adults are failing to help teenagers find their moral voice for a wholly different reason. Rather than expecting too much of their teenagers, these adults are expecting too little. Especially as parents have come to rely increasingly on teens for closeness over the last few decades, many of us are failing to insist on high standards and important principles-- a failure that is abetted by another, opposite myth about adolescence. Over the last few decades, many adults have become acutely aware that adolescence is a distinct developmental stage. These parents have been bombarded with scientific evidence indicating that the basic circuitry of the teen brain makes them a different animal. I regularly hear parents talk about teenagers as if they are another tribe or species-feral, wholly self-absorbed, amoral. A 1988 Time magazine article on childhood put it this way: "Between childhood and adulthood lies the ridiculous and treacherous territory of adolescence. It is a region full of dangers, brainless impulses, hormonal furies." A recent, popular book about adolescence is called A Tribe Apart.

Yet it's just as mistaken and risky to view teenagers as a separate species as it is to view them as weak versions of adults, as failed adult clones. The idea that adolescents are differently constructed and beyond the pale has become an easy rationalization for avoiding conflict and failing to hold them to high standards. Fearing conflict, many of us are now too quick to excuse irresponsibility, chalking it up to a "stage."

It's a high-wire act, but we as adults need to be able to hold in our heads two seemingly contradictory ideas, an essential irony, about teens-that they are at the same time peer-dependent and developing high inner standards. As the Jets sing in "Gee, Officer Krupke": "The trouble is [we're] growing, the trouble is [we're] grown." Research has parsed the many kinds of selves or self-representations that exist in teenagers, including the "actual self," the person you are now; the "ideal self," the kind of person you hope to be; and "ought selves," the person your parents expect you to be (which may or may not greatly overlap with your ideal self). Long ago, the psychoanalyst Anna Freud recognized that behind a great deal of adolescent rebellion was not the lack of conscience but a highly tormented conscience, that teens are pulled by new impulses in ways that war with principles and standards that are also growing stronger. Because teens tend to be aware of what they ought to do, because they have an "ideal self," they need and respect adults who deeply appreciate their peer predicaments and also ally with their own high inner standards.

We as adults can be most helpful to teens when we are able then, to listen and empathize, to understand teens' worlds and their peer dynamics while connecting our values and our wisdom to their experience. It is this delicate integration of guidance, perspective-taking, and assertion, both an authentic connection to who a particular child is and an ability to grasp how that child makes meaning of her experience, an insistence on high standards and an understanding of a child's world-- hard as that integration is for any adult-- that most effectively nurtures our children's emotional health and moral independence.

Richard Weissbourd is a family and child psychologist on the faculty of Harvard's School of Education and Kennedy School of Government, and the author of The Parents We Mean To Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development. To learn more, please visit www.richardweissbourd.com

Citations

1. The interpersonal nature of the self in adolescence: Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); see, especially, 57. Notes from Robert Kegan lecture, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1982.
2. Time magazine article on adolescence: "Through the Eyes of Children," Time, August 8, 1988, 55.
3. The book A Tribe Apart: Patricia Hersch, A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
4. Research on adolescent self-representations: Daniel Hart and Suzanne Fegley, "Prosocial Behavior and Caring in Adolescence: Relations to Self-Understanding and Social Judgment," Child Development 66 (1995): 1347.
5. Anna Freud on adolescent rebellion: Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1937), cited in Robert Coles, The Moral Life of Children (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 164.