Helping Adolescents Learn Two Compromises in Life

Source: Carl Pickhardt

In two areas of human life, learning to compromise can be valuable:

• In managing expectations to deal with changing life experience
• In maintaining satisfaction to manage significant relationships

In both cases, parents can teach a teenager how some is going to be sufficient. Getting some of what one expects in life and getting some of what one wants in a relationship is going to be the best a person can get.

Managing expectations

Expectations are mental sets that we create to anticipate events and outcomes as we move through change and time. These approximations often prove inexact, creating compromises in life with which we have to live.

Expectations can lead us on, but they can also often let us down. Consider some common examples:

• What I wanted is not exactly what I got.
• What I romanticized is not exactly real.
• What I was promised is not exactly what was given.
• What was planned is not exactly what turned out.
• What I believed is not exactly what’s true.
• What I predicted is not exactly so.
• What I understood is not exactly correct.
• What I hoped for is not exactly fulfilled.
• What seemed simple is more complex than that.
• What happened is not exactly what I intended.
• What I was hired for is not exactly the job that I got.

To cope with such discrepancies, a young person must adapt and strike a compromise between the anticipated and the actual, between the expected and the unexpected, and make the best of what reality has to offer.

Much that happens for people is not a function of personal intent but is due to human miscalculation (beyond their thinking), the complexity of life (beyond their knowing), and the play of chance (beyond their control.)

Hence, the parental advice: My experience has taught me this:

• No matter what I imagine, I always have to work with what I get.
• No matter what I understand in advance, I never know it all.
• No matter how badly I'm surprised, sometimes it's good.

Compromising with reality is something young people must learn to do, striking the best bargain under the circumstances they can: "That this isn't what I expected is not a problem. It's how life often is."

Managing mutuality

Ongoing relationships require the capacity to compromise so each party can live not on one-way but on two-way terms with each other. This demands a capacity for mutuality—a shared experience where my way and your way are compromised to create our way, each person sacrificing some self-interest for the sake of their relationship. The adolescent learns to do this with friends, with teammates, with fellow students, with siblings, and with parents, and, when older, with coworkers and with romantic partners.

Like managing expectations, mutuality requires compromise—another life skill that has many uses.

Compromise is a process and an outcome. Compromise discusses differences. Compromise is cooperative. Compromise allows give and take. Compromise seeks a middle way. Compromise settles disagreements. Compromise creates agreements. Compromise requires shared sacrifice. Compromise settles for less. Compromise builds a common interest. Compromise considers the other person. Compromise allows people to carry on. Compromise supports mutuality by honoring the needs of three parties in any two-party relationship—of you, of me, and of us.

The ability to create compromise between people can unify their relationships. While the child learns compliance with parents, the adolescent learns compromise with parents as more issues around growing individuality and independence arise between them. This education prepares the adolescent for managing differences and disagreements in significant relationships to come.

The willful person

Some children, adolescents, and adults can be constitutionally willful, by which I mean that

• When they want something, they want it a lot;
• When they want it a lot, they feel they must have it;
• When they assume they must have it (now there is a conditional shift), they believe they should get it;
• When they don’t get what they feel or believe they are entitled to and are denied, they get angry;
• When they get angry, they resort to using anger to get their way if they can and to blame when they cannot.

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Willful people can have a hard time accepting compromise—be it with how an outcome is only partially sufficient or with how a relationship only partly satisfies. In families, they can be domineering to live with: “She just won’t back down!” “He just won’t take ‘no’ for an answer!” “Their way is all that counts!” “No disagreement allowed!” "Refuse and get run over!"

In general, while driven willfulness can sometimes dominate, for most people, learning how to compromise is the more fulfilling way to go.