Psychology Today

Older adolescents who have grown up since birth as citizens of both offline and online worlds have to keep these twin realities adequately separated, integrated, and balanced.

The approaches parents use to stay meaningfully and influentially connected to their adolescent are numerous, and necessarily so in a relationship that never stops growing in complexity.

That first step in the last stage of adolescence, Trial Independence (18-13), moving out from home for job or college, can be harder to take than the young person anticipated. The separation feels hard because the familiarity and comforts of home are sincerely missed.

When it comes to leading a more independent path through life at the end of adolescence, finding a working interest to like and taking an active interest in work one doesn't like can both be hard to do.

One trap for parents and teenager when in a hard place with each other is to think hard thoughts and feel hard feelings. By doing so, matters get worse. To make them better it helps to violate negative predictions and disempower feelings from influencing decisions.

Today's parents must raise children in two worlds, offline and online, and for adolescents freedom on the Internet has a powerful allure.

Continually lying to parents needs to prove counter-productive for the adolescent.

Parental perception and parental enabling can contribute to what constitute adolescent "problems" in their eyes.

Parents need to respect the adolescent room for the many personal functions it can provide; the adolescent needs to respect parental needs for that room to fit into what they want in a family home. This is an accommodation that must be made.

The closer to reaching a valued growth goal an adolescent gets, often the more ambivalent and resistant they can become.

There are affirmative actions parents can take to stay meaningfully and satisfyingly connected to their teenager as the process of adolescence grows them apart, as it is meant to do.

For many last stage adolescents (18 - 23) independence can prove too much of a good thing when they flounder in so much freedom, become stressed out, and experience emotional crisis as a result. At this juncture, parents can be of help.

With all the media attention devoted to adolescents getting in trouble, getting hurt, and getting killed, it's hard for parents not to worry about their teenager and to act restrictively in her or her defense. However, the best protection parents can provide is self-management preparation for safely functioning in a hazardous world.

For many adolescents, after letting go the childhood dependence on parents, there is a need for a transitional dependence on an assertive and strongly defined same sex friend before feeling ready to rely more independently on themselves.