Adolescence
Parenting Adolescents and Three Challenges of Keeping Order
Since adolescence is so disorganizing, parental direction has stabilizing value.
Posted September 23, 2025 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
The messy room, the scattered stuff, the forgotten promises, the lapsed memory, the wandering attention, the tuned-out response, the lost belongings, the trail of litter around the family home, can all be emblematic of the more demanded, distracted, and disorganized adolescent state of mind.
Adolescent overload
The dramatic growth change of adolescence can be a lot to keep up with as it unpredictably increases the complexity of one’s inner and outer life. “How I look different in the mirror each morning, keeping up with friends at school each day, family demands a home, teachers who keep piling on new assignments: there’s always something new that's going to matter.” More than childhood, adolescence can be a more demanding and disorganizing time of life.
“The wheels have come off the truck!” was how one dad described how his young teenager had become. “The inside of his head is like his room – a complete clutter!” While a mom despairs of her daughter’s backpack, treated like a waste basket of school assignments: “She can’t find anything where she keeps everything!”
Adolescent objection
Order can be a major point of contention for many young adolescents, particularly when expressing new individuality, pushing for independence, or in rebellious mode. For the young person, it can feel emblematic of the oppressive adult system that keeps declaring what the teenager must and cannot do. “You’re not the boss of the world!” the frustrated young person may object.
Adult order can feel like the enemy of personal freedom, yet adolescent anarchy is not really desired. Parental order is also welcome in a grudging way because this family structure of rules and restraints and growing expectations also secures a stable sense of place and purpose in a rapidly changing world. “At least I don’t have to decide everything for myself!”
Need for order
Since adolescence is often a less “orderly” age, consider how the word “order” can become problematic for the teenager in several common ways:
- Order as organizing (“Keep track of possessions and commitments”),
- Order as demanding (“Do what’s required and as you’re told”),
- Order as prioritizing (“Stick to what’s most important.”)
Parents have a supportive role in helping the young person maintain personal order of all three kinds.
Order as organizing
For some highly disorganized and distractible teenagers, it can be a mercy to live in a strictly kept personal space. “Everything in my room is where it’s supposed to be.” While a messy room can feel free in the sense that no order is externally required; it can also feel confusing and anxiety-provoking to live in chaotic surroundings. Such order can create a locus on control in a world rapidly growing larger and more complex.
And just because growing bedroom disorder is in evidence doesn’t mean that once a week parents can’t insist that the space be picked and cleaned up to mostly suit their sense of household order, even though in the succeeding week they know it will lapse into more messiness again.
Just as parents can show the teenager how to use an assignment calendar to keep track of what is due to happen when, they can keep personal space structured in some simple ways so important belongings can be readily found to forestall the complaint: “I hate it when I forget or can’t find something!” Know how to order and organize how you live, and you will feel more in charge, as an older adolescent who graduates their care will often testify. “I’ve learned how to keep my life together, such as it is.”
Order as demanding
Parental demands limit adolescent freedom at an age when freedom matters more than ever. This is why there is commonly more teenage resistance to parental demands. There is more passive resistancein the form of delay. “It takes forever to get her to do anything we want.” And there is more active resistance in the form of argument. “Everything we ask of him is up for debate.”
The marching order for parents dealing with delay is: be not deterred. With patient, persistent pursuit wear passive adolescent delay with parental insistence. “My parents just keep after me until I finally do what they ask.” Without getting upset, parents show they mean what they say by following through with what they directed.
As for argument, communicating more disagreement to the family powers that be, this is to be valued. The adolescent is willing to talk out and not shut up or act out in opposition. So, listen to argument, value the speaking up about what matters to the young person, and model and insist on appropriate language. Simply declare: “We will be firm where we have to, flexible where we can, and always give a full hearing to whatever you have to say, so long as it is said respectfully.” Thus is how a working sense of family order is maintained.
Order as prioritizing
Keeping one’s life in order can have to do with placing attention and energy on what matters most. The problem is, as the child grows, what matters most can change, particularly around the age of entering into middle school.
For example, to the elementary school child, of first importance is often achieving well in school because that pleases self and parents; second comes having friends because this companionship creates fun; and third comes personal appearance because how you look and dress doesn’t matter that much yet.
But middle school is not elementary school, partly because now the separation from childhood into early adolescence has begun for most children. In consequence, now operating priorities can be reordered, like this. First comes personal appearance because how you look is a now a big part of how you are valued and treated. Second comes having friends because peer acceptance and belonging, fulfills the urgent need for socially fitting in. And lastly can come continuing to make academic effort because, for the young person, grades don’t have the immediate impact that maintaining appearance and friendships now do.
So, for many young people there can be an early adolescent/middle school achievement drop as making the effort to make grades is discounted in comparison to the two other higher priorities. “Grades don’t matter that much; just getting by should be good enough,” parents may be told. They must explain how this belief is not so. “Middle school grades directly affect what you are encouraged to take in high school – like higher level and advanced classes. Building your future opportunity increasingly depends on your classroom effort now.”
Takeaway
Helping their teenager keep personal order during a rapidly changing period of growth is part of the parent’s thankless job. So:
1. Help your teenager stay sufficiently organized during a more distracting and complicated time.
2. Follow through on rules and requests so the teenager has a family structure to depend on.
3. Maintain expectations and operating priorities that give support for future growth.
