In the early 21st century, when American children reach late adolescence (18 years to 21 years), parents have little control and adolescents often don’t have sufficient self-control. We now know that this is partly due to the incomplete development of white matter in the brain, the tracts and linkages that allow full integration of brain function, including, most importantly for this discussion, judgment that facilitates responsibility.
In the responsibility vacuum between late adolescence and early adulthood for many Americans, problems also develop that are a symptom of the absence of intention, living life with a focus and purpose.
Most American adolescents grow into adults who exercise good judgment and are responsible and intentional, but to the degree the transition is prolonged, the parent suffers and is at financial and emotional risk. Too often, the parent and adolescent get locked into their relationship and retard each other’s growth so that the adolescent enters adulthood scarred and misdirected, with the most important relationship available to him/her seriously strained, if it exists at all.
Parental Coaching is based on motivational interviewing and health coaching, two related methods that are effective in bringing about behavior change in people who are recalcitrant to change.
Parental Coaching uses the emerging rationality of the adolescent to identify and develop discrepancies between what the adolescent wants and what is naturally available in society. It takes advantage of this discrepancy and the adolescent’s need to become competent as an adult. The need to become competent is best addressed by the adolescent’s setting and working toward goals, with the parent as a coach.
The goal of Parental Coaching is to complete the job of inculcating the parent’s value system in the adolescent as an emerging adult. It takes advantage of the earlier value training that is there if you look for it and causes the immature behavior in an adult body to be a source of shame and embarrassment for the adolescent.
Parental Coaching helps to create rites of passage that didn’t used to be necessary because American children’s ascent into adulthood was much more abrupt. Given the contemporary culture, American parents now need to facilitate a change in the Parent-Child relationship as adulthood looms. If the parent can preserve the inherent value in the relationship while stepping out of the earlier parental role to become a coach to their emerging adult-child, the parent continues to be a valued and influential ally. If the adult-child can allow the adult-parent to be coach, the transition into adulthood will be faster and more consistent with the family’s values and a healthy adult-to-adult relationship will emerge.
Parental Coaching begins with a parental attempt to increase the adolescent’s awareness of the costs of immature behavior in an adult body with the parent doing non-judgmental asking rather than judgmental lecturing. This is a difficult step for most parents, especially when the parent has had several dramatic examples of immature behavior in an adult body that have already been handled judgmentally. Often, a professional counselor or relative such as a caring uncle or aunt will need to help model this for both parent and adolescent.
Parental Coaching requires a different emphasis on the age-old parental question, “What the hell were you thinking!?” The question still needs to be asked because it marks the moment and makes absolutely clear the parent’s value system, which remains the bedrock of the adolescent’s, though this seems to be covered up and sometimes invisible. But the question needs to be asked as if it actually is a question, rather than a more sophisticated way of spanking the adolescent for immature behavior in an adult body.
Parental Coaching is always focused on considering choices broadly and then choosing that reflects the family’s values and then sticking with the choice in spite of pressures to abandon the earlier intention and acquiesce to peer pressure or laziness.
Through Parental Coaching the adolescent becomes increasingly motivated to achieve a future that requires acquiescence to some semblance of the family’s values because that makes available the rich resources that are only available within the family. Parental Coaching helps adolescents:
- Think differently about their behavior by identifying discrepancies between how the adolescent wants life to be and how life actually works.
- Identify what might be gained through change.
- Identify new possibilities for behavior.
- Explore and resolve the adolescent’s natural ambivalence about change.
- Develop opportunities for healthy experimentation.
- Realistically and carefully review their results.
Used by professional therapists, motivational interviewing is non-judgmental, non-confrontational and non-adversarial, which won’t work for most parent-adolescent relationships. Parents are naturally judgmental and must at times be confrontational and adversarial. Parental Coaching takes advantage of this by offering the adolescent an opportunity to adjust the parent-adolescent relationship, if the parent is willing to say, “I can help you become a healthy and happy adult if you can be honest with me and yourself about the choices you’re making. I’ll support those that I understand and will give you the benefit of the doubt for those I don’t understand as long as you are honest with me and yourself.”
Parental Coaching takes advantage of the natural ambivalence and sense of inadequacy that the adolescent has about behavioral change focused on a life of competence and independence that he or she seeks.
The parent helps the adolescent take responsibility for emerging independence by setting goals and identifying resources and threats. During this stage of the relationship, the parent and adolescent enter into an “accountability partnership” focused on the adolescent’s valued future.
Parental Coaching uses the natural empathy of the parent for the adolescent to develop better communication about the adolescent’s perspective in order to identify the discrepancies between where the adolescent is and where he or she wants to go.
The natural resistance to change that will be demonstrated by the adolescent is accepted and new behaviors are encouraged through understanding. Nobody really wants to change themselves, we all want our circumstances to change so that we can be happier without having to change. Resistance to change is natural and needs to become less important to the parent; the naturally-developing needs and abilities of the adolescent will instigate change. The adolescent has a strong urge to become competent, develop self-efficacy and establish independence that parents can trust and foster.
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