This time they promised you they wouldn't engage in any underage drinking. You thought, after the last time you caught them in a drunken stupor having driven home from a party, that they had learned their lesson. But your teen never made it home last night ... as a parent, what do you do?
Surviving the Teen Years
Such scenarios make it easy to understand why many parents view the teen years as a crash course in survival. For moms and dads in the trenches of acne, raging hormones, adventurous body art and the brave new world of "sexting" and cyber bullying, survival can seem highly underrated. Add to this eruptive mix the temptation to experiment with popular teen gateway drugs like alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana, and it is no wonder most parents probably secretly wish they could take a five-year sabbatical from child rearing between the ages of 12 and 17 -- or at least outsource the heaviest lifting to pros like "The Teen Whisperer."
For the vast majority of parents left to struggle through the teen years mostly on their own, save the occasional advice of other parents and self-help tips on the web and in books. Knowing how to walk the line between enabling risky behaviors, on the one hand, and being too over-protective, on the other, is a delicate balancing act. That is because the middle ground between implicitly encouraging (enabling) a child to binge drink, experiment with drugs, or make other unsafe choices and sheltering them too much from the necessary risks of adolescence can seem narrow, indeed. In fact, it's a pretty thin line. On that note, the following pointers can help.
How to Know if You're Enabling Your Teen
Let's return to the above scenario: your teen never made it home last night after promising before they left that this time they wouldn't be drinking. Just when you are about to panic and call 911, your teen saunters through the door. They look sheepish, disheveled and not in a mood to talk. In these circumstances, here is how to know if you're enabling your teen:
- You avoid making any inquiries about where your child has been, the friends they were with and whether they and your teen were drinking.
- You only express feelings of total relief that your child has made it home safely, at the expense of addressing the other ways in which their behavior has affected and inconvenienced you.
- In the present moment you are most concerned with protecting your child from the consequences of their choice -- in this case, being very late for school, not having completed any homework or gotten any rest or breakfast in preparation for today's responsibilities at school. You may even offer to stay home from work, drive your child to school and do their homework for them.
- You tell your teen that from now on they will have to abide by stricter rules (no parties on school nights, a strict curfew, no use of your car to visit with friends, etc.), but then you don't enforce these new rules.
How to Know if You're Being Overprotective
A parent who is being overprotective in the same set of circumstances would respond in different but potentially equally damaging ways. Research has found a link between controlling parenting styles and anti-social and delinquent behaviors, for example. In this case, an authoritative crackdown -- or the parental equivalent of imposing martial law -- is also not a commendable route, even if it may seem intuitively appropriate in an effort to protect your teen from dangerous situations moving forward.
If you tend to err on the side of being hyper-vigilant and overly controlling and protective, here are some things to ask yourself when you find yourself in this scenario or others like it:
- Am I losing my temper and lashing out in anger?
- Am I over-reacting to the situation out of fear and worry?
- Are the boundaries or consequences that I'm imposing as a result of my child's unsafe choice a clear and direct extension of my child's behavior? (A requisite consequence of your child having been out all night partying, having taken your car, might be for example, the loss of their car privileges for an extended period of time, and/or the requirement that from now you will transport them to and from social gatherings. A requisite consequence is not, on the contrary, telling your child that for the rest of their adolescent life they will be grounded from all socializing with friends!)
- Is my discipline strategy about helping my teen exercise more responsible choices in the future, or is it more my effort to control outcomes that are beyond my control?
What You Can Do
Striding the thin line between enabling and overprotecting is a worthy enterprise, however tricky it may be. Here is what you can do to stride that thin line in the proposed scenario and others like it:
- Ask your child gently and directly about the events of the previous night and whether they were in fact drinking (after promising you they would not).
- Encourage them to think about both the real and potential consequences of their behavior.
- Let your child know how much you love them and how their behavior has hurt you and betrayed your trust to the degree that you cannot be sure, without some clearer boundaries and consequences moving forward, that you are able to trust their word.
- State clearly what your child's loss of privileges and/or the new rules will be as a result of this incident and then firmly enforce them.
- Try motivating your child with a positive behavioral incentive that encourages precisely the sort of responsible behavior you would have liked to see in the above situation.
- If you don't know your teen's friends, now is a good time to start getting to know them and to develop a back-up list of friends and parents to call during emergencies like this one.
- Develop a plan for how to check in on your teen and their friends in future social situations where drinking and other risky behaviors are likely to occur.
- If this incident turns out to be one of many in a string of underage drinking episodes, call a substance abuse hotline to consult with an addiction professional. Your child may be struggling with an alcohol use disorder.
As Executive Director of Beach House Center for Recovery, Robert Yagoda brings more than 10 years of combined clinical and administrative experience in facility-delivered, drug and dual diagnosis treatment. Robert is a licensed mental health counselor and certified addictions professional. What motivates him most is seeing clients make groundbreaking strides in recovery, knowing he was part of their growth and success.
