As a parent of three in a blended family, while raising them I often felt that my children were not going to behave responsibly unless I was constantly supervising them. They are adults now and just launched into their lives, but I can still hear them when they were teens: "Why can’t I go out with my friends? Katie’s mother lets her – Jodi’s mother lets her – even Carly is going out tonight - you are the most unfair mother of all."
At times my daughter succeeded in letting me feel like Momma Cruella. So then I would "back off" for a while and live in fear that she would make poor choices. And on one cold February evening, when we lived in Rhode Island, she broke curfew and was in her friend’s car at one o’clock in the morning, listening to music and having a great time. But not for long. Under freezing temperatures, bridges ice more quickly than the road and when the little Toyota hit the black ice, it started to spin out of control. The car hit several trees before it stopped on a frozen pond. The impact of the car broke the ice and my daughter felt the freezing water enter the car. She looked at her friend who was driving and saw that she had blood on her face. There were no other cars passing by. So she managed to squeeze the passenger door open and walk across the frozen pond to the nearest house and rang the bell and knocked on the door. It seemed hours before the owner, awoken by the barks of her dog, came to the door. She looked out the peephole suspiciously, and then saw the car with its lights on, slowly sinking in her pond. Then she called 911. The rest is history. The girls were hurt but recovered. I remember thinking: "This is the price you pay for not supervising and regulating her environment more carefully."
I still hadn’t learned that my first option, to over-control and over-regulate my daughter was not going to work. Backing off her was no solution either. It wasn’t until I started visiting "intervention and wilderness programs" that I began to see what my daughter needed. There is a way to teach teens to do the right things for the right reasons. It requires that they pay attention to their own feelings, and not pay attention to external factors such as their peer’s views and even their parents’ feelings about their behaviors. This is so hard to do for parents, but the payoff is worth it.
Teens that are in touch with their feelings can learn to self-govern. They can learn to self-evaluate. A fruitful way for parents to deal with them is to remain non-judgmental and re-phrase what happened as facts. My daughter broke down in tears over her friend’s injuries as a result of the car accident. Teens who feel their own disappointment in themselves learn a more powerful lesson than anything parents could do or say.
Wilderness programs are an effective vehicle to help teens become reflective and to help them pay attention to their internal processes. Teens are subjected to many conflicting messages from their peers, the media and the surface culture of the day. Parents set their standards and they too are subject to cultural expectations of how parents should/should not act. Teens are very susceptible to what their peers think of them. When they don’t get along with their parents they turn to their friends. We forget that the teen years are years of immense change when they try to develop their sense of identity. They are establishing their own ideas of what the world is about and establish their own coping mechanisms. Unless poor coping methods such as recreational use of drugs and alcohol are addressed during the teen years, teens may continue to use them when they are adults. Wilderness programs can break these patterns of poor coping mechanisms before they become engrained.
It’s very difficult for parents to make the decision to send their child away for an extended period of time. They may hope that it’s a passing phase and their teen will go to college after all. However, college is not the place for a teen who is not well-grounded in his feelings and values, and does not connect the present with what will happen in the future. The temptations are many in college and it’s easy for teens to seek a sense of belonging by joining a negative peer group or engaging in risky behaviors. Parents who let their teen do his/her own work end up raising an independent and self-regulating adult who is able to choose between good/bad peers, healthy/unhealthy relationships and lifestyles. Wilderness programs coach parents in how to do this and build a foundation for better connections within the family unit.
C. Claire Law, M.S. is an IECA Certified Educational Planner on Daniel Island. She has first-hand knowledge of and visits special needs programs in order to assists parents with troubled teens. She can be reached at 843-278-1271 or claire@eduave.com.