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How to Keep Individual Parenting Styles From Impacting a Struggling Teen

During our last Strengthening the Co-Parenting Team course, I worked with a family who was struggling with an anxious child, a strained parental relationship and a technology addiction.

The Situation

The father routinely tells his child that his game time is up and that it is time to get ready for bed.  Child ignores his father.  Moments later, father prompts child again. Child begins negotiating for more time.  This escalates, father doesn’t budge and son storms away to find his mother.

Child talks to mother about the logic behind being able to continue to play and make his 10:30pm curfew.  Father walks in to defend his position that game time is up. Child screams at father to “stay out of this”, shouting, “this is none of your (expletive) business”. Mother tells father that she can deal with it and asks him to leave.

Father storms off ruminating that child is not going to be able to take responsibility later in life if he can’t even get off of the game when asked. Mother negotiates with child. Child continues his game for another 30 minutes and makes his curfew on time.

This might sound like a positive story where everyone came up with a somewhat workable solution, but in reality, it highlighted a dysfunctional parenting pattern that was playing out in other areas in much less benign ways. Instead of turning it into further resentment and bitterness, it became an opportunity for both parents to learn.

The dysfunctional parenting pattern

The parents became aware that they had a habitual pattern of not valuing each other as individual, capable members of the family. The mother kept fixing everything, as she felt she was the designated peacekeeper between the son and the father.

While this sounds like a noble and worthy role, this undermined the father and suggested that he and his son were incapable of coming to resolutions on their own, which lead to the son devaluing his father even more than he already did.

Throughout the four weeks of the course, this mother was able to learn how how to respond in the moment, in a way that allowed her to be available to her son without undermining her husband’s parenting. She learned how to encourage her son to work through things with his father, on his own, in a healthy way.

Here's what really impacts a child's wellbeing

A 2009 study from the University of London, on families, stated that it is not the type of family (divorced, partnered, married or single parented) that impacts a child’s well being, but, more important, how the family functions, as a whole.

This might seem obvious, but often we are not aware of how our own habits might not be contributing to the health of our family’s functioning; or we might be aware that we can no longer be at odds with our co-parent, but we don’t know how to break old habits.

Even though the mother was intervening to keep the peace and make everybody happy, her efforts were exacerbating unhealthy behaviors for her son, preventing the father from being able to have a direct relationship with his child and exhausting herself by having to always be the middleman.

The importance of taking the time to pause in our relationships

We’re living in a time where fast-paced over scheduled lives; parental over-involvement; fear-based parenting; over connection to digital devices; and anxiety ridden children and adults are becoming the norm. It’s no surprise that two parents don’t take the time to pause long enough to examine their relationship and the impact it is having on the entire family system, until the problems become too severe to ignore.

Like these parents, perhaps you have witnessed your child’s aggression or violence when trying to turn the screen off after 10 hour of addicted game time; or you have seen your child depressed and unable or unwilling to go to school; maybe what started off as some typical teen experimentation has turned into an unhealthy identity with the drug culture and addiction.

Or maybe you are just starting to notice things that aren't drastic, but are starting to concern you. This could be a child who constantly demands to have things done for her and blames the world when things go wrong; an inability to get work completed, though you are aware he is smart and capable; a child who stays up too late with an eye on social media; or a quickly declining self-esteem. Sometimes even these examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

Sincerely, Hilary Moses - Parent Coach, Solutions Parenting Support


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Solutions Parenting Support, LLC is a nationally recognized parent support and transition program assisting parents and families with straightforward and compassionate skills based support prior to, during and after wilderness therapy and/or residential treatment. Solutions is a dynamic team of parent coaches who have had extensive careers as therapists in wilderness therapy or residential treatment before turning their talents towards coaching parents around the globe. The team is family system focused and are licensed professional therapists and/or social workers each with 15-30 years of experience working in wilderness therapy programs, varying levels of residential treatment programming, and transitional support.

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