The Importance of Patience as a Parent in the Teen Years

Her: I’ll be getting up earlier tomorrow so don’t worry if you’re hearing a bit of noise. I’ll try to be as quiet as possible.

Me: As early as this morning?

Her: Not quite, but maybe like 5:30/6:00

Me: Are you heading out earlier tomorrow?

Her: No, I just am going to try getting up earlier for a while. I feel like I’m wasting too much of my day. I’d wanted to be working more on the new course than I have been.

Now, I’m not one to consider sleep wasteful. Sleep is blissful, important, essential.  And the concept of wasting is really dependent on the person and their goals at that time. So I’d actually been happy to see her sleeping when she’d been up late with other things. 

That being said, she and I move at different paces. It’s hard to know how much is innate and how much is that she’s grown up with a degree of agency over her time that, having been in school full-time and strongly encouraged to work from a young age, I didn’t have. So it’s been uncomfortable for me sometimes. 

What pace would I naturally choose had I developed that ability to follow my own needs? I don’t know. Would I be answering work texts Sunday night? In my defence, they often do need to be answered, so maybe. Would I have chosen work that required so much of me in that way though? My intuition and my “shoulds” are all tangled up and hard to discern. 

And so with the different paces (to mine and also to each other) that my children have had over the years, have come niggling doubts. Is it really okay for teens to sleep later? To be night owls? To choose their own pace and schedules? To be on “screens” for long periods of time? To work what society considers “overtime” but to them feels normal on the one hand and then sometimes less on the other? Shouldn’t they be stressed out? Arguing with us more? In more resentful moments I wonder if it’s okay for them to have this peace and interdependence I never had. To have something I don’t fully have even now. Or maybe that I don’t recognize. I technically could have a lot more agency and freedom from expectation than I know how to claim. Often during a really joyful day, I feel like I’m getting away with something. I feel sheepish if I get enough sleep in the morning or stay up “too late” in the flow of creating or researching. I occasionally imagine my writing being marked and how it would measure up. Even though I enjoy it and others tell me they get something from it, which are the actual points of writing, a small part of the back of my mind fills with comparisons and rankings and feeling the need to explain when I begin a sentence with “And” or “But.” 

My kids don’t seem to feel they’re getting away with anything for enjoying things, taking care of themselves, working more or less if they need or want to. Often they do hard things with courage and curiosity rather than the resentment I see in so many others, my husband and I included. 

 I hear these words of my daughter about making a change in wake-up time to meet a goal, to find purpose in working on something enough to get up earlier and I’m glad I waited a little and just observed a while rather than interrupting that process. 

It takes an enormous amount of patience and often willpower to hold back on our observations, discomforts and concerns and this is one reason that I think many of us can have a tendency to do some jumping back and forth with rules and routines in family life. Waiting and holding space is unfamiliar in our society and it’s often deeply uncomfortable for us in our best wishes for our children as well as in hearing or imagining what others think. This tension for us might increase in the teen years because not only are there standard assumptions about meeting milestones, but it’s also a time of big physical, intellectual and existential change with all the emotions that come along with those. 

In the end, she and I had a good laugh because the 5:30 am study time actually wasn’t that fruitful, the snooze button was hit more than once and she’s landed back at not setting the early alarm, but instead setting a time to work right until the cusp of evening. (I’m not saying that people need to have set times but she likes to have a general map of her time). 

And I think that’s interesting too because often when our kids make a self-directed decision that feels conventional and responsible we feel a sense of relief, or maybe even pride if we’re unschooling. “Look at that,” we might say to ourselves. “They’ve come to their own responsible conclusion, and all without coercion, punishments and rewards, just like the unschooling gurus said they would.” 😁

But then it doesn’t quite pan out the way it’s planned. Snooze buttons are hit, or maybe other goals or declarations don’t happen or do, but need some support from us.  I think sometimes that’s the slippery slope of holding too tightly to specific ideas of educational or parenting philosophies. Even if the ‘gurus’ don’t mean them to be taken verbatim (which sometimes they do but often maybe don’t), in our love for our kids and desire to get it right, we look for a prescriptive path. 

I have not found this way of living straightforward. At all. The duality of leaning into plans and interests and being ready to help facilitate, yet simultaneously not forming a grip on the outcome is complex. Sometimes we grieve a bit as they move on from interests or stages. Digging for time and energy on a whim (when we can and because we choose to) to be present and supportive, while knowing the very path we’re validating may change course can be taxing. Expanding our minds to imagine (not necessarily take on) their developing perspectives even when they rub against deeply held convictions we might have is not for the faint of heart. Could that actually be the beauty of it though? 

Over and over, I see the fruit of kids who know themselves, understand their inherent worth and that of others, and who somehow know that taking care of themselves is not a deterrent to others but can actually create a healthier dynamic in general. I’m still sifting through all of this and am so conditioned otherwise, particularly working in social services, that it may always need to be intentional work for me in seeing life that way for myself and my own needs. 

So how do I wrap this up except to say that I find it helpful to surrender to and actually be curious about the ongoing work involved in being in respectful relationship. 

And again, patience. None of this happens quickly. It takes patience to observe and support kids as they explore passions, areas of study, future paths and develop self-regulation. Not just “sit back in an armchair and see how it all plays out” patience – although honestly that often works more than we might imagine – but a gentle, curious “wait a bit, maybe a good bit, until you say something and just see where some positive support could be helpful” patience. 

*Something I want to add is that I’m saying ‘teens’  but really this dynamic happens into early adulthood and beyond as well. The example of figuring out the alarm and study time is one from my daughter being 18. Your child might not have a focus on setting specific “study times” ever because it’s not their thing and regardless of their areas of interests, I found a big difference in my kids’ ability to sort that out in the later teens versus the earlier ones.  I also am finding a big difference in my own abilities to be a patient and see how things will play out.

**As an addition, Virtual Kitchen Table Podcast Episode #20 is called “Deschooling Imperfectly – The Beauty of Intention” and might have some thoughts around giving ourselves grace when we struggle or slip up in our schoolish ways, which are often connected to patience.