Am I Supposed to Be My Kid's Friend?

When seven-year-olds get an equal vote in family decisions...

I frequently give talks to parents on issues related to technology.  After my presentations, parents ask for advice in managing their children’s behavior.  I hear similar questions and worries everywhere I go, with slight variations depending on the population of my audience.  However, I am nearly always met with one specific concern that comes in response to my more challenging suggestions, the ones our kids don’t like. 

It goes like this: parent asks a question about something their kid is doing or wants to do with technology, something they’re worried about, usually the amount of time the child wants to use it or the kind of tech he/she is using.  I respond with a suggestion or intervention that requires limit-setting and a set of guidelines for incorporating that change.  The parent then says some form of this: “But if I do what you’re suggesting, I’m going to be yelled at or hated by my kid; it’s going to cause a huge problem.”  I usually smile and say yes. This, however, seems to confuse the said parent, as if they’re waiting for me to offer a solution to their problem that doesn’t require discomfort or disagreement, a policy that’s easy to implement.  I then deliver the following, sometimes surprising news alert: “As a parent, you're not supposed to be your child’s friend.”

We are living in a time when, as parents, we’re supposed to be our children’s best friends at the same time we’re being their parents.  Moms and dads hang out with their kids as if they’re hanging out with peers.  When there’s a disagreement, parents believe we’re supposed to negotiate with our kids as if we’re negotiating with equals.  Parents of seven-year-olds report to me (with a straight face) all the reasons their child doesn’t agree with their decisions regarding the child’s behavior.  I see parents of children under the age of five who get an equal vote in setting up the rules of the house, which includes the rules that will apply to the children.  I hear the delight of parents who are friended by their kids on social media.  We’re spoon-fed the message that we’re supposed to be buddies with our kids and that they should like us, all the time. And, that we’re bad parents if they are upset by our decisions.

We have thrown away the distinction between adult and child, undermined the wisdom of our adult experience, all so that we can be liked by our kids. We’re choosing to be our children’s playmates rather than to do what’s best for them.  There’s no wonder kids now hurl profanities at their parents in public places, to which the parents giggle awkwardly, and wonder if this too is part of the new hip friend/parent milieu.  As parents, we’re taking the easy path, the path of least resistance, telling ourselves that if our kids like us, then we must be doing this parenting thing right.  In the process of trying to be friends with our kids, however, we are giving away our authority, depriving them of the experience of being taken care of, denying them the serenity, trust, and confidence that arises from knowing that we can stand our ground and protect them even when it incites their anger.  It is precisely because we love our children that we need to be able to tolerate their not liking us all the time.  

When we’re driven by the desire or responsibility to be liked, we’re giving ourselves an impossible task.  We simply cannot prioritize being liked and simultaneously raise healthy, sane, human beings who can tolerate frustration and disappointment.  We are setting ourselves up for suffering and failure.  We survive on the ephemeral crumbs of being liked—liked for giving them what they want, while denying ourselves the real nourishment of the experience of providing our kids with what we know they really need, pleasing or otherwise.  We are, as with many other things, opting for the easiest, most immediate and pleasurable option over the deeper, harder, more thoughtful and ultimately satisfying choice. 

We are also, in this friending over parenting process, doing a great disservice to our kids.  Our kids need boundaries and guidelines.  A woman I work with who was raised by a parent who, above all, wanted to be her friend, put it this way: “I never felt like there was someone to stop me if I got to the end of the earth and was going to dive off.”  Our kids, even though they may scream and throw things, also want us to know things that they don’t, to stick with our knowing despite their railing, to be willing to tolerate their rants in service of their best interests—to take care of them in ways they can’t yet take care of themselves.  Our kids want us to demonstrate fierce grace.  We too feel our best when we walk the walk of fierce grace. 

Often, children do not know what’s best for them, and almost never do they know what’s best for them when it comes to technology use.  It’s hard enough for us grownups to realize what’s best for ourselves and children have front brains that are not anywhere near fully-developed.  Allowing children to make their own rules around technology is like handing an opioid addict a vial of heroin or bottle of oxycontin and asking him to make his own rules on how to use.  Young children and teenagers should not get an equal vote in matters that relate to their tech use, nor in many other matters. As parents, we usually possess at least a couple or more decades of experience under our belts that our children don’t possess. Put simply, we know things they don’t, and we can tell them this truth. This makes our kids not equal in matters that require discipline or hard choices, ones that go against what their brains’ pleasure centers, hormones, or inexperienced thinking tells them is best. 

Remember this: it’s okay for your child to be upset with you; it’s okay if they don’t like or agree with the decisions you make; it’s okay if your child is madder than a wet hornet at you for setting limits and sticking to those limits. You're allowed to say no; it takes great courage to say no.  You're not a bad parent if it gets bumpy and your child goes through periods when he/she doesn’t like you—at all—and maybe even says she hates you for a while. It probably means you’re doing your job as a parent. 

Assuming your role as the authority in your child’s life is critical, and the more you assume that role, the more you will feel the wisdom of your own authority.  Being the authority doesn’t mean turning a deaf ear to your child’s anger, disappointment, or anything else they feel.  We can listen to our kids’ emotions and thoughts while simultaneously holding our ground on what we know is best for them.  Being the authority in your kid’s life doesn’t mean being callous or insensitive, but it does mean being brave enough to stay strong in the face of a tsunami that might come back at you, knowing that your role is to be the grown up in the parent-child relationship, to be loving in your willingness to do what’s best for your kids.  Your role is not to be your child’s friend. 

Teens and Texting: A Recipe For Disaster

Michelle Carter is a teenager who was part of a deadly texting relationship, one that ended in the suicide of her then boyfriend, Conrad Roy.  Michelle Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, wanton and reckless conduct, for encouraging Conrad to kill himself, bullying him via text to follow through with his suicidal thoughts, and not doing anything to stop him when she knew he was dying.  Last week she received a sentence of 15 months.  She was 17 at the time of the crime,

Source: Unsplash

he was 18. This tragic case has gotten me thinking a lot about teens and texting and what’s really happening to our children when they conduct online relationships. 

Michelle and Conrad called each other boyfriend and girlfriend despite the fact that they had only met in person a few times over their more than two-year relationship. They communicated almost exclusively through text messages, over a thousand of them in just the last week of the boy’s life.  Conrad was depressed and had tried to kill himself once before he met Michelle Carter.  Michelle, while socially popular, had also struggled with depression and had a history of cutting and anorexia. 

In the beginning of their relationship, and at other times throughout it, Michelle encouraged Conrad to get help for his depression and was supportive of his hopes and dreams for moving forward in his life.  But as time went by, Michelle became more callous, and chillingly aggressive in convincing him to commit suicide.  She even went so far as to tell him that she would look like a fool, after all this effort, if he didn’t kill himself.  She said, “You always say you’re going to do it but you never do” And when Conrad was scared and got out of truck once it had started filling with carbon monoxide, saying that he didn’t want to die, Michelle told him to get back in and do it.  When he worried that his suicide would cause suffering to his family, Michelle Carter told him that his family would get over him after a couple weeks, and that she would take care of them. 

So how does something this terrible happen, and why?   How does a good kid like Michelle Carter become someone capable of such emotional violence?  And does technology have anything to do with why this tragedy happened?  Is there something about the texting relationship that causes this kind of behavior and dysfunction?  It is critical that we consider such questions now as our teenagers’ relationships have become, for the most part, text-based; kids are communicating less and less in person and more through their devices, experiencing one another via abbreviated, isolated and often terse words on a small screen, without any of the necessary components and triggers for empathy and emotional connection. 

When Michelle Carter met Conrad Roy she seemed to care about him and expressed kindness and concern. But over time and text, she grew colder, less empathic, and more involved in what his suicide would mean for her, how it would get her what she wanted, namely, attention.  Towards the end, as she convinced her boyfriend over text to take his own life, Michelle requested that Conrad tag her in a last post before he died, to memorialize her as his greatest love.  So too, immediately after his death, she began posting on Facebook about her profound loss and suffering.  What we notice is that Conrad, for Michelle, had ceased to be a person in his own right, and rather, had become just an object for her, something that could provide or deprive her of her needs.  Over time, she seemed to stop caring about him or seeing him as a person truly suffering.  She stopped caring about what was in his or his family’s best interest.  Interacting solely with her screen, as opposed to a real-life human being, Michelle Carter seemed only able to feel what would benefit her. 

The texting relationship is missing three profoundly important relational elements, and the essential ingredients of connection and empathy.  Specifically, the sight of someone’s face, the sound of someone’s voice and the language of someone’s body.  Without these three elements, it’s extremely difficult to develop or maintain a sense of empathy for another person.  Texting relationships, if they are not supplemented with real time together, face to face, eventually, can and do lose a sense of empathy and even reality.  The texting teenager shifts from being in relationship with another person to being in a relationship with just themselves.  Without visual and auditory cues, the relationship is with their own words and the screen on which they appear. Teenagers are narcissistic by nature, it's normal;  they need more cues - not less - to resist turning every experience into something about themselves. Teenagers need to see, hear, and experience another person in order to remember that the words coming across their screen indeed belong to someone else real, separate from themselves, with real feelings.  

Furthermore, the texting relationship adds rocket fuel to a teenage mind.  Texting makes it possible to record and manifest every thought that appears, and so, whatever is present in the adolescent mind will be ignited and strengthened.  Because of the possibility that texting creates, teens pay extra attention to their thoughts and are encouraged to listen to and formulate their every idea.  In the past, perhaps ninety eight percent of a teenager’s thoughts might have simply passed through her mind without much attention, without even being remembered, but now such thoughts are celebrated and exacerbated in the process of turning them into texts, formulating the unformulated, and thus feeding the wild teenage mind. 

In addition, texting gives the teenager an un-interrupted audience for her every thought; it offers immediate feedback and attention. Teens today crave attention at a level that’s unprecedented.  It is paradoxical really; on the one hand, teens behave as if their every thought is fascinating and worth recording, and yet, they don’t seem to be able to maintain a sense of self-worth unless continually validated, attended to, and reflected through likes, followers, and constant online attention.  Texting makes it possible for teens to receive that attention 24/7, which is in part why it’s so addictive for the adolescent mind.    

So what is a parent to do?  How can we keep our teens from becoming the next Michelle Carter or Conrad Roy?  Many people judge parents who are unaware of what’s happening in their teen’s online life. But in truth, even the best parents can be duped when it comes to their teen’s texting relationships.  Undoubtedly, teenagers need to individuate, to keep secrets and have private spaces that their parents can’t access.  But before technology was central to a teenager’s life, parents could, to a certain extent, control their child’s access to secrets spaces.  For one thing, the private encounters had to happen outside the house, outside a parent’s earshot and view, and also in between activities like school, sports and the like.  Now, because teens are communicating with peers around the clock, outside the earshot and sight of their parents, the secrets and private encounters exist everywhere and all the time.  As a result, our teenagers’ private lives are impossible to control and difficult to know about, even by the most well-intentioned and loving parent. 

In this new world of nonstop texting teens, parents need to be extra vigilant, to pay serious and focused attention to what their kids are saying, doing, and feeling, and the silences between the words.  If your teen is becoming more withdrawn, angry, sullen, distracted, or is spending more time on her phone, more time out of sight, it’s critically important to inquire into what’s happening in her online life. And don’t just talk to your teen, talk to the parents of her friends as well, about what they are seeing and hearing.  It takes a village to raise a child, and now that their social life goes on outside our reach, we need that village more than ever.  As a parent these days we need to be relentless in discovering our children's virtual universe, and specifically, the relationships they are playing out on their screens.  We must keep open, or if need be, force open the lines of communication with our teens.  Simply trusting and turning the other way, in this new virtually relational world, is no longer an option.