Child to adult: the difficult teenage years
Before your child has stopped being a teenager, they will legally be an adult.
In fact, by the time they are half way through those teen years, in most Australian states teenagers can:
Leave school (at the end of Year 10)
Have sex with whomever they choose
Leave home
When they turn 18 (if not before) they can:
Drive a car on their own
Consume alcohol anywhere adults can
Vote to elect the leaders they want
Get married
Go to war (you can join the defence forces at 17)
Whether we like it or not, at 18, they will be a fully functional adult in the eyes of the law.
Change the focus to when the teenage journey begins at 13 and many children are quite child-like in many of their outlooks and behaviours and certainly in their mental development. Until they turn 13 they can’t even have a part time job so they are completely dependent on you to meet virtually all of their material needs.
So, the teenage years have to be seen as your child enrolling in their very own adult-in-training program run, almost exclusively, by you. You have somewhere between 3 and 5 years to take this child from being fully dependent to being fully independent, if required. For the complexities of that transition this is an incredibly short timeline. It is made much more difficult by the fact that most teenagers don’t have mental development to accurately assess the actual level of their skills, abilities, understanding of how the world works and their decision-making capacities. They will, invariably tend to over-estimate all of that.
In addition, patience is not a characteristic for which that teenagers are well-known. Many 13 year olds think that they are more than capable of being able to handle sexual relationships and alcohol. Many 16 year olds know they are. You may know different, as you are aware that at 13 a fully developed adult brain is still at least 12 to 15 years away. Popular psychologist and parent educator Dr Michael Carr-Gregg sums it up well by saying the well-developed sound decision-making part of your teenager’s brain has to be in the front of your skull, because it is not in theirs.
Other complications include the fact that a part of the transition to being an assertive, independent adult, able to stand up for yourself in what may be an over-whelming world is the need to break away from family, resist being told what you ‘have to do’ by anybody, including your parents and assert your rights to make your own decisions. This process has the potential to create considerable conflict between parent and child.
The long and the short of it is this is an incredibly difficult and demanding task. You will quite rightly want to delay their introduction to sexual relations and alcohol consumption until they are physically and mentally more capable of dealing with the responsibilities that go along with those activities. They may be under considerable social, emotional and peer pressure to introduce those things into their lives as soon as possible. Much more potential conflict here.