Dear Therapist:
I am writing to see if you have any suggestions regarding our 17-year-old son. In general, he hasn’t been doing awesome over the last year. He has a particularly tenuous relationship with his mother while he does a little better with me. This period of quarantine has been particularly difficult. I guess I can break down the issue into a couple different questions. He is not really functioning on a normal schedule, waking up late, sitting on his phone all day. Given the situation how much to we push back against this? There has always been an issue with him helping at home. This really bothers his mother and now this is amplified. How do you suggest we navigate this? He has been hanging out with his friends at night in violation of social distancing norms, how much do we fight him on this?
Response:
This has been a difficult time for most of us. Part of the difficulty is due to ways that changes to social distancing rules have affected our social and emotional wellbeing. These factors have, in many cases, exacerbated already-troubling situations within many families.
Your questions can be viewed from a general—pre-coronavirus—perspective, as well as from within the current situation. Your general questions relate to how hard—and in what way—you should push your son to conform to the rules that you lay out for him. To some extent, this depends on the relationships within the family.
All else being equal, it sounds like you would be better able to convince your son to follow some of the rules. However, if his mother is often the one who is more vocal about these rules, his problematic relationship with her may well cause him to push back against what he views as restrictive and unreasonable. This often occurs when a child gets the sense that his parents are split with regard to their thoughts on the enforcement of rules. If your son believes that one of you is significantly more concerned than the other with a rule (or rules in general), he will tend to play one of you against the other to get his way.
Aside from the child possibly gaining the advantage in each particular scenario (by playing one parent against the other), this can lead to a pattern—in turn leading to the child gaining more control over their parents than is healthy. Sometimes the question is less about the right decision than presenting a united front. If one parent is simply not going to change their viewpoint, there are times when “agreeing” with their viewpoint is the lesser of the two evils.
Related issues are your son’s relationship with his mother, that with you…and quite possibly your relationship with her. It is not uncommon for disagreements over the proper way to discipline a child to provoke relationship issues between the parents. This, naturally, can easily lead the child to take control. Often, the further control that the child takes, the greater the rift between the parents, thus leading to a vicious cycle.
Specific advice about what rules to enforce and how to enforce them should be discussed with a professional who is familiar with your situation. Since I don’t know your son or the specifics of your relationships and the situation, I cannot offer specific advice. However, it is important that you and his mother present a united front at all times so as not to turn a difficult issue into one that is untenable.
-Yehuda Lieberman, LCSW
psychotherapist in private practice
Brooklyn, NY | Far Rockaway, NY
author of Self-Esteem: A Primer
www.ylcsw.com / 718-258-5317
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