Once we've survived having adolescents in the house, we've got it made: we like to think parenting will be easier from here on out. And it will be. Sort of. But there is a continuum of adolescent rebellion that moves and morphs as our almost-grown kids move into the emerging adult years.
As psychologist Carl Pickhardt explains it, the young child "looks up to parents and their wonderful powers and idealizes who they are. The adolescent looks down on parents and their unfair authority and criticizes who they are. The young adult looks at the hit-and-miss child raising job parents have done and humanizes them as well-intended but imperfect people."
That means our emerging adults see us warts and all, and figure we've done something right and some things wrong. But the really key issue for us, as parents of these emerged adults, is a follow-on point Pickhardt makes: The ultimate goal of adolescent rebellion is to establish adult equity with the parent. "Thus by the end of adolescence," he writes, "there is mutual agreement that the young adult is just as much entitled to run his life as parents are to run theirs."
Some of us run into trouble accommodating ourselves to the "mutual agreement" or their sense of entitlement. If I read Pickhardt right, we tamper with their fledgling independence at our peril.
