Parents struggle with the idea of letting their kids grow up. They want to take care of their child, to protect them from the dangers of the world, and to give them the best life they can possibly have. And in their eyes, what better way to guide their children and promise them success and happiness than to keep them from making mistakes? It seems so much better to keep children from experiencing anything bad in order to keep them on the right track. What's so wrong about keeping your child from dealing with negative influences? If you don't let negative influences touch your children, there's no way for them to go the wrong direction.
But there's a lot of issues with that mindset. The idea of keeping your children from experiencing anything you deem negative effectively forces your children to swallow your ideas of what is "negative." They'll never really learn to decide whether or not something is bad for them, for themselves. That's hard to see, because every parent thinks they know what's best for their child. And that's true, to an extent. At a certain age, your child is going to start knowing a lot more about what he or she wants in life, than what you think they want. They will have the capability to critically think for themselves about what's positive and what's negative. Forcing your children to take on your beliefs is the same as taking their individuality. Parents always support individual thinking until their children's thinking begins to differ from theirs. It's essentially parental peer pressure.
It also boils down to simply keeping your children in a box. There's not really that wide of a window between the time they can start critically thinking and when they will be thinking about their own kids. That window is the only real time to experience life for themselves and to learn what they want to learn. The more you cut into that time, the less experiences they have, and the less they've really lived. Setting strict barriers on what your child is allowed to do keeps them from making their own mistakes, and those mistakes are really the best life lessons. It's important to know when to step back and let your child live, and when to step in and help them. People take a lot more from their own pasts than they do from other people's pasts. Children won't really mature, because they don't have anything to base that maturity off of. In the end, they might be the perfect person on the surface, but they'll be an empty shell because there won't be any experiences to build up who they really are.
That's not to say that parents should simply step out of their children's lives completely. Absent parents are just as bad as overbearing parents.
What's important to realize is that in the end, you can't make decisions for your child. If guiding them the right way is your job as a parent, then do that; don't drag them along the road you've deemed "right". There are so many roads leading to the same destination. Let them ultimately choose. Encourage them to do as you would perhaps, try to make them see why the way you want them to go is best. But if they choose differently, you don't stop supporting them just because you disagree with them. Support your children even if they choose to do something you don't agree with. They're still your kids and they still need you. But supporting them is not impressing upon them one idea of "right."
Kids crave independence. Especially throughout their teen years. So it's important to get rid of the whole "teens are awful and can't think for themselves" mentality. A parent acting on that mindset is, in my opinion, what makes their child "act out" and "be angsty" and affirm the idea that teens are still too immature. It's true "no one understands" them.
Parents stop listening to their kids at this age because these kids are asking to be treated as more mature, to be trusted more, to have more freedom, and to be able to be themselves more; that's scary, because it means less control and less knowledge of their kids. These kids are becoming more complicated. That complexity is really just maturity coming into being. When blossoming maturity is met with condescending, patronizing and dismissive reactions that refuse to acknowledge the phase of "growing up," it leads to a lot of frustration. How do you show to someone that you are mature if they won't give you the chance to? A parent has to give a more freedom to the child, even if it is just to see whether or not the child can handle the freedom. Give them a chance. That's it.
In the end, it's summed up like this: There is a difference between supporting your child and limiting them. There's a difference between looking out for your children and keeping them dependent. And there's difference between experiencing life and surviving life.
The journey is what counts in life, so let the kids decide their own adventures.
