Lessons learnt from your teen

It’s that old chestnut – how much better we’d be at being teenagers second time around. All that life experience we’d bring to it, the wisdom, the perspective, the Teflon-coating. No broken hearts, superior study habits (with corresponding top marks), generally blitzing it in the teenage department.

Except we’re wrong.

If your teenager gets through the teenage years relatively unscathed, it’s not you who got them through it. It’s them who got you through it. Because they’re the ones at the coal face, dealing with the day-to-day reality of teen relationships, friendships, break-ups, teachers, studying, drugs, parties, sex, social media, the list goes on and on.

We’re not the experts – they are. And it’s about time we showed them the respect they deserve.

In fact, I’ll take it one step further – not only do we have nothing much to teach them about being teenagers; we could learn a thing or two from them about being adults if we just sat and listened.

Being a parent of little ones comes with a whole lot of adoration: they look to us for guidance, laugh at all of our jokes, want to please us, are impressed at our spelling skills: how can we not start believing our own publicity?

Then they become teenagers, and the pushback starts. Our jokes aren’t funny. Our music sucks. For gods’ sake, we don’t even know how to do subtraction (when did that get so hard?). On occasion, let’s face it, we’re downright embarrassing.

We go from being the fount of all knowledge, to the butt of all jokes.

As the world starts expanding for them, we try to rein them in; panicking that we haven’t prepared them for it, that they’re vulnerable, that they’re going to make mistakes, that we need to protect them, that they’re not listening to us. Maybe, if we’re honest with ourselves, we worry that we’re becoming irrelevant. To combat this, a lot of us end up parenting from a worst-case-scenario point of view, which is exhausting and demoralising, and has the potential to cement in their minds the idea that we don’t know what we’re talking about.

The freedom that comes from letting go, from leaving them to it, is powerful. Not just for us, as parents, but for our children, as teenagers. Watch their shoulders straighten up when they realise that we’re letting them make their own decisions. When we start (genuinely) trusting them. Of course they’ll make mistakes – that’s their job. But, we all make mistakes. We can’t stop them from making mistakes. And we shouldn’t try.

Let’s take Greta Thundberg as an example – it’s hard to imagine her parents were thrilled when she started wagging school every Friday to sit outside Parliament and protest global warming. Maybe they tried to talk her out of it. Maybe they warned her she’d get in trouble. Pretty sure none of the adults in her life said to her, ‘listen, give it a go – who knows? You might start a worldwide movement’. And yet, here we are. Greta took a risk, and it paid off.

And that’s what we can learn from our teenagers. To take a risk. Try something and see what happens. Contrary to popular opinion, we parents aren’t oracles who can see into the future and predict how things will pan out. Parents are, at best, there to give warmth, love and comfort when things go wrong. But guidance? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say parental guidance is overrated.

What if we flipped things on their heads? Looked to our teenagers for guidance instead. What would we learn? My kids are constantly surprising (and delighting) us. Every day, they’re out there experiencing new things. Watching them inspired me to try new things too. Because of them, I’ve experienced the fun of being hopeless at karate. Struggling to learn Auslan. Writing a book. They’re all things I wouldn’t have attempted if it wasn’t for my kids showing me that it’s okay to fail. That’s how we learn. And we’re never too old to learn. In fact, learning keeps us young.

I’m strictly your GOLD FM type. But in the past couple of years I’ve come to appreciate rap. To a degree. I’ve learnt that rap comes with a rich tradition of blues and jazz. That it’s all about the beat. The rage is the point. That, ‘Fuck the Police’ is probably a reasonable lyric when you grow up black in America and the police are constantly shooting your own. It’s still not something I choose for my listening pleasure, but I don’t hate it. When I was young I worked in a recording studio where Nick Cave recorded an album. I went to parties were hash was rolled into joints on street kerbs. Where people I didn’t know at the beginning of the night, were my best friends by the end. Hell, I even married one of them. I used to be open to all sorts of experiences, then somehow I closed up. My kids taught me to open my mind to rap, and reminded me that there are all kinds of amazing cultural experiences that I’d been closing myself off to.

I write young adult novels, so I fairly frequently get my head into the teenager mindset. And I, like all of you, thought that, if only I could go back to being a teenager, how good I’d be at it. I wrote pages and pages based on my superior way of handling things. My character in my most recent book (a 40 year old woman in a 16 year old’s body) thought the same. At a pivotal moment, she needs to convince two twenty-year olds to listen to her. She fails miserably. And too late, she realises that she’d sent an adult in to do a teenager’s job. She should have sent the 16 year old girl in.

Mark Twain once said, ‘when I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he’d learned in the past seven years.’ Of course, all of us smug parents nod knowingly at the humour in the quote: it’s not that your father learnt anything, Mark – it’s just that you started listening to him. But maybe we’ve got it all wrong. How about we simply took that quote on face value and admitted that yes, it’s true – if we sit and observe the wisdom of our teenagers, it’s astonishing how much we might learn between their ages of 14 to 21.