How to give your children more freedom as they get older

What price freedom ? Our children are growing up and venturing out into the big wide world on their own or with friends. Katy Gosset looks at how we manage our own anxiety and let our children spread their wings.

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Ellen* is the first to describe herself as ‘a bit of a worrier’. 

‘’I’m the parent that’s scared of vans pulling up near my children, you know child abductions.”

As they’ve got older she’s less stressed about it but she does monitor her children’s phones – with their consent.

‘’I like to be able to track where they’re going on their phones. They’ve never had a problem with that because they know that I’m a little bit paranoid.”

She’s happy that her ex-partner does plenty of outdoor and riskier activities with them while she ‘grits her teeth’

“[My children] are really nice about it but it’s definitely something I’ve had to work on as a parent.’’

And Laura* has been going through the same thing with her teenage son who has been brought up in a rural setting but is beginning to explore the city.  

“Initially that was quite unnerving for me because you just never know what he’s going to come across when he’s wandering around the central city by himself.”

And then there’s the drinking culture.

‘’The biggest challenge we’ve had over the last 12 months with him is alcohol. He’s in a situation where he’s going to parties where people are drinking and drinking heavily at 15 and 16.’’

At a recent party Laura allowed him to take two drinks and a post-party debrief showed that was a good compromise.

“He was happy that that’s all he’d taken and he’d seen how ridiculous people got. He was very mature about it. I kind of have a bit of faith in him in that sense that he does make the right decisions.”

In fact, knowing what to allow at what age is a tough one for any parent to navigate.

Clinical psychologist Catherine Gallagher said children inevitably changed as they got older.

‘’When is the right time and around what issues are we going to change with our kids?”

“That gets complicated. Whoever said this parenting gig wasn’t complicated was probably lying.’’

There were some developmental norms that could guide parents but Gallagher warned that children’s developmental, emotional and ‘street’ ages could vary.

‘’If we’re only looking at how old they are from the date they’re born we could miss some important information.  Not all 15-year-olds are equal when it comes to the idea of looking after themselves or being able to make decisions around risk.”

It also depended on the child’s motivation. Some were eager to push boundaries and embrace each new challenge while others were much more cautious and needed a push to try new things.

Getting started

“As a rule what we’re looking at is what kids are generally capable of and giving them a bit of extra freedom around that,” Gallagher said.

“So kids need guidance around what’s expected and a line being drawn so when they cross it they know what’s going to happen.’’

Scaffolding was also needed as they built new skills to handle different situations.

‘’Remember it’s those repeated experiences. Getting things right, getting things wrong, repairing, moving on from that stuff, that’s how we learn stuff and how we become robust.’’

It was natural for children to always want to do the next thing, to feel frustrated that they couldn’t quite do it and then to be supported through the experience by parents.

‘’So if I’m wanting to dress myself and I just can’t get it right and Mum and Dad are always stepping in and doing it for me to remove the frustration then I never get to kind of push through the frustration and feel that feeling and get to the other side of it and then master a task.”

Most children would also use ‘vicarious peer pressure’ to advance their cause: ‘Everyone is doing it Mum. Please, please.’

“Most parents are struggling with this and those that look like they aren’t are probably just better at hiding it.”

Mind the gap

Parents did not need to give in to every demand but as children grew it was time to start offering them ‘a gap’ in which to develop new skills.

“We need to actually step back to allow them to step forward.’’

This would require some trial and error and mistakes by parents and children alike, Gallagher said.

‘’The risk is if the gap is too big, so if we step back too far, and the child doesn’t have the skills to deal with the space that’s left or if there’s no gap at all.’’

Parents’ own anxiety usually determined how much of a gap they felt comfortable leaving for their children.

Rupture and repair

We think of R and R as Rest and Recreation but we can probably all agree there’s not a lot of that in parenting.

Here R and R stands for Rupture and Repair which may be more familiar to us than we realise.

“The Rupture and Repair thing starts from day dot with attachment,’’ Gallagher explained.

“A baby might cry and if we don’t get the message right and we misinterpret it then there’s a mini-rupture because the baby’s going, ‘But I’m still hungry and you’re changing my nappy.’"

‘’So there’s those moments of going, ‘You’ve got it wrong!’’’

The repair part of the equation was the idea that parents could come back to the situation or issue and revisit it.

“You can actually see the baby’s still distressed and work through with them about what it was they needed or, even if they didn’t get what they needed, they got love and support to get through that dissatisfaction.’’

This process of Rupture and Repair became more important as children got older and tried to spread their wings

“We’re not always going to read the signals right. We have mistakes in relationships.”

While words like ‘mistakes’ and ‘rupture’ sounded negative, people were developmentally created to make mistakes and learn from them, Gallagher said.

Parents needed to work alongside their children as they made decisions and to have a plan in place for when they did make errors.

“Often parents can react and just say ‘Right, the trust is broken’ but they don’t actually signpost to the kids about how to get back from there and this can be really confusing for both parties.’’

Gallagher advised having conversations about this so children knew that even if they might face a consequence after slipping up, the unconditional support from their parents was still there.

“This is so important especially around issues of safety. We want our children to call us when they feel unsafe, even if it might result in a telling off after they’ve got the hug.’’

Managing our own anxiety

Alongside the legitimate risks children might face, parents also had to grapple with their own worries.

For Laura making these decisions alongside her teenage son was a greater emotional challenge than raising small children.

“The pre-school years are really hard physically because you’re so exhausted and tired but the emotional exhaustion of teenagers is hard. It’s really hard.”

Gallagher said parents would need to look hard at whether an activity was an actual risk to children or whether it was being coloured by their own concerns.

‘’We have to be honest here, parents. Although we might dress up a lot of this as ‘what’s good for the child’ we’re often really in the mode of managing our own anxiety especially when it comes to issues around risk.”

She urged parents to reflect on what they needed to do to relax more, ‘to be able to build your confidence and reduce your anxiety around allowing your child more space to explore and make mistakes.’

Being different

Part of exploring for a child was the process of individuation: ‘a child’s really natural and necessary developmental task of being different and defining themselves as different from us’, Gallagher said.

This could prove challenging as children experimented with religion, politics, fashion sense or sexual orientation and moved in a direction that was outside of their parents’ comfort zone.

‘’The reality is actually trying it out for size when it’s a really uncomfortable fit for you can make it hard to stay in communication with your kids.’’

It was also hard for parents when they discovered they were no longer their children’s ‘sun, moon and stars’ and their children turned to friends for advice on life.

‘’Again that’s one of those gaps that we actually have to allow them to have. It just doesn’t sit very comfortably especially if we think the people they’re turning to for advice aren’t that sound.’’

However the answer was not for parents to hold on and tell their children what to think.

“Guess what an adolescent’s going to do? They’re going to individuate; they’re going to pull away more.’’

Instead parents should take a deep breath, have some faith in the values they’d already instilled in their children and continue to maintain the relationship.

‘’This doesn’t mean we stay in their faces but it does mean we allow the door to stay open so we can have dialogue around these issues.“

For Laura that was ‘the scary part’.

”Once he’s away from us we have to hope that we’ve put in the ground work enough that he makes sensible decisions. That’s the hard part of independence . It’s really hard to let go”

Coming to a compromise

So, once we’ve allowed a ‘gap’ for our children to grow into, accepted that they’re now different from us and got a handle on our own anxiety, the real bargaining can begin.

This was a process of negotiation which would involve concessions on both sides, Gallagher said.

‘’You might go ’My preference is for you to stay with me or be at home by 6.00.’ Your kid’s preference might be ‘No, I want to be out there drinking and I want to be there with my friends and you should just trust me.’’’

At this point the parents would need to offer some sort of compromise that would align with their own concerns around safety while still giving the children some freedom.

‘’So the child gets a little bit of what they want and we get a little bit of what we want. Those are the kind of things that can mean we get a much more successful outcome.’’

It was still likely that kids might push the boundaries and not come home when expected.

‘’Which means you then do what you said you were going to do which is put a consequence in place, but this is a process of trial and error.’’

And as part of that process, parents could mess up too.

‘’In a relationship where there’s love and connection, we’re allowed to make mistakes too.’’

Parents might need to revisit punishments they had doled out in haste or anger and this helped model to children how to recover from errors.

‘’When I said to you that you’re never allowed to go out ever again, probably overreacting. You’re grounded for a week. That’s what happens when you get really angry: you say stuff you don’t mean.’’  

‘’Now for me, that learning experience is far more powerful than you having got it right in the first place.’’  

Tips to help parents give their children more freedom

-Be guided by the developmental norms of your child’s age but don’t expect all children of the same age to cope with risk in the same way.

-Look at what your child can already do and extend freedom in those areas or activities.

-Accept that children will often push to move onto the next thing, often using peer pressure that suggests ‘everyone else’ is doing it.

-Don’t give in to all demands but create a ‘gap’ for your child to grow into where you step back and allow them to do more independently.

-Let them know what the consequence will be if they cross the line of what has been agreed upon.

- Accept that rupture and repair is a normal part of your relationship with your children. There will be endless to-ing and froing as children break the rules and face consequences.

-Have conversations about this so children understand that the unconditional support will still be there if they break the rules.

-Realise that your children will want to be different from you and that it’s a natural part of development. Resist the urge to cling on tighter and put some faith in the relationship you have already built with your child and the values you’ve instilled in them.

- Keep the relationship and dialogue open even while they experiment with other influences.

- Manage your own anxiety and be prepared to negotiate and make compromises around your children’s freedom.

- Don’t worry if you make mistakes yourself. This will model to your children how to bounce back from errors.

*Not their real names.