Adolescence is the most complex and challenging stage of development an individual will ever have to navigate. Rapid physical, hormonal, and neuronal changes are occurring every day resulting in increased vulnerability to environmental stressors which can often result in emotional and behavioral issues manifesting as a defense mechanism to those perceived stressors. Depression, substance abuse, anxiety, suicidal ideation, truancy, cutting, and increased oppositional defiance are just some of the issues that can manifest as coping mechanisms in response to this increased psychological and physiological vulnerability.

An additional reinforcement to the potential instability of adolescence is the emergence of newly sophisticated metacognitive abilities which lead to increased egocentrism, self-absorption and the development of ‘The Personal Fable’. ‘The Personal Fable’ is the view of the adolescent that what happens to them is unique, exceptional, and shared by no one else. They may feel that no one has ever experienced the pain they feel; that no one has ever been treated so badly; or that no one can understand what they are going through. This perceptual framework can lead to feelings of isolation, despair, and disconnect, further increasing the adolescent’s vulnerability to manifest maladaptive behaviors.

During the time my son was navigating the challenges of this complex developmental stage, I was compelled to make myself a t-shirt with the following inscription on it:

                                              Mothers of teenagers understand why wolves eat their young

What made this sentiment even more apropos was that, at the time, we were living in the Adirondacks with two wolves. So we were both able to enjoy the sentiment with the provision that I not wear it out in public while in his company.

All of my experiences, both personal and professional, have helped me discern over the years that the most balanced and effective approach to parenting the adolescent is achieved by focusing primarily on what it means to be an adolescent from the perspective of the adolescent.

Just as with the child, joining the adolescent where they happen to be in the moment in their experience is the most important thing we can do. This requires that we, as parents, teachers, mentors, and coaches, suspend our own personal agendas in favor of establishing a truly empathic connection with the teenager.  What makes this difficult to do is that the adolescent’s experience is often infused with a lot of instability, drama and crisis which serves as a reflection and painful reminder for all of us of a time in which we experienced the same deep existential angst and suffering that often defines this stage of development.

In addition to not wanting to revisit our own imprinting from adolescence, parents will become extremely uncomfortable with the recognition that they have less influence on their child than in previous years despite using the same external control mechanisms which had always proven successful. So what’s changed?

Around the age of twelve rapid neuronal changes in the brain result in newly emerging metacognitive abilities. Metacognition is essentially ‘thinking about thinking’ and once the adolescent has reached this cognitive benchmark; from their perspective, everything is up for review; including whether or not they will continue to conform to the conditioning and control mechanisms that have been in place since they were born .

Around the age of two when language is acquired, one of the first and frequent utterances that comes from the toddler's mouth is the word "No". Unfortunately, the widely accepted interpretation of this new verbal expression is often referred to as the beginning of the "Terrible Two's ". However, I could not disagree more. It is my personal belief that this new verbal expression is related to 'Object Relations Theory' in which prior to 18-24 months of age, the child's experience is that they are literally attached to their primary care giver. At the age of two they begin to differentiate from their primary caregiver by seeing themselves as separate and apart from them and the word "No" is their attempt to do so by identifying that it is so. It is also my belief that the adolescent's version of the need to further differentiate from their primary caregiver is often expressed with some variation of the verbal expression "Fuck You". Both examples are drawn from the two most critical stages of development as it relates to rapid and accelerated physical and cognitive development which absolutely requires that the child further differentiate from their primary caregivers. In both examples it is developmentally appropriate and biologically driven. Unfortunately, in both examples the parents will often attempt to defend themselves by engaging in a power struggle with either the child or adolescent.

From the previous article, “Parenting the Child”:

“Increased differentiation from our parents is a requirement for transitioning successfully into adulthood. However, in order for this to happen the parents or primary caregivers need to be fairly healthy, balanced, conscious and aware. If they are not then they will take the child’s attempts to differentiate from them very personally. They experience it as extremely threatening since their influence and control over their child appears to be diminishing. This is evidenced by the fact that the negative consequences and positive reinforcements that they have come to rely on to ensure acceptable behaviors in their child are no longer effective. In response to this unwelcome development, the parent usually ratchets up the control mechanisms and engages in increased power struggles with their child which always fails to satisfy either party’s needs.”

One of my mantras to the parents I work with is “Don’t get involved in a power struggle with your child.” It is my experience that if you do, you will almost always lose because the child is willing to lay prone on the floor of the grocery aisle and the adolescent is often willing to take them self off the planet rather than conform to control mechanisms which, for them, represent the equivalent of self-annihilation.
 
“Without realizing it, they are defending their right to exist beyond the boundaries and confinement of this conditioning that projects onto them that their inability to conform is evidence of some inherent flaw that will limit their ability to be successful in getting their physical and emotional needs met throughout the course of their lifetime.”      - Beyond the Imprint -
 
What is most important for the parent to understand is that their control/defense mechanisms are more of an attempt to get their own physical and emotional needs met by alleviating the anxiety associated with the dawning awareness that, over time, they have increasingly less control over their child and fundamentally little, if any, control over their teenager. It is never helpful to parent by establishing a power dynamic with the child or adolescent because you are essentially imprinting them with the understanding that whoever is bigger, stronger, louder, and more threatening is the one who gets their needs met. And without a doubt, the child/adolescent will bring this unconscious imprinting into their adult relationships by replicating a co-dependent, power dynamic with their significant other by playing the role of either 'victim' or 'perpetrator'.
 
“If we, as adults, were able to recognize the degree to which we are influenced by our own imprinting and subsequent conditioning we would be much better equipped to parent, teach, and mentor this most critical and dynamic stage of developmental.  Our teenagers are our ‘truth tellers’ and we have much to learn from them if we could only allow ourselves to listen and accept them without feeling the need to defend our position.”       - Beyond the Imprint -
 
 

Despite this being an extremely large and comprehensive topic in the field of human development, all of the work that I have
facilitated for children and their families during the past eleven years as well as my own experience as a parent, has helped 
me distill my primary focus down to one specific tenet regarding child development.  Joseph Chilton Pearce described it best 
in 1977 in his groundbreaking book “Magical Child”:

“Learning to take our cues from the child and make a corresponding response means learning to heed and respond to the 
primary process in ourselves as well.  A child can teach us an incredible amount if we are willing to learn, and because s/he 
is biologically geared to take his/her cues from us, s/he learns as we do.”                
             
I believe that it is the most important dynamic to embrace and embody for parents who seek to model and demonstrate 
positive, loving, and healthy relationship patterns for their children. In doing so, the greatest opportunity for the child to know 
themselves and actualize their fullest potential is achieved.

Unfortunately, cultural conditioning over countless generations has created very different relationship dynamics within the 
familial, academic, and community environments. Conformity to whatever agenda the prevailing authority figure has
determined is appropriate for the child and society as a whole is achieved and reinforced through a system of punishment 
and rewards.

The problem with this approach is that all that has been accomplished is to ‘bend’ the child to the will, boundaries and false 
limitations of whoever is ‘in charge’.  Not only is the wound/trauma imprinting reinforced in the adult who takes this approach 
but it subsequently creates similar wound/trauma imprinting in the child. Consequently, the child and the adult become
imprisoned together within these limiting, shaming, and fear-based patterns and beliefs because the parents are only at ease when the child is able and willing to conform to whatever conditions and limitations are being placed on them. 

"No matter how we camouflage our intent, to ourselves and to our child, all parenting and education is based on: “Do this 
or you will suffer the consequences.”  This threat underlies every facet of our life from our first potty training through university 
exams, doctoral candidate’s orals, employment papers, income tax, on and on ad infinitum down to official death. Culture is 
a massive exercise in restraint, inhibiting, and curtailment of joy on behalf of pseudo and grim necessities.” 
                                                          – Joseph Chilton Pearce, “The Biology of Transcendence” -

Children enter the world with the capacity for optimal growth and development. However, well-meaning parents begin to limit 
and distort this capacity from the moment they become aware that another life has been conceived and they begin to project 
identifications onto the child that have nothing to do with the unique being who is taking shape and form in the mother’s womb. 
After the child is born these projections continue well into adulthood since most parents believe that they have a responsibility 
as ‘guide’ and ‘teacher’ to bestow onto their child all of what they believe to be ‘true’ about them, the external world, and
‘reality’ in general. 

What they fail to recognize, however, is that their well-meaning attempts to be responsible and effective parents has more to 
do with their own agendas than it does the child’s best interests. This is because their ideas about parenting are always being 
informed by their own unconscious and unresolved wound imprinting and subsequent fear-based beliefs from childhood.

“Since we must pattern ourselves and our worldview after our culture and parents, when that is a disordered system for 
modeling, we are ourselves disordered in precisely the same way.”        - Joseph Chilton Pearce, “Bond of Power” -

I have never met a parent, including myself, who, in determining their specific style of parenting, was not somehow trying to 
compensate for how they were parented during their own childhood. Unfortunately, it turns out, that when we parent from our 
unresolved wounding in an attempt to ensure that our children are not wounded in the manner or to the degree that we were; 
we end up just shifting to the opposite end of the dualistic spectrum and are as equally out of balance as we judged our parents to be.
 
Shifting this parenting paradigm requires that we be open to learning new patterns and possibilities; the absence of which 
has us responding and reacting from unconscious defense mechanisms stemming from whatever wounding we, as parents,
experienced throughout our own childhoods and still carry with us in the form of cellular imprinting and limiting beliefs. This 
shift requires a tremendous amount of trust which is counter-intuitive to the control dynamics that we were raised with and have 
relied on to ensure our own survival at the deepest levels.

It is extremely challenging for a parent to trust that their child carries an inherent, intuitive understanding of who they are and 
what they came here to do and that their role, as a parent, has less to do with being a mechanism for control and instruction 
and more to do with being a loving reflection of acceptance, acknowledgment, and reassurance. It is this dynamic, and only 
this dynamic, that creates the safest and most secure environment for the child to explore their world, develop their identity, 
and actualize their potential. What makes it so difficult to model is that the parent is encoded with cellular memory that continuously identifies that the world is not safe and in response to their own anxiety around this distorted belief, utilizes external control mechanisms in order to ensure that their child is safe. Unfortunately, these fear-based, control dynamics accomplish very little other than to infuse the child with the same level of anxiety that the parent is vibrating around.

Since a large part of human development is about ongoing identity formation; it’s important to bring awareness and 
understanding to the fact that a child growing up in a controlled, anxious, and fearful environment will have an extremely 
limited opportunity to explore and identify their true sense of self. Taking cues from this type of environment leaves the child 
no other option other than to learn, from a very early age, the importance of being able to defend themselves. This posture is 
then reinforced throughout lifetime and reflected in all of their relationship dynamics. Therefore, a very different parenting
paradigm is required in order to have the desired impact on human development; a paradigm that is no longer being 
determined by the parent’s fear-based agendas or self-interests but is reciprocal in meeting the true needs of both the child
and adult.

Decision-making and behavioral expressions are primarily shaped and determined by the anticipated response the child has
learned to expect from those individuals who have the greatest control and influence over them. Therefore, I am always 
reminding the parents I work with to stop telling their children who they are and what they need to do and to just join them in the moment in their experience. 

However, children whose parents continue to have the perception that their child is out of control, are just reflections of how 
much the parent needs to be in control in order to feel safe and secure. This has nothing to do with the child but is rather a 
reflection of the parents own conditioning and unresolved imprinting from childhood. It is for this reason, that I always, without exception, choose to work as much with the parents as I do the child much to the parent's unexpected surprise.

“Once shame is imprinted there will never again be “unquestioned acceptance of the given” but a faltering hesitancy as doubt 
intrudes and clouds the child’s knowledge of self and world”           - Joseph Chilton Pearce, “The Biology of Transcendence”-

Letting go of the unconscious agendas that infuse the child’s environment and shape their limiting beliefs about themselves 
and their world is paramount in ensuring that they have the potential to realize themselves without shame, doubt, or self-recrimination.  

Once again:

“Learning to take our cues from the child and make a corresponding response means learning to heed and respond to the 
primary process in ourselves as well. A child can teach us an incredible amount if we are willing to learn, and because s/he 
is biologically geared to take his/her cues from us, s/he learns as we do.”       
                      
A paradigm such as this takes us all beyond the duality of our cultural conditioning and childhood imprinting by providing new
patterns and  possibilities for anyone who mentors, teaches, parents or works with children; thereby changing the course of
human development.