Helping Teenagers Grow Up

It is a banal truth that kids don’t come with operating manuals. But that hasn’t stopped publishers from offering manuals to parents. In this crowded field of printed advice, John McKinnon’s new book To Change a Mind (Lantern Books, 2011) stands out as a useful addition.

Although it is a relatively thin volume (207 pp.), Dr. McKinnon has managed to take a complex subject and reduce it to its essentials. The subtitle to the book—Parenting to Promote Maturity in Teenagers--hints at what makes this book somewhat different from standard parenting manuals. In McKinnon’s estimation, promoting maturity is the parent’s job during the teenage years. As a psychiatrist and co-founder of a therapeutic boarding school in Montana, McKinnon knows well this subject. His previous book, An Unchanged Mind: The Problem of Immaturity in Adolescence, argued that many problems of adolescence, even clinical ones, can be traced immaturity. Drawing on data from his years working with students at Montana Academy, McKinnon proposed that internal and external “obstacles” block some adolescents’ development into adulthood.

While An Unchanged Mind is addressed to psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, To Change a Mind is addressed to parents. To promote maturity in adolescents, McKinnon suggests that parents focus on two principles: recognition and limit-setting. By recognition, McKinnon means that parents need to really see their teenagers for who they are and who they are becoming: their strengths, their weaknesses, their interests, hopes, and dreams. Moreover, he stresses that recognition is an act, not just a thought, emphasizing that teens need to verbally hear and emotionally feel that parents are actively engaged in knowing them. In discussing recognition, McKinnon offers several case studies, describing how a lack of recognition stunts maturation of teenagers. Similarly, McKinnon explains limit-setting as essential to adolescents’ evolving sense of competence and morality as they move into adulthood. As with recognition, he provides case studies and specific examples of how to establish and maintain limits.

The value of this book is the blending of theory and practical application. Because McKinnon has vast experience dealing with troubled adolescents, he has a grounded sense of what can and does go wrong in development of child to adult. However, he also offers very detailed examples—even down to possible scripts and scenarios—to guide parents in applying the principles. While this may sound reductive and simplistic, rather than helpful and accurate, it doesn’t play that way. McKinnon acknowledges that there are many possible ways to recognize and set limits. He also acknowledges the difficulty of doing so for some parents. Given a vast and tangled subject like parenting, McKinnon has marked a useful path through the thickets.

Peter Pan on a Mission

Jason Calder, a therapist at Summit Preparatory School in Kalispell, MT, recently sent me some notes on his reading of Michael Kimmel’s 2009 book, Guyland: The Perilous World where Boys Become Men. I haven’t yet read the book, but Jason’s extensive notes are enormously interesting and suggestive, resonating with my own observations of the perils young men face in maturing. As Jason summarizes the book, Guyland is an exploration of the cultural world where adolescent boys and young men aged 16-26 live in a Peter Pan mindset.

For example, both quoting and summarizing the book, Jason notes the following:

“Every man’s armor is borrowed and ten sizes too big and beneath it he’s naked and insecure and hoping you won’t see.” Caught between being “real boys” and real men, [the Peter Pans of Guyland] have all the entitlement [of mature men] and none of the power. No wonder that, to guys, boyhood is a safe and secure retreat—it’s a regression with a mission. (p. 43)

As educational consultants, we see this up close and often in our office. Parents tell us agonized stories of their boys’ and young men’s development stunted by drugs, video games, truancy, thoughtlessness, and lack of drive. We see in these stories constant examples of the national trends of steadily declining test scores for boys in reading and verbal skills compared to girls. We see parents stunned and often paralyzed by their recognition that their boys aren’t going up. Worse, as Jason’s note suggests, the boys are actively regressing.

What can be done? The answer to that, of course, depends upon the severity of the problem. For some boys their entitled regression is just beginning, and parents can often modify their parenting strategies. For example, parents might reconsider “running interference” for their sons or inconsistently applying consequences. For boys and young men deeper in retreat from manhood, therapeutic wilderness programs and schools (like the one Jason works in) can help point the way to maturity. Kimmel’s book would seem to suggest how far guys have to go—and how widespread is the problem.