Pre-Teen Asher

 

 

Parenting Asher has kept Amy and me, now in our 50s, on our toes. COVID, neuro-divergence, and behavioral issues have made every stage of life and just about every day a bit of an adventure with a lot of noise and not a lot of serenity.

And now we usher in a particularly tumultuous phase of any kid's life, which is the pre-teen years. Which for Asher has meant the typical behavior of one growing from being a kid to being a young adult with all the hormones and social complexity that comes with it.

By choice and by necessity, our parenting style has tended to be more hands-off. Helicoptering or snowplowing, or whatever you want to call it nowadays, is certainly understandable: we care for our kids and we want to do right by them. But oftentimes, doing right by your kids means letting them struggle a little on their own, and that is certainly the case the older they get.

And so for Asher that has mean giving him freedoms he didn't have but one year ago, to go out with friends without our supervision, for example. But it doesn't mean total and unadulterated license to do whatever he wants. Which is where that famous pre-teen rage comes in. 

Even though he's our third child, I still have to remind myself to hold my tongue when he lashes out at us for never giving him any latitude, since the accusation seems so untrue given just how much leeway we have allowed him. I need to remember that this too is part of normal child development at this age, always pushing and stretching and testing.

We will certainly set hard boundaries when appropriate. You don't let your three-year-old near a hot stove, just like you do need to override your 11-year-old's desires to stay up too late or eat like crap or shirk homework/chores or talk disrespectfully. So when Asher pushes, we sometimes need to push back; when he desires to roam free, we need to hold the line.

Fighting all the time is tiring for Amy and me, and we're not as young as we were when Jada and Aaron were going through this. But fight we must, remembering that this too is normal and this too will pass, and ever negotiating (amongst ourselves and with him) when to bend and when to not break.