Kids in the House 27: Teenagers and Peers

It's quite normal, in the sense of typical, for a teenager to be pulling away from parents, whether it's healthy or not depends upon the reason. The healthiest reason is because the teenager wants to become his own person, wants to think for himself, have his own meanings, have his own motivation. And sometimes the attachment gets a bit suffocating, and so the adolescent pushes away. That's the best reason of all. That's developmentally natural. It's important. But unfortunately, many of our teenagers are pulling away for an unhealthy reason. Peers have replaced parents in their lives. They're orbiting around their peers, looking to them for their answers, looking to peers for what to do, how to act. I call this peer orientation. And when our adolescents become peer oriented, they're pulled out of orbit from around the adults that are responsible for them. They pull away from us, but for all the wrong reasons. Because peers can't bring each other up to raise them. We need to preserve our attachments with them. We need to be able to hold onto them for as long as they are not yet ready to enter their world as separate beings.