“If you can’t be nice to the people here at home, then I can’t trust you to behave properly when you’re out,” my mother used to say. In fact, she may have gotten it exactly wrong.
Parents of cranky teens often find great relief in learning that the behavior they see at home is not necessarily representative of the behavior their child demonstrates when out of the home. This can explain those conversations that sometimes puzzle parents….”Your daughter is so polite when she’s visiting our house. She even offers to help with the dishes!” You can’t figure it out – you regularly have to remind her even to clear her place at the table at home. The teacher who describes your son as “helpful, thoughtful and kind” confuses you…those words hardly describe the way he treats his little brother. What’s going on here?
It’s kids’ behavior in public – at school and other such places – that is a better demonstration of their level of maturity than the behavior you see demonstrated at home. So says Anthony Wolf Ph.D., author of Get Out of My Life, But First Can you Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall?
Dr. Wolf says what parents often see at home is demonstration of the “baby self.” Mike Riera Ph.D. (Staying Connected to your Teenager) calls the difference between the behavior seen at home vs. the public behavior the variance between “the regressed child” and what he calls the “emergent adult.”
What’s happening is this: home provides a place where kids can relax, let their hair down, recharge their batteries and act naturally – and yes, sometimes that includes being lazy or crabby. Home is a place where they can express their most basic, relaxed self and actually let their real – unedited - feelings out. And this is important to do.
In public, teenagers are busy developing and establishing their identity in the world of their peers, which is exhausting work. It requires concentration and for some even courage to participate in school, to compete in the band, the sports team – whatever. Particularly exhausting is managing their way through the social milieu; they are continually evaluating their status in the world of their peers. When they come home they need to relax, to regress even, and to express their feelings. As they let down their defenses, their more immature self is expressed – in fact, sometimes we see nothing less than supreme self-indulgence. To compensate for the pain or challenges they have endured in their world, they may express anger or resentment in the only place they feel comfortable enough to do it – at home. It is precisely because kids feel that home is safe, home is where some of their worst behavior is expressed.
Parents should understand this, because sometimes adults do exactly the same thing. Our families see the worst of us – and hopefully the best of us too. After a long day adults are tired, and we, too, can regress to more immature behavior when we want to be left alone. Adults, too, can go to that place of supreme self-indulgence. The difference is adults spend less time there than kids. Gradually shedding the “baby self” or “regressed child” is a process that takes place over time. As our teenagers gradually mature, they spend more and more of their day behaving like the young adults they are becoming.
That our teenagers know how to express the more mature part of their developing personality in public is good and appropriate. Parents need to understand that the self-indulgent behavior teenagers exhibit at home is a part of their normal developmental process and is not an accurate portrayal of their true level of maturity.
