Teens Who Don't Grow Up

November 12, 2009

Interview with Joseph Allen, co-author of the book Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old

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Mike Carruthers:
Many of our teenagers have a problem and here it is...

Joseph Allen:
We are seeing more and more parents who are running flat out trying to provide everything they can for their teens - from lessons to summer camps to electronic gadgets. And yet in spite of all of this nurturance they find that there teens are still just remarkably helpless and dependent even in the face of simple everyday tasks.

Joseph Allen, co-author of the book Escaping the Endless Adolescence

We see even highly educated late adolescents who wouldn’t know how to begin to make a doctor’s appointment for themselves, get a car repaired, change a printer cartridge. Believe it or not we’ve even seen kids who complain that their parent’s won’t change a light bulb for them and they don’t know how to do it.

Well-meaning parents are the cause of the problem. They provide just about everything for their teens.

And their teenagers don’t so much need things provided for them what they really need are challenges - things they can sink their teeth into. Things that’ll make them stretch and grow, let them do hard things for themselves and feel proud and independent.

Joseph has some advice for the parent’s of today’s teens.

Anytime you’re about to do anything at all for your teen an alarm bell should go off. And you should stop and ask yourself, “Is this something I can teach them to do or let them learn to do or do for themselves?” And it could be anything from pumping gas to buying groceries to filling out online applications to changing light bulbs. We really cheat our teens if we do this stuff for them because we make them feel dependent on us and then they also come to expect it and think that’s how it should be.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.