Brain Trust's Guide to Helping Your Teen Leave Home with Confidence
We are thrilled to have Teen Brain Trust** join us to give us insights into adolescent development and how we can help our teenagers thrive as they face numerous stressors and begin to scaffold greater independence. Below are their tips for helping your child leave home with confidence:
Consciously or not, most parents have a checklist of things they think their teen ‘should’ have achieved by the time they leave home. However, there is no empirical scale for where teens should be at any given point. All teens develop in different ways and at their own pace.
In order to offer our teens the best support, we need to forget about conventional milestones and meet them where they are, developmentally.
Adolescence is about self-discovery!
When our children are ready to leave home, they should have a sense of mastery and ideas of where they feel good about themselves. That is enough to support them in the next phase of their development.
To support that, we can encourage them to reflect on the following:
Who are they among their social group?
Are they the joker, the planner, the glue that holds them together, or something else?
During what kinds of situations or activities do they feel the happiest, the most confident, the most competent?
Encouraging teens to reflect on when they come alive, laugh, or are happiest, gives them something to build on. It psychologically puts them in a better place and encourages internal motivation.
Questions you can ask:
What were the highlights of today?
This can be asked on a daily basis and, if it becomes a regular practice, it may even cause them to become more mindful about what they like and enjoy.
What is it about that [moment/activity/show] that you enjoy?
This should be asked anytime your teen seems enthusiastic or excited about something.
The primary way we can help our teens feel self-assured is to be attentive and responsive to how they’re feeling and what they’re dealing with emotionally and psychologically. Most teens don’t freely offer up this information but if they do, we want to respond by validating and normalizing their experience.
We can also prompt them to share by asking them open-ended questions about what their experience is:
How do you feel about the prospect of leaving home?
What’s it like to not be a high school student anymore?
If your child is reluctant to offer up details about themselves, you can also ask the same questions but about a 3rd party:
How do you think your friend feels about the prospect of leaving home?
By asking these questions, we are giving our teens an opportunity to process and vocalize their own thoughts and feelings on these issues. This can greatly help with any feelings of anxiety or overwhelm that may be present.
Because leaving home for the first time and being an ‘adult’ can be daunting, we recommend breaking it down into more manageable chunks.
A great way to determine what these are is to ask our teens to identify what parts of adulthood they’re afraid of and/or looking forward to. Then we can look for practical ways to allow them to practice those aspects so they can develop confidence and mastery.
A teen might say they’re looking forward to having more control over their schedule:
Before they leave home, try letting them come and go as they please and give them full freedom over managing their time.
Then, have periodic conversations about how it's going, what they think they’re doing well, and what they wish was going differently.
While developing hard skills and abilities is important, helping our teens reflect on and think critically about their experiences will help them establish the psychological resilience needed to continue this process of development once they’re out of the house and on their own.
Have any questions about the above? We are here to help your children as they transition to college and adulthood. You can also reach out to Teen Brain Trust directly as they are a great resource for parents. Click here to download their guide on helping your child leave home with confidence.
