Adolescence as re-birth-ing

Once more into the breach!

The physical separation of a child from their mother’s body is literally traumatic for both. Infant and mother scream and suffer. Both do not always survive the ordeal.

The infant moves from total dependency on the mother’s biology to a long and vulnerable symbiosis. Serious risks remain for the infant’s well-being. The mother’s care is indispensable for the child’s survival. Constant attention from both parents is essential.

Adolescence is the life chapter that bridges the transition from childhood to adulthood. It is another torturous delivery, and in some ways a more complex one for parents and their offspring.

Expansion

The infant is a largely passive participant in the birth process. They are expelled by the mother’s uterine contractions. They have no active channel for protest or negotiation or decision-making. The adolescent has, by contrast, real agency in their own self-creation.

The primary task of adolescence is the transfer of significant energy, attention and attachment from parents/family to the wider world of peers and other adults. This has a clear evolutionary/survival function in the event of parental death or unavailability. Expanding and diversifying their orbit and web of engagement to extra-familial figures is the functional and psychological equivalent of emerging from the cocoon of the mother’s body.

The adolescent’s relations with friends and parental surrogates have a special intensity due to their literal life-sustaining function. Good parents facilitate their child’s expansion efforts by letting go more as well as continuing to provide support, advice and protection as appropriate for this new phase.

Individuation

Adults forget the depths of languor into which the adolescent mind descends with ease. They are prone to undervalue the mental growth that occurs during daydreaming and aimless wandering. — E.O. Wilson

As the adolescent expands their network of attachment figures, they gain access to a wider range of models and information about potential identities and life trajectories. The second key task of adolescence is the experimental trying on of multiple ways-of-being and assessment of fit with their emerging sense of self.

The adolescent’s special capacity to idealize and “fall in love” intensely and serially with a succession of people is in part a merging with and tasting of the essential elements of that person’s core self (character, sexuality, interests, abilities, values etc.). Over a period of years of these serial infatuations and trial identifications, the adolescent progresses (ideally) from a fluid to a more crystallized sense of identity. This enables the making of better and finer decisions about their goals/ambitions and choice of friends, work and partners, culminating (hopefully) in a stable and satisfying life structure.

This crystallization of identity and some deceleration (but not termination) of personal change signifies the completion of the adolescent’s psychological birth process and their emergence from childhood and family of origin into adult life. Like a biological birth, its process and outcome vary from person to person.

Some adolescents do not survive the drama, others emerge smoothly and successfully, and every variation between. Parenting an adolescent requires great skill and judgment. It is one of the most fateful transformations each person, and those who care most about them, will ever experience.

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