Roxane Lehmann, Ph.D.

Haley Still Cares What Her Parents Think

Season 4, Episode 12

The Framework

The headline of tonight’s episode “Party Crasher,” announcing the birth of the Pritchett baby in the middle of Manny’s birthday party was no big surprise. Anyone who’s seen Gloria lately knew this long-awaited baby was due anytime. Nevertheless, the episode had its share of surprises. And these weren’t just your run-of-the-mill surprises. As Luke put it, these were the kind in which the surprised becomes the surpriser. And these were the kind of surprises that tested the connection between parent and child and left the relationship a bit stronger in the end.

There’s five-year-old Lily who has been favoring Mitch over Cam lately. But when the surprised Lily gets accidently dumped in the pool by Cam, she surprises him by calling out for him instead of Mitch:

Lily: Daddy!

Cam: Oh, look at this. I’m coming! Daddy’s coming!

What’s wrong with me, Mitchell? When she fell in the pool, she screamed for “Daddy.” She calls you “Dad.” She calls me “Daddy.” She got scared, and she called out for me.

Mitchell: See?

And later we see this playful exchange between father and daughter.

Cam: I guess Daddy was worrying about nothing. But, you know, I can be silly sometimes.

Lily: You’re always silly.

Cam: No, you’re silly.

Lily: No, you’re always silly.

Cam: No, you’re always silly.

There’s Manny who turned fourteen tonight. What with all the preparation for the new baby, he’s been a bit neglected lately. That’s why Gloria has planned a surprise birthday party for him. But Manny comes home early to his party, bringing his girlfriend with him. And in the pre-party darkness, she gives Manny his first kiss ever – a kiss witnessed by the surprised party guests who’d come to surprise him. Humiliated, Manny takes off for his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

Gloria – now obviously in labor and doing all that she can to hold the baby in place for one more day so that Manny won’t have to share his birthday with a sibling for the rest of his life – tries to console him from the other side of his bedroom door:

Gloria: Manny, we’re so sorry. We didn’t mean to…

Manny: What? Ruin the greatest moment of my life? Thanks again, Mom!

But then later in the episode there’s this between mother and son:

Gloria: You know I love you no matter what.

Manny: You’re trying to hold another person inside of you to spare my feelings. Message received.

And then there’s Haley who, as a way of rebelling, introduces her parents to her new “boyfriend” Kenny: a ponytailed, fortyish jeans designer with a knack for coming up with creepy double entendres – things like I’m trying to get into girls’ jeans.

Claire is not just surprised, she’s disgusted, summing the situation up this way: He’s old. She’s young. It’s gross. And she begins hatching her own surprise for Haley – a surprise that involves a game of chicken. Now all she has to do is sell Phil on the idea:

Claire: Phil, you can’t say anything to Kenny… I know why Haley is doing this. She’s doing this to get back at you for being so hard on her. I did the same thing to my dad.

Phil: First of all, I’m not your dad. And do you think I’m just going to let this happen?

Claire: Trust me. The more it bothers you, the longer he stays. The more we ignore it … the sooner Willie Nelson is on the road again.

So when Haley surprises her parents again – this time with her plans to spend the night in a hotel with Kenny, Claire is ready. And to Haley’s surprise (and horror) she gets not only her parents’ permission but their credit card to boot.

Flipping the Frame: My Notes

Should Claire and Phil have been able to see Haley’s rebellion coming? Probably.

Early in tonight’s episode when Haley hands Phil an envelope with her hard-earned money inside, we see some evidence of the sarcasm that has crept into Phil’s interactions with her:

Haley: This is everything I made at the boutique last week. I’m not going to have any money left for me.

Phil: Should’ve thought of that before you got thrown out of school. You live here, you pay rent.

Haley: You used to be fun.

Phil: You used to be… What? Oh, yeah, at college.

Now, I don’t have any problem with Haley being charged rent. (Click here to read an earlier post on that.) It’s the way that Phil talks to Haley about it that I object to. Here’s why: There’s a good chance that Haley isn’t feeling very good about herself after being asked to leave college. And when teens don’t feel good about themselves, they sometimes project their negative feelings on to us. Phil’s words, tone of voice, and body language added fuel to the fire, giving Haley reason to doubt his respect for her. And because respect is like air to teens, when we take it away, they can’t think about anything else. They dedicate all their energy to rebelling and getting revenge.

When kids are younger and they’re in need, our interactions with them are so much more straightforward. When Lily was dumped in the pool and needed rescuing, she called out for help, yelling Daddy! and Cam jumped right in and pulled her to safety. But as evidenced by the way things went with Manny and Haley tonight, getting the recuse right gets decidedly more complicated when it involves teens. And as we saw, the older the teen, the more complicated things can get.

Granted, teens use a variety of strategies to make our interactions with them more complicated – complications that include evading, omitting, distorting, and even fabricating. But something happens to us parents too when our kids become teens.

Before our kids became teens, if their behavior told us that something wasn’t quite right – even if we weren’t exactly sure what it was, we spoke up. Without hesitation we calmly confronted them with what our intuition was telling us. This sent our child a message about our sturdy presence, reminding them that we cared about them, that we noticed their behavior, and that we weren’t afraid to say something about it.

However, when those same kids become teens and our intuition is telling us that something is amiss, instead of speaking up, we’re tempted to say nothing. Especially if we don’t have clear evidence for concern or if we think that addressing the problem will cause more trouble. But no matter how awful their response can be – and a teen’s sulking silence and raging anger can be pretty awful – our teens need to be able to trust that we’ll speak up and guide them through adolescence.

The BottomLine

Bad things can happen when we’re worried and should speak up but don’t. Our silence can have long-term consequences for our relationship with our teens.

When we say nothing, our worry about our teen can turn into anger. Then our feelings fester. And although we don’t deal directly with the issue, we act out our concerns through our tone of voice and offhanded comments – as Claire and Phil (especially Phil) have been doing lately with Haley. And as the exchange below between mother and daughter shows, our acting out can damage our connection with our teen:

Haley: What’s the matter with you?! You’ve been acting so weird ever since I left college.

Claire: For the record, you didn’t leave college. You were asked to leave.

Haley: Of which you guys never let me forget – especially Dad.

Claire: Honey, your father…

Haley: Oh, you don’t have to tell me what he thinks. Okay?! I’m a huge disappointment to him. And I see it on his face everyday. He acts as if he doesn’t even want me around.

Because teens are desperate to feel independent, they’ll often go to great lengths to demonstrate that they don’t need our advice or direction any more. In truth, though, as we saw with Haley tonight, they care deeply about our opinions of them and fear seeing a diminished view of themselves reflected in our eyes. They desperately want our respect.

At the very end of the episode, Phil confronts Claire about the plan she hatched up:

Phil: This little chicken game may work for your dad, but it doesn’t work for me. That’s my little girl. I need her to know that no guy on earth is good enough for her – let alone some slimy, middle-aged jean salesman!

Then Phil sees that Haley too is in the room. And the next minute she is in his arms.

Phil: What’s this?

Claire: Just enjoy it.

This is more than just a feel good ending for a made-up TV show. There’s a vital message here for you and me: Although our teens may insist on changing the terms of our involvement, they still want us involved in their lives.

Flipping the Frame: Your Parenting Experiences

• Tonight we see that Haley still cares about what her parents think about her. I’m not sure we ever outgrow that. What do you think?

• Teens do care deeply about their parents’ opinions. But we have to look closely to see evidence of this because they’ll almost never tell us this directly. Have you seen evidence of this in your teen? What does it look or sound like?

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The Teen Stage

Season 4, Episode 17

The Framework

Tonight on Modern Family the four teens are on stage. Luke has a case of adolescent-stage fright about sending a message to a classmate he has a crush on, but he eventually lands a first date with her when his dad helps out by on-line chatting as him. And Manny is crushed when the romantic dinner he planned for the new nanny – a dinner complete with candles, love poems, pizza, and tiramisu – doesn’t even make it to first bite.

Meanwhile, Haley accepts her mom’s invite for a dinner date, bails on her, and then rejoins Claire to watch Alex play in her new band. But after the concert, just when it looks like Claire might get to have a double daughter mom-date, Alex (acting just like a teen) blows her off instead:

Claire: We’re going to get some dinner. Do you want to come with us? You can bring your friends from the band.

Alex: Ummm, no thanks. We’re (pointing to the band) actually going out. And I have a ride home. So see you guys later.

Alex (to her band friends): Oh, my God! Sorry about that.

Haley (to Claire): Did she just apologize for us.

Claire: Yep.

Haley: But we were just being nice.

Claire: Sucks doesn’t it?

Claire has a theory about the teen stage and what makes teens act the way they do. Actually it’s an analogy that Phil gave her:

Raising a kid is like sending a rocket ship to the moon. You spend the early years in constant contact. And then one day, around the teenage years, they go around to the dark side, and they’re gone. All you can do is wait for that faint signal that says they’re coming back.

Flipping the Frame: My Notes

I can get onboard with Phil and Claire’s rocket ship analogy – at least as far as the moon. I can envision the soon-to-be-launched teen rocket being fueled as our kids’ physical maturation, their increased thinking capacity, and the intensified expectations placed on them all combine for their blastoff into adolescence. I can even use the Dunphy’s analogy to picture our kids extending away from us as they form their own identities. Our girls tend to extend away by revving their rocket engines in our faces while our boys tend to takeoff to their bedrooms and stay there for so long that they might as well have gone to the moon.

So I was right there with Claire and Phil on their moon mission for the firing of the rockets, the revving of the engines, and the takeoff. But when we got to the part about teens going around to the dark side and that all we can do is wait while they’re gone, I had to bail out.

We used to think that the Dunphy’s analogy pretty much described how things worked. For years psychologists told us that teens needed to separate from their parents so they could establish their own identity and become independent. We believed that during their early years kids were dependent on us – we were in constant contact as Claire put it. We thought of adolescence as a time when kids form their identity by venturing out on their own (to the dark side, so to speak) to discover who they are. And like Claire and Phil, we thought that about the only thing parents could do was wait, and if we waited long enough, our kids would eventually come back to us as fully individuated and independent adults. Sounds just about as plausible as when Claire described it, doesn’t it?

We now know that this theory about growing up is way too simplistic. Today experts agree that connection – not separation – is the foundation for strong parent and teen relationships. And this connection is not based on the dependence of a young child or the independence of a mature adult. Instead the connection is based on an in-between stage of interdependence.

Don’t get me wrong, though. If our teens are to do their job of forming an identity of their own, they have to keep us at arms length (hence the revving of their engines in our faces and the takeoffs for their bedrooms and beyond). If they didn’t work hard to extend away from us, they couldn’t be sure that the identities they’re forming are truly theirs and not just a copy of our opinions, values, and ideas.

So just to be clear: Our teen’s job is to extend away from us. And it’s our job to stay involved and connected to them– even as they extend away.

The BottomLine

Tonight Claire lamented to Haley: When you were little, we used to do everything together. And I thought maybe you were coming back around, and we could be friends again. I miss being part of my daughter’s life.

Take heart, Claire. Adolescence is a stage. It has an end. And while it’s true that conflict within families is particularly evident between daughters and mothers, it’s also true that the conflict typically increases and peaks during the early years of adolescence – around the age of thirteen or fourteen. So Haley is on her way back around.

Our kids do change. And it’s almost always for the better. It takes time, but they’ll eventually be friendlier on a more regular basis. They’ll be more cooperative, more responsible, and less argumentative. They’ll no longer criticize us constantly and disagree with all our ideas just because we happen to be in the same room with them.

Tonight Claire notices the transformation beginning to take place in Haley, remarking to Phil: Did you hear that?! First she complimented my fashion sense. And then she told me I did something right. I think it’s happening. Although Haley is not yet fully independent, we’re beginning to see glimpses of the adult she is becoming.

Flipping the Frame: From My Life as a Parent

We too can sometimes get a peek at the young adult our teens are working to become. Our best chance is often late night because that’s when teens tend to be most reflective and most able and willing to give us a window into their lives.

Even though I’m not quite the night owl my kids were as teens, I did find it was worth my while to occasionally make myself available late at night to connect with them. One word of caution though: I found that this was not the time to lecture or to probe them about some upcoming event in an attempt to calm my worries. If I did, the window into their lives quickly got slammed in my face. But if I stayed quiet and receptive, I was often rewarded with insights into their thinking and sometimes even a glimpse at the adult they were becoming.

Flipping the Frame: Your Parenting Experiences

• Claire and Phil talk about their kids going to the dark side of the moon during adolescence. When you think about the distance your teen has put between you and them, what kind of words or analogies do you use?

• Think back to your teen years when you were extending away from your parents. What kinds of things did you do to put distance between them and you?

• Have you noticed your teen actively extending a way from you? What kinds of things are they doing to keep you at arms length?

• Have you ever tried connecting with your teen late at night to get a glimpse into their lives? Have you found other times when you can get this kind of glimpse into the adult they are becoming?

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