Roxane Lehmann, Ph.D.

Haley Goes to Jail

Season 4, Episode 7

The Framework

The episode opens with the kind of call every parent dreads – a middle-of-the-night call from the police:

Claire: Hello. Yes, this is she … Oh, God! Haley has been arrested!

Immediately, Claire jumps onto a roller coaster of bad feelings. And while on that emotional ride full of confusion and panic, and well before she has all the facts, she begins putting together a plan to solve Haley’s problem.

Early the next morning Claire, Phil, and Mitch (enlisted to lend his legal expertise) head to Haley’s campus to rescue her from what they believed were underage drinking charges. En route, with some time to reflect, Claire seems to realize that Haley needs to share some of the worry about what she has done:

Claire: My daughter’s been arrested for drinking. I would like her to sit in jail and think about that. As a matter of fact I might stop and do a little outlet shopping. Who wants a pair of last year’s sunglasses, eh?

Upon their arrival, however, they find that things are even worse than they’d thought: The charges are more serious than they’d assumed and, after only a matter of weeks at college, Haley is in danger of suspension. The parents bail Haley out of jail, and once again begin to take charge of the problem. Surprisingly, it’s Phil – generally more of a likeable friend than a father figure – who puts his foot down. He scolds Haley for being reckless and making excuses instead of taking responsibility for her actions and gives her specific instructions on how to dress and act at the upcoming suspension hearing. But just when it seems that Phil is going to completely takeover the rescue mission and leave little or none of the worry or work for Haley to deal with, Claire steps in to hand some of the responsibility back to Haley:

Haley: Where are you going?
Claire: To get [your dad] a waffle.

At the hearing Haley admits to her wrongdoing and some other unrelated acts as well. Suffice it to say that the sum of her confessions gets her kicked out of school. And as Claire and Phil help Haley pack-up her belongings, it’s tempting to wonder if perhaps the parents got the problem sharing balance wrong. Perhaps they should not have gone off for waffles, leaving Haley to prepare for her hearing alone. But when the dorm room is empty except for the furniture and it’s time to depart for home, there’s this exchange:

Phil: Where are the keys?
Haley: There right there on the makeup table.
Claire: Oh, honey, that’s a desk.

So perhaps things did turnout for the best after all.

Flipping the Frame: My Notes

Tonight Claire and Phil faced the unsettling fact that while they’re still responsible for Haley (the police called them), they’re not in charge – at least not totally. This is not unique to the Dunphys. Virtually all parents of teens face this fact sooner or later. And their dialogue as they approached the police station depicts the ambivalence we parents typically feel when our teens mess up:

Phil: We’re going to walk in there as a family and show we support her no matter what.
Claire: We may be supporting her for the rest of her life.

Phil’s right. Of course, we don’t want to be too hands-off when our teens mess up and leave them with only their own inadequate judgment to guide them. But Claire has a point too. If we expect our teens to eventually become self-reliant, we can’t let our fears about what the mess up might do to their future cause us to become too hands-on either.

When we takeover our teen’s problems, they miss out on the chance to develop the important life skills of decision-making and problem solving. And not letting our teens experience any of the negative consequences of their actions, means that they miss out on key feedback that can motivate them to learn from their mistakes. Plus if our actions tell our teens that we’ll do all the necessary worrying, they’ll come to see this as our job. They’ll come to believe that we have to figure out how to get them out of their problems –that that’s what parent are for – and that they have absolutely nothing to worry about.

The BottomLine

Haley: I don’t know what the policy is… but I think I broke it – twice.

When our teens mess-up (and they’re bound to), it’s important that we strike the right balance. Of course, we don’t want to abandon them just when they need our sturdy presence more than ever. But it’s not in their best interest for us to take total control of the situation either. Instead, our teens need us to be a guide worth following – someone with the authority to set limits and make and enforce rules as well as someone they can look to for direction and back up.

And our teens are counting on us to get the balance of support right. Because when we find appropriate ways to influence and guide them, their bad decisions can become some of their best opportunities to gradually learn self-reliance and develop their own inner voice, which will remind them of their values and help them make better decisions.

Flipping the Frame: From My Life as a Parent

This episode brought back memories of my son’s eighth grade sneak out. Like Claire, I got a middle-of-the-night call from the police along with the feel-bad roller coaster ride of emotions. That night it dawned on me that I was no longer totally in charge. I realized that I was going to have to change the way I thought about my role as a parent. Successfully parenting my son – now that he’d become a teen – would require his cooperation. And getting his cooperation would depend a lot on me.

Flipping the Frame: Your Parenting Experiences

• Did this episode bring back memories of the time you came face to face with the fact that you were no longer totally in-charge of your teen? If so, what happened?

• How did you handle the situation? Did your hyper-vision about the future cause you to jump in and take control of the situation? If you had it to do over, would you do anything differently?

• How did the incident change your relationship with your teen – in terms of your trust, your expectations, your monitoring of your teen’s behavior and how you held your teen accountable?

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The word is grit.

Grit is a new psychological category defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” It’s related to willpower (the subject of a recent posting), but it’s not the same thing.

Gritty individuals have more than the self-regulation in willpower. They have zest and persistence as well. Teens with grit are focused less on short-term intensity and more on stamina. They believe in long-term goals and don’t give up in the face of difficulty or disappointment.

So how gritty do you think your teen is? The Short Grit Scale can give you some idea. The scale was developed and validated by Penn psychologist and researcher Angela Duckworth.

Duckworth and other researchers have been studying qualities like grit, perseverance, self-confidence, curiosity, and passion for several years now. They call these qualities “non-cognitive skills,” and they believe that these skills have been undersold. Now, they’re not saying that smarts don’t matter. But they’re arguing that when it comes to how children succeed, this set of non-cognitive skills is at least as important as the narrow band of cognitive skills measured on ability and achievement tests, including the ACT and SAT.

Although non-cognitive skills are harder to measure on tests, researchers are increasingly pointing to how much grit and the related qualities (which most of us call character) matter in predicting which students will flourish. What’s more, studies have shown that while there may be a genetic component to character traits, they are not fixed. Instead, they can be taught, learned, and developed.

How can you help your teen build grit?

There is not yet a curriculum proven to make teens grittier, but there is quite a bit of evidence suggesting that the following can help:

Nudge your teen to do some looking into the future. Teens who regularly think about what they want to do with their life and what kind of person they want to become, have a better sense of direction and are, thus, less likely to get off-track. These teens don’t see going to college as an end in itself. Instead they’re charting a course that includes some ideas of what they might do for their work life. This doesn’t mean that they’re firmly committed to a specific career track. They may change their mind and head in a different direction more than once. But at any given time, they can articulate where they think they’re heading – at least for now.

Teens with this type of guiding purpose tend to work hard at school and to take hobbies and other activities seriously. They also tend to take charge of problems and persevere.

So nudge your teen to look into the future by regularly (a couple times a year) asking them to think about their current interests and strengths. Encourage them to make lists of the things they like to do, the things they like to learn, and the things they value, as well as the things they’re good at – perhaps even better at than most kids their age. And then talk with them about how their combination of interests and strengths might be used in a career someday.

Encourage your teen to think of academic achievement as a marathon. Most teens have a shortsighted view of academic achievement. They think of tests, papers, and projects as a series of unrelated sprints that they either win or lose at. When school is viewed this way, the intensity and the pressure to win can become unbearable.

From a longsighted view, though, academic achievement looks like a marathon. From this viewpoint, each test, each paper, each project your teen works on represents but one of many laps to their long-term goals. And each lap offers new opportunities for them to develop the non-cognitive skills they need for sustained high performance – learning how to better pace themselves, developing better study strategies, discovering the value of perseverance, and building resilience.

Give your teen a chance to learn how to handle disappointment and failure. We parents often think our job is to do everything we can to shield our children from adversity. Yet when children are overly protected from hardship, they don’t get a chance to develop the ability to overcome failure. So if we want our kids to have long-term success, we need to first be willing to let them do some struggling. This is a thread that runs throughout How Children Succeed, Paul Tough’s brand-new book about character. (You can hear the author talk about his book in an interview with MPR host Kerri Miller here.)

So rather than thinking of yourself as your teen’s protector, consider acting as their safety net instead. Being a safety net means paying attention so that you’re there when they fall – to comfort them and reassure them that they can indeed bounce back. And then you’ll want to help them look honestly at where things went wrong, how they contributed to the problem, and what they need to do differently next time.

Be your teen’s historian. You can help your teen bounce back stronger and build resilience after a fall by reminding them of obstacles they’ve faced before and successfully overcome. When they’re feeling discouraged or overwhelmed, you can listen to their worries and then remind them of their past successes under similar emotional circumstances.

By helping your teen build grit, you’re not just helping them succeed at school. You’re also nurturing the kind of stamina they need to have real-life success.

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