Missed Connection Children Lacking An Intimate Relationship With Their Parents Grow Insecure, Make Bad Choices

The girl baffled her parents. A frantically busy couple, they both needed to leave for work by 7 a.m. each morning. Yet day after day, their teenage daughter confounded them by refusing to get dressed on time.

It took a therapist skilled in a field called attachment theory to unlock the mystery of the girl’s problem.

It wasn’t the girl’s defiance. Nor was it the parents’ firmness.

The real difficulty in this family, according to attachment researcher Roger Kobak, was the precarious nature of the girl’s relationship with her parents.

The family had recently undergone serious financial stress, and the mother had upped her work hours from 40 to 60 per week. She’d also added a thrice weekly exercise class.

The result: The daughter deeply missed her mother.

Once her parents realized that, they began to devise ways to become more available to her. And the girl’s angry morning behavior began to melt away.

Spokane’s Marycliff Institute recently sponsored a workshop featuring Kobak, director of clinical training in the University of Delaware’s psychology department.

“Parents would be shocked at the notion that their kids feel they don’t love them,” Kobak says.

But that’s exactly how kids often feel — even if they don’t express it — when anger or distance regularly separates them from their parents.

Insecure attachments leave kids to muddle through dilemmas they lack the maturity to handle alone, while secure attachments lead to healthier consequences.

Secure kids tend to make wiser choices in their friendships, find it easier to break off dating relationships that aren’t satisfying, use contraceptives when they come sexually active, and, provided they’re not disadvantaged by poverty, achieve higher grades.

Attachment research with adolescents springs from the theories of British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who wrote in the 1950s.

In the early 1960s, Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth began a study of infant attachment at Johns Hopkins University. This field of research has grown since, exploring intimate relationships among people of all ages.

According to Kobak, 60 to 65 percent of teens are securely attached. The remaining 30 to 35 percent fall into one of three categories of insecure attachment.

The dismissing style, the most common in U.S. culture, is displayed by the teen who actively denies the importance of any sort of relationship with his parents. He rarely seems to show up at home, yet when he runs into difficulty, he’s likely to make lousy choices. When he combines this style with an angry, harsh assessment of his parents, he’s more likely to abuse drugs or alcohol.

The preoccupied style of insecure attachment is the mirror opposite. This kid stays too attuned to his parents’ feelings and reactions. Parents are likely to worry that the child isn’t capable, and he seems thwarted in his effort to move toward independence.

The most troubled kids, however, display a third style, called a disorganized style of attachment. These kids, damaged by early trauma and loss, find life too chaotic to forge even tenuous attachments. They may wind up at serious risk for all sorts of difficulties, including violent crime.

The lessons of attachment theory can be useful for parents of any child, regardless of attachment style. Kent Hoffman, a psychotherapist at Marycliff Institute, points out that securely attached kids also display pockets of insecurity.

The goal for parents, when their teens are struggling, should be to strengthen the relationship. Parents must combine firmness and understanding to give kids the solid support they need to launch into adulthood. As the relationship grows more secure, so does the child’s sense of autonomy.

Parents tend to err in one of two directions, Hoffman says. They can be too firm, leading to rigidity. These parents make life an endless series of unbending rules. They can also be too understanding, leading to wimpiness. These parents can’t enforce a rule to save their souls.

The trick is to combine firmness with understanding, structure with flexibility. That also helps create kids who can work out their disagreements with their parents through negotiation, rather than through misbehavior, says Bert Powell, a Marycliff psychotherapist.

The ideal, according to Powell, is for the kid to bolster his arguments for greater freedom with examples of wise choices he’s already made. A teen who can point to a solid school record, and safe driving habits, for example, may be ready to drive from Coeur d’Alene to Spokane on his own.

How can parents help foster this sense of security?

First, agree the experts, parents must be willing to examine how their behavior affects their child.

Too often parents simply blame the child: She’s too sullen, too rude, too irresponsible.

“If you find yourself saying, ‘The problems are all the child’s,’ the truth is, they’re not,” says Hoffman.

Very often, kids are responding to their parents’ emotional reactions. When parents routinely yell, criticize and reject their kids, teens’ behavior worsens.

“Some parents realize how they handle their own emotions is important, and others aren’t even aware they’re having emotional reactions,” says Kobak.

It’s up to the parent to be the grown-up and search for a respectful way to de-escalate the conflict.

According to attachment therapists, the answer will be simple, yet profound. The teen must hear the message that, despite their disagreements, the parent will be there for him.

During these years, therapists point out, it’s helpful for parents of teens to have a partner or a close friend for support. That way parents can work out their anxieties away from the child, and express themselves more calmly and maturely with their teen.

Parents of teens must also learn to tolerate differences, Powell says. He recommends that parents accept strange fashions and weird music, but set a firm bottom line for safety issues such as curfews, driving, sex, alcohol and drugs.

Therapists recommend that parents find ways to regularly schedule time alone with each child. That may be as simple as a relaxed conversation in the car on the way to soccer practice, a Thursday morning breakfast at McDonald’s before school, or a weekly date for frozen yogurt.

The actual activity doesn’t much matter. “It’s not the content, it’s the tone,” Kobak says.

During that time, parents should try to understand the child’s perspective, avoid attempting to change the child, and just enjoy being together.

By maintaining a positive, ongoing relationship, parents are better able to track their child’s ups and downs, and more likely to understand what’s causing problems.

A secure relationship, caution the therapists, doesn’t prevent all rough patches on the road through adolescence.

But when the bumps appear, it does give parents a steering mechanism to help guide and redirect the child.

Powell says much of his work in therapy is designed to provide parents greater access to this type of relationship with their child.

“If you have access,” he says, “you don’t need therapy.”