Playing the Power Game

From Parenting the Teenager, Carl E. Pickhardt, Ph.D., Capital Printing Co., Inc. 1983

If you want to enjoy parenting your teenager, you need to understand how to play the game. What game? If you don’t know the answer to that, you may already be in trouble.

The name of the game is Independence. Its purpose is for teenagers to gather increasing amounts of power until ultimately they can self-determine their own lives, free from parental support and control.

The game itself is structured around a seemingly endless series of conflicts, where freedoms that teenagers demand are opposed by parents, and where responsibilities parents demand are opposed by teenagers. In addition the contestants are assigned different roles, both of which are contradictory in nature. The parent is required to hold to power while at the same time letting it go; the teenager is required to assert power while at the same time allowing others to retain it. If this all sounds challenging, it is.

The game begins about age 10 to 12, with the opening move usually being a declaration of general dissatisfaction with the parents. We suddenly observe that the child who once respected even loved us now simply endures our presence and believes we can do no right. Caught off balance by this unanticipated loss of approval, we may respond with hurt or resentment. What, after all, have we done wrong?

Bad move. Never take this early criticism personally. It simply reflects a desire to discount the worth of our authority and raise in its place their own superior judgment as the basis for guiding what they should and should not be able to do. Hence the refrain: “Well I know better than you!”

After dissatisfaction has been declared and our judgment discounted, the direct challenge to our authority gets underway. Demands and resistance, confrontation and negotiation, become the defining activities in our new relationship. The game has truly begun.

For parents, the purpose for this continuing combat is important to remember. Over and above the differences being contested, you are now playing a game in which the teenager needs to win power from you. That doesn’t mean they must be allowed to prevail in every dispute. Far from it. What they do need however is for you to provide enough resistance to their demands so that they must at times fight you for freedoms they want, and win frequently enough to experience a growing sense of power. These freedoms, which they gain through argument, are often more highly valued that those they are simply given. Thus, by your losing, you, as well as they, can win.

Since they are so expert, you may as well learn from their experience. A 16-year-old summarized a winning strategy this way. “Always start by asking for more than you can reasonably expect to get, and then let them argue you down to where they think they have won, and you have got what you were really willing to accept in the first place. So for parents, always start by declaring less than you can reasonably expect to give and then proceed as they do. In this way, you can each feel that you have won, and in fact you have. Compromise allows both players to preserve their self-respect.

Most important, remember that parents do not lose the game by losing power. They only lose the game by losing their sense of humor. When the game becomes so serious that we can no longer laugh at ourselves and our teenagers, then the spirit of play is gone, perspective falls away, and a constructive game can degenerate into harmful conflict.