Do We Expect Too Much From Our Teenagers?

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One of the complaints parents frequently make about teenagers is that they don’t think about anyone except themselves. We say it when they keep us awake at night wondering where they are, when they forget to pick up a younger sibling at a Scout meeting, when they consider (or don’t) the long term consequences

of their decisions. We want them not only to act differently, by which we mean more maturely, but to think and feel differently, too. Are we asking too much of them – are we, in fact, expecting more than they’re capable of?
The ability to identify inner emotions and acknowledge internal conflict as well as the capacity for insight and self-reflection are all involved in situations like these. So are considering the needs and feelings of others, taking another perspective

beyond one’s own, or thinking of the future the way teenagers do - as something other than the present that just hasn’t happened yet. This "different way of knowing,” as Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan characterizes it, is a higher level of cognition that begins to develop in later adolescence, between the transition to college and the onset of adulthood. One indication of this new mental organization is a change in how other people are viewed - from being principally about one's own wishes in relation to them to being about them as distinct selves with their own wishes or preferences.
Of course, well before adolescence children understand that other people have minds that are different from theirs, independent points of view. But the capacity to subordinate

their point of view, not to another’s but to the relationship between them, develops a lot later. Certainly teenagers are more than capable of simple, tit-for-tat reciprocity – I’ll call when I’m late if you lend me the car, for instance. But the mutual reciprocity and interpersonalism that define a more complex mental level - I’ll call when I’m late because if I don’t, you'll worry , not because otherwise you won't give me the car next time – might be more than we should expect of them, at least for a while. As we all know, teenagers are by definition narcissists – usually they don’t think about anyone except themselves, and parents exist mostly as need-fulfilling objects. Once their minds catch up to their feelings, though, they might even start thinking about ours.