The Bedroom - Adolescent's Need to Grow

Excerpted from
What Are You Doing in There: Balancing Your Need to Know with Your Adolescent's Need to Grow
By Charlene C. Giannetti, Margaret Sagarese

Comforting: Did your child once cuddle a special blanket? Researchers at the University of Wisconsin verified that children's special blankets had the same magical powers as Mommy during doctor visits. Alter studying sixty-four children, they found that blankets known to be attached emotionally to the boys and girls in the experiment appeared to lessen their anxiety in the doctor's office us much as a mothers presence. "Blankies" are magic.

Your children may outgrow blankie. What remains is the equation that certain items contribute to a sense of security. These years are filed with change, turbulence, and insecurity. So being surrounded by favorite things is reassuring and especially important now. Your role is to guide your young adolescent to create a room for relaxing.

A comfy bed is a must for middlers, who need an increasing amount of sleep. Well-worn stuffed animals, special collections-whatever things your child holds figuratively if not literally on to are objects of comfort. The room is supposed to be a sanctuary.

Order is not necessarily a part of this atmosphere. As we already mentioned, neatness is a herculean task for ten to fifteen-year-olds. Neatnik does not come naturally to most middlers. Spend a weekend putting up shelving or a closet organizing kit. Keeping the room clean has to he explained in specifics. No food items left around. Dirty clothes put in the laundry hamper. Floors or rugs vacuumed on a regular basis. when you talk in specifics, your child has a better chance of understanding the directions-and following them.

Stimulating: Young adolescent bedrooms should be a place for adventure and activity, for studying and learning. That doesn't mean we advocate furnishing it with IV. VCR, Play Station, PC, telephone, and any other electronic innovation your child covets. Without her own personal television or DVD, she's more likely to watch programs or movies with you. If you provide her with everything in her own space, she's less likely to join the family.

So much has been written about the hectic schedules our children have today. An unrecognized yet critical part of being stimulated is actually "vegging out." We forget that ten- to fifteen-year-olds desperately need lime and space simply lo be. Middlers are dealing with physical, emotional, psychological, and social changes pulsing through their lives.

If you see your child staring at the ceiling, realize that this is a useful and necessary time-out. Don't jump to the conclusion he is slothful or she must be stoned. Zoning out is leading to something, perhaps to something even extraordinary. Did you know that Albert Einstein discovered his theory of relativity while sprawled out on a hill basking in a summer day? He did not make this intellectual leap from behind his desk. So if your child is horizontal, don't think idle. Think incubating. The room is supposed to be a kind of percolator.

Treating your child's space with respect, curiosity, and patience comes with a guarantee. That Do Not Disturb sign, actual or implied, will be replaced (at least occasionally) with a Welcome sign. Your child will invite you in to show you something or play you a new CD track. When you abandon the clean machine mentality and approach, you will find a truce, and even better-camaraderie.

Cover-ups - To Worry or Not to Worry

Most of what goes on in your middlers bedroom as you read these pages is what has gone on for decades. Talking with friends (although telephones are now being exchanged for cell phones), daydreaming, listening to music, and writing in diaries. Young adolescents need their own space and their own place to let down their defenses without being judged by an adult.

However, there are signs that may make you worry.

Hostility: While few adolescents will have the gall to affix a lock to their bedroom door, watch for behaviors that spell unusual trouble. Is your child's room totally off-limits? A posted KLLP OUT message is little cause for concern, unless it is followed up regularly by fights when you step inside to drop off laundry. When your child takes this combative posture about his room, you are likely to know too little about what's going on with him.

Isolation: Another pattern to watch out for is hyper-hibernating. Is your child alone in his room all the time, even on weekends? Some children are loners. A solitary six-year-old may be comfortable with this temperament, but ten- to fifteen-year-olds need peers. It is true that not all young adolescents have a pack mentality, surrounding themselves constantly with friends, hut nearly every middler has at least one or two friends. II your child is friendless, never gets phone calls, or rarely plays with other children, find out why.

Typically, middlers run into social problems at school with cliques and bullying. Social conflicts feel like shameful failures. So if you sense your child is hiding or brooding, investigate further at school.

Weirdness: What if your child's room decor looks as if Ozzy Osbourne or Marilyn Manson did the interior-satanistic posters, a CI) rack filled with suicide rock like Kurt Cobain, bookshelves of Sylvia Plath, black walls. That's what the following parent faced:

"My fifteen-year-old daughter dresses in black and wears leather necklaces and black nail polish. The posters on her wall scare me. She listens to Stevie Nicks all the time and reads books about witches. Is this unhealthy? I have heard it described as Gothic. Is she in need of therapy?"

Chances are New Age paperbacks about witches, heavy metal music, gruesome paraphernalia, and Cloth clothes are sheer experimentation. Young adolescents like to try on identities as they search for who they are becoming.

Too much weirdness sets off the parental alarm bell. Automatically we think Columbine's trench coat mafia. An outlandish or disturbing personal style may be signaling emotional distress. Anger and depression hit some young adolescents hard. If your young adolescent's style unnerves you, use this checklist to get a clearer picture.

• Is she well adjusted in school, working up to her potential?

• Does she have friends with whom she laughs and spends lime?

• Does she have interests and habits that seem typical, such as watching TRL (MTV's Total Request Live) or meeting her friends at the mall for pizza?

• Does she talk to you about how she is feeling about her life?

• Does she participate willingly in family routines?

If you answer yes enough, don't worry. If you answer no, no, no, make an appointment with the social worker or psychologist at your child's school. Inquire about teen screening. I he Youth Depression Screening Initiative offers a test nationwide wherein kids hear questions through headphones and type responses on a laptop computer, ensuring privacy. The Center for the Advancement of Children's Mental Health at Columbia University works with schools and communities to administer the test and any follow-up treatment.

Adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide are widespread enough so parents shouldn't dismiss the signs as legendary teen angst. Surveys conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that 20 percent of teenagers say they have thought about ending their life.

For most of us, though, our young adolescents are not holing up in a dangerous state of mind nor hiding out in deranged environments. That said, make no mistake; many are standing their ground.