Being the Dad of a Teenager

Our oldest is about to turn 13. If I didn’t know this on my own, I would have learned it by so many people who see him less frequently than I do remarking how tall and adolescent looking he’s getting. When big changes happen one day at a time and right in front of you, it’s easy to miss them.

Remember that famous line at the end of Back to the Future II? Doc Brown says, “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” Well that sentiment, that the future is so beyond your thoughts that your question isn’t even relevant seems to accurately capture the way many dads feel as they embark on the journey of parenting a teenager. It’s more like: Maps? Where we’re going there are no maps.

To keep the sci-fi references going, I’m about “to boldly go” where no man has gone before as we travel warp speed into the teenage years.

Except that’s complete bunk.

Not only has this road been traveled by most fathers before, in most cases dads have a map of the brave new world they’re going in to: Their own teenage experience with their parents.

To be fair, that may not always be a clear map or a well-marked road, it may even be a cautionary tale, but it’s not nothing. The idea that parenting teenagers puts you in uncharted waters is contrary to experience. And I think dads are using it as an excuse to neglect their duty to their children.

The ideas that teenagers are some new species that a father couldn’t know anything about or the assumption that kids know what’s best for themselves or that outsourcing their development (mental, physical, spiritual, etc) to government institutions and the internet is best may be common -- but they reek of passing the buck.

It may be fun to seek comradeship in collective incompetence, but dads shouldn’t get let off the hook so easily for shirking their duties once adolescence rolls in. The consequences of doing so may be more important than you think. It could lead to the rise of totalitarianism.

Well that escalated quickly.

How did we go from teenagers to tyranny in half of a Daddy Days column? According to famed Gulag survivor and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, this sort of “abdication of responsibility” is a precursor to just that.

In the 1970s, when Solzhenitsyn was asked to give examples of things he was seeing in the West that were the same as what he saw in Russia before the rise of Stalin he said, “Adults deferring to the opinion of their children, the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas…a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation.”

As we approach the first of many teenage birthdays, I can’t help but notice how common fathers deferring to the opinion of their kids is. If social media (and Tik Tok in particular) isn’t the most shallow and worthless idea that the younger generation is carried away with I don’t know what is. Intellectual leadership? Well, parents don’t think they have any and gladly yield to the younger generation to raise their kids for them.

Parenting teenagers is certainly new territory, just as parenting your first toddler is. And I’m not going to downplay the challenges and difficulties. But I am going to “up play” the reality that parents do know best, adolescence isn’t unprecedented, and we’ve got an important role to play here. Roads or no roads, dads, we’re not just along for the ride.