Adolescence and the loss of childhood
Whenever I think about a child’s entry into early adolescence (around ages 9-13), I am reminded of the extraordinary title of Thomas Wolf’s novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.
For me, these words capture the irredeemable loss that young people must endure and the daunting challenge that they must brave as they depart from childhood and face the great unknowns of growing up.
They can never “go home” to childhood again. They can never return to that simpler, sheltered, and supportive time. Growing up requires giving up because necessary losses must occur if necessary gains are to be made.
Now early adolescent apathy causes the separation from childhood to begin as young people start caring less about what used to matter most. Now they are set adrift in a sea of disaffection.
They care less about what they loved to do as children.
They care less about spending time with parents.
They care less about life in the family circle.
They care less about school performance.
They care less about social obedience.
They care less about pleasing parents.
They know what they care less about; but they don’t yet have any good alternatives for investing their caring elsewhere.
No longer wanting to be defined and treated as a child, they can throw childhood interests, activities, and enjoyments away to show how they have changed. Unhappily, this decision can leave them riding on empty.
The young person is at loose ends. He or she can’t find a satisfying way to connect to themselves, other people, or the world. Restless, frustrated, and discontent is how the early adolescent often feels.
Of course, the passing of childhood is not just painful for the young person; parents have their share of loss to bear as well. They will never have their son or daughter as a little child again. That golden period in their relationship that may have been so rich in closeness, communication, and companionship is passed.
The child who loved nothing better than to spend time with them, to play with them, to be proud of their company, to confide in them, and to please them has been supplanted. No more cuddling and rough housing.
Now they have a more aloof early adolescent who is more reluctant to be touched, who would rather spend time with friends, who feels too old to play with parents, who is embarrassed by their public company, who is more private and less forthcoming, and who seems to court their disapproval through deliberate resistance and opposition.
As loss of the old relationship creates more distance and abrasion between them, the break with childhood is made.
Parents miss the old sweet times with the child they had together, the glad company they kept and the precious history they shared. Gone is the “little buddy” who wanted to tag along everywhere with them and the “constant companion” who would tell them everything. Suddenly (it seems to parents) their little darling has been replaced by a more adversarial adolescent who doesn’t act like he or she misses them the way they miss the child.
This apparent difference may even seem to them unfair. Doesn’t the adolescent regret giving up the old way they used [to] be together? Yes, but the young person is moving on with life, more inclined to looking forward to the future than to looking back at the past. The older, grown up world that beckons is filled with exciting possibilities. After all, the other side of loss is freedom — freedom from and freedom for. Now the young person anticipates more freedom from parental restraint and more freedom for new experiences.
While the adolescent eagerly anticipates the new, parents can feel bereft of the old. It’s hard for them to appreciate their son or daughter’s growth when the cost of this progress for them is a very painful letting go.
And if they turn pain to anger, they can criticize the change. “You used to be such a great kid, what’s happened to you?” Now parenting takes more effort and yields less positive return when the early adolescent starts to complain about treatment, contest limits, resist demands, and pull away for social independence.
At this transition into adolescence the young person can feel in danger of having nothing stable to hold onto, caught between the trapeze of childhood that has been let go and the trapeze of growing up not yet within his or her grasp.