The Challengers of Boys Leaving Home

‘ We had a great relationship with him for most of his childhood, but just recently he seems to be questioning everything we say, challenging our authority and he and Bill seem to be clashing with each other every second day and I’m sick of being caught in the middle’, says Rita the tearful mother. Does this scenario sound familiar? This scene is played out in many families as adolescent boys reach their late teens and if its not handled wisely it can lead to all sorts of difficulties in the ‘leaving home launching’ phase of family life.

Levinson, a developmental psychologist interested in the adult development of men identifies the early adult transition as beginning at approximately age 17 and ending around age 22. This early adult transition is understood as the developmental bridge between the eras of pre-adulthood and early adulthood. The young man throughout this period is a boy-man on the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. Although emotionally still an adolescent, he is stretching forward toward the enticing, exciting but also forbidding adult world ahead.

During this transition there are two major tasks to be accomplished. The first is to leave the pre-adult world and the most obvious component of this is separating from his family of origin. Predictably, this process is often accompanied by considerable emotional upheaval. In one large study 82% of men experienced major conflict in negotiating their moving out of home. For those of you reading this, the good news is that you are not on your own if you are struggling with your late teen boys - it is the norm rather than the exception. It is not too difficult to appreciate the reasons underlying this troubled time. During the transition, the boy-man is questioning the nature of the world and his place in it. This almost inevitably leads in many cases to the challenging of parents values and authority. Because emotionally the boy-man’s emotions are still volatile, his challenging of his parents frequently degenerate into screaming matches particularly with dad. There are not many parents who possess the maturity and self possession to resist and impassioned defence of the life values they hold sacred.

It is my belief that families function best as a benevolent dictatorship, meaning that mum and dad are lovingly and wisely in charge and run the family according to what they think is best for their children. Of course they need to be open to their children’s ideas and wishes but finally when their are differences between what the parents think is right and what the children think, it is the parent’s decision and wishes that need to hold sway. Now this normally works very well till the time when children become late adolescents, but as just noted when boys start to become boy-men this begins to cause trouble because the boy-man begins to resent the ‘benevolent dictators’ rule believing that he should have the same power as his parents. And this is normal and to be expected and it signals the beginning of the launching process. The energy from the power struggles eventually propels the boy-man out into the world. Of course their are both wise and not so wise ways of negotiating this phase

The second major task of this transition period is to form a basis for living in the adult world before being fully a part of it. At the beginning of this period, the boy-man, more the adolescent, harbours vague, romantic ideas and fantasies about what he will do and accomplish in life. Gradually as he travels chronologically toward the adult end of the spectrum, he begins to flesh out some of these fantasies into a more concrete achievable program. Often this rocky process makes parents very anxious as their boy-man vacillates and changes direction, exerting additional pressure upon an already strained relationship.

If the description above of the launching process connects with your experience and you’re feeling a bit lost or a lot lost! then I would be happy to see you to assist you to charter a course through this very fraught but potentially wonderful phase of family life.