Parenting: What Should I Do When my Son Freezes me Out after the Divorce?
Q: How am I supposed to stay connected with my teenager when he just freezes me out? It’s been happening a lot since the divorce. He treats his life as none of my business. He refuses to answer my questions or tell me what’s going on. I feel so helpless, like I’ve got no role to play and there’s nothing I can do!
A: While the son’s tactic and the father’s feelings are understandable, there is something the dad can do.
First understand that the son’s tactic, which is a time honored one, is based on the assumption that parents keep best in the dark. The less they are told the better. So, in service of protecting personal freedom, the son is keeping his dad in ignorance. Naturally, to get information, the father pushes for a time to discuss what he needs to know.
However, come adolescence there never seems to be a good time to broach a conversation since his son is either otherwise occupied, in a bad mood, on the way out the door, or too tired to talk, except to friends. You need to accept that questions that seem sensible to ask to elicit what you want to know are actually likely to shut down more communication. Why? For many adolescents, questions from parents are intimidating and intrusive. They are emblematic of authority and invasive of privacy, and on both counts can be resented and resisted.
So what is the father to do? The answer is to hold his son responsible for the consequences of not talking. To do so, he could begin by declaring something like this: Whether you choose to talk to me is entirely up to you. I am not in the business of forcing communication. However, you do need to know that in the absence of any information from you, and feeling disconnected on that account, I will have to manage my ignorance my own way. I will have to use my own imagination to come up with an explanation for what may be going on in your life, and based on that understanding (or misunderstanding) I will then make a decision about what is best for me to do.
“For example, I may suppose from your not talking to me that you have something to hide, maybe substance use, and in consequence I may decide to impose some social limits on your freedom and reduce the money we provide to protect you from possible harm. Of course, you may find my thinking unrealistic, my conclusions unwarranted, and my actions inappropriate. However, when you refuse to communicate with me you give up the power to accurately inform my understanding and effectively influence my decisions. But as I said at the beginning, whether or not you talk with me is always entirely up to you.”
