Raising kids through adolescence is not for the faint of heart.
When you have a baby, it's expected that you'll take some maternity or paternity leave from work. When you have a teen, it's expected that you'll be in the peak of your career, but some parents are finding the need to take a "teen-ternity leave" from work to support their adolescent kids.
It's a flip from what has become the traditional trajectory for modern parents. Despite the fact that the U.S. is the only developed nation in the world to not have mandated paid parental leave, most parents take at least some time off when a baby is born to recover physically from pregnancy and birth and to settle into life with their tiny new human. Many parents then opt to have one parent stay home full-time during their children's younger years, as full-time childcare is often cost prohibitive, and raising babies and toddlers requires an enormous amount of time, attention and energy.
Parents often return to work when their kids are in school full-time, and many feel a bit of a respite from the relentlessness of parenting as their kids become more independent and capable of doing things on their own. It's not that older kids don't need their parents, but their needs are different. Physical parenting gives way to more complex emotional parenting as kids get older, and for a while, those emotional challenges are somewhat simple.
Then the tween years come along. Then the teens. And for some parents, a realization hits that parenting kids through puberty takes almost as much time, attention and energy, as toddlers do. Only now, those needs are much more complicated and consequential.
Taking "teen-ternity leave" from work may not be feasible for many or most parents, but those who have the means to take a break from work to focus on family full-time during their kids' teen years shouldn't be judged for it. Raising teens is rarely easy, but for some parents, getting their kids through their teen years is the hardest thing they will ever do.
For one, adolescence is when mental health struggles really come to a head. If you've never parented a child with anxiety, depression, OCD, or some other mental illness, consider yourself fortunate. The mental and emotional toll for parents in that boat is immense, and the amount of time it can take to find the right kind of care and manage the various manifestations of whatever they struggle with can be significant.
Mental health struggles often arise during adolescence.
Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash
Another reality of parenting teens that makes going to work challenging is the tendency for teens to spend the better part of the day not wanting to talk and then totally opening up at like 10:30 at night. Late night heart-to-hearts are a hallmark parenting in the teen years, but it can be hard to sustain if you're having to wake up early and head to work in the morning. And the emotional nature of these conversations requires a lot of thought and energy.
Helping with homework becomes more complicated as parents try to pull their advanced math knowledge up from the recesses of their minds, and then there's the transportation problem. Until a teen can drive themselves and unless they have their own car, someone has to take them to and from their various activities. It may sound silly to take time off from work just to drive your teens around, but it's not just the transportation—it's the transportation on top of everything else.
Is all of this just modern overparenting run amok? Not really.
“We often think the heavy parenting lift is for young kids, who need help getting dressed and more supervised playtime. But once you have a teenager, you realize bigger kids, bigger problems,” Amanda Craig PhD, LMFT, family therapist, mom, and author of the book, "Who Are You & What Have You Done with My Kid?: Connect with Your Tween While They Are Still Listening," told Parents.
The pandemic, of course, didn't help matters. Kids who went through that world-changing event during their formative years had their sense of normalcy and safety rocked, not just on an individual level, but a societal one. Research on the brains of teens before and after the pandemic shows there were actual neurobiological impacts of that time period. Teens today have also grown up during a particularly turbulent time in politics with that turbulence shoved in their face continually via social media. It's not surprising that a lot of young people are psychologically struggling and needing more support from their parents than previous teen generations did.
Maybe a teen-ternity leave—which is really just a different form of parental leave—isn't a bad idea. Imagine if we lived in a world where it was actually economically feasible for more families.