Embracing our daughter’s people.

As parents, we want to protect our children from any dangers we perceive. As parents of daughters, we want to protect them from people we don’t believe are healthy/safe.

Before our daughter going into a long term treatment program, we definitely didn’t embrace the friends and boyfriends we thought were ‘bad’ for her. We prohibited her from seeing them, certainly didn’t invite them into our home, etc. These are common behaviors amongst most parents who find themselves in this situation. While we were in our treatment program, I read a book that used the scenario of a child being placed in a wilderness treatment program as an analogy to understanding human behavior in and out of the workplace. While the book was very timely to our situation, it was one of the most insightful things I’ve ever read.*

In the story, one of the moderators started helping the parents in the analogous situation understand that if their children came home to the same circumstance by which they left, very little would likely change. While that alone is a deep and real topic, the example the author gave was eye-opening. The parents in the story responded to negative influences (humans) in the same way we had as parents — barring all contact and interaction with them. The moderator offered, instead, what would happen if you invited them into your home?

We read this at the very beginning of our program but didn’t have a significant opportunity to act on it until our daughter returned home and reentered the real world.

While in her program, we did apply this learning where we could. We didn’t tell her not to hang out with other girls in the program we didn’t like or didn’t like what they had done to get there. We treated them as they were one of our own, and this is where we began to see her step away from those girls who were prohibiting her growth. This started to teach us how to behave before she game home.

When she came home, we started her a year behind where she technically could have gone. We enrolled her as a Junior instead of a Senior for a variety of reasons. Within the first week, she made friends, two of whom were Seniors. For no other reason than a hypersensitivity of her falling back into old patterns, I immediately bristled at the idea of her spending her time with Seniors, even though they were the same age. My husband and I took the opportunity to use what we’d read. Instead of prohibiting her from spending time with these two girls, we embraced them.

• First, we invited them to our home. We wanted them around us as much as possible so we could get to know them and so that our daughter knew our home was open to her friends.
• Second, we allowed her to spend time with them under reasonable parameters. Things such as knowing who she was with and where she was going to be were mandatory, but we didn’t say no.
• Third, we went to where they were. All three girls participated in the school’s theater program, so we engaged in parent activities where possible, attended performances, took them too and from events, etc. We didn’t overtly get involved in every detail, but we did put ourselves in a position to observe them in other situations.

While part of this friendship triangle crumbled over time, half it remains strong to this day. Over time our daughter realized what was and wasn’t healthy for her and abandoned those individuals who weren’t making a positive influence on her life.

Next came the boyfriends. This was much harder to swallow primarily because of how we first encountered ‘the boy.’ We were using social media monitoring software that also connected to her Gmail. She was very aware of this and knew that we received notifications for any trigger the app identified based on sentiment, language, and other tactics.

Before she was actually permitted to date, per the rules of her program, we learned of a young man she started seeing. The social media monitoring app, in a 60-minute window, sent us approximately 50 alerts. The email thread through which they were having a conversation was filled with profanities and other references that trigged the software to notify. Just reading how he ‘spoke’ and what he said was enough to make me want to go down the former road of prohibition.

We dealt with the fact she broke program rules accordingly (through her program mentor), and this rule-breaking did, in fact, extend her program approximately three months. Once, though, she was allowed to date, we allowed them to carry through on a relationship, but we did so only through some very specific rules. We used these rules to both show an attempt to embrace this person and to ensure she understood the importance of ‘self.’

• They were allowed to date but were only allowed to be together at our home, with us home or at school. Going to other locations was not something that was allowed immediately.
• He was required to attend a family dinner at our home once a week. During this dinner, we engaged (or attempted to) him in conversation to get to know him and so he could get to know the type of home we were.
• She was required to keep up an extra-curricular activity that he was not involved in (e.g., if he were in the theater program, she’d have to find something else), and she was required to maintain her participation (no dropping out).
• She was required to keep a B average in terms of grades, and should those drop all outside of school, time spent together would be stopped until the grades were brought back up.

Admittedly, it was a rocky road. The young man attended a few dinners with us, barely eating anything and hardly conversing. We certainly didn’t expect him to be excited to share a meal with us, but we were looking to engage with him genuinely. We kept with it, though, and followed through on all of the above rules as well.

It didn’t take long, six, or eight weeks maybe before our daughter realized this wasn’t the right boy for her, and they separated. We’ve used these rules with every young man she’s dated since. Some we absolutely loved, some we didn’t like at all — but at the end of the day, we embraced them all and let her come to her own conclusions.

The point to all of this is that teenagers seek their parents' approval regardless of their child being in or out of a treatment program. History also shows the more parents rage against something or someone, the more the teenager is drawn to them. If I had parenting through our daughter’s teenage years to do all over again, this is one of the first things I would have changed. I would have done what we do now — embrace her people.

She is smart enough that, in time, if someone is a negative influence over her, she will see it, and she will course correct. We don’t have to do that for her. In fact, our previous ways of managing this prevented her from learning these things herself. Allowing her to see how individuals reacted in the situations we opened our doors too showed her who they really were and helped her to understand what to look for in terms of what was good for her versus not good for her.

We also have learned so much about ourselves, her and her friends by embracing them. We’re no longer strangers, and even though we might not always like each other, we must respect each other and allow new people into our lives.

Embrace your children’s friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, partners. Anyone who they find important in their lives. I promise it will help you understand your child better, and having an open heart is so much better for a family than not. It will help create a more peaceful environment and build trust and partnership with your teenager over time.

It should be noted: Obviously, if you fear your child is in real danger, then none of the above applies.

*The Anatomy of Peace by The Arbinger Institute

Photo by Hannah Nelson from Pexels