I Didn't Raise You to be This Way - Miami Style

I hear this phrase so often that I thought it was about time I wrote a little about it. This deeply meaningful sentiment; I didn't raise you to be this way, says so much. I evokes our hopes and dreams about our children and exposes the limits of our own power to guide and shape our teenagers. There's profound disappointment in this sentence. A harsh combination of disappointment in ourselves, for not living up to our own expectations as parents, and disappointment in the loss of the cherished fantasy about who our teenagers really are. When I hear this sentence I also see desperation, fear, anger, sadness, and shame in the faces of parents. As if they were saying to their teenagers: "I've failed you and now look at you. You're problems, your character flaws, are my fault." Or "I've tried to give you the best so you could grow up right but nothing was enough. I'm deeply disappointed you didn't turn out the way I was trying to make you. You've let me down." What a huge feeling!

In Miami this sentiment is even more complicated. It involves cultural, not just generational and family history aspects. It's a common fantasy of parents born and raised in Latin America that they can instill the values and culture of the motherland into their child who is growing up in the U.S. When it turns out that those kids grow up into teenagers that are more Miamian and American than anything else and that they don't really get what it's like to be Cuban, Venezuelan, Colombian, etc... it can come with a profound feeling of failure. In a way, in spite of all the well intentioned efforts, you've ended up foreigners to each other. With all the misunderstandings, value differences, and things lost in translation that come along with it. "I didn't raise you to listen to that kind of music and dress like that. I didn't raise you to think that way about the church. I didn't raise you to think that smoking weed was OK. I didn't raise you to talk to me like you're my equal. I didn't raise you to feel this way about school/tattoos/those people. I didn't raise you to be this way!" What a tremendous feeling of fear, distance, and powerlessness.! But, there's good news.

The deep pain that gives rise to this sentence was always going to happen. Indeed it needs to happen before a real relationship with who your teenager really is becomes possible. The very act of feeling and expressing these sentiments sets up a different future relationship that you and your teenager can be enriched and healed by. In other words, you haven't really failed and they haven't really let you down.

Parents please remember this simple and true fact. The whole of Miami has been raising your child along with you so that they could become the way they are now. You didn't fail. Your child couldn't help but absorb everything around them. Some of that came from you and a lot of it did not. This doesn't mean you failed to protect them. It means that you allowed them the experiences they needed to adapt to the realities of their environment. This is what well adjusted healthy children do and you were part of that. In this way, your teenager has come through for you beautifully! This reality might have been very different from what you imagined but it was what needed to happen. Grieving the loss of the fantasy of the way you "raised them to be" and getting on board with the way they really are sets up a real relationship you could both be proud of. It might not be what you were hoping for but there are very good things to be had in this real relationship.

Having a teenager that didn't turn out the way you thought puts you in a very good position to start a process of getting to know them without assumptions. Ask them to explain how they understand things and why. Explain to them the way that you learned about these things. Do this with curiosity and suspend your judgement. Parents and their teenagers usually discover that there's perfectly understandable reasons why they think the way the do, although from our own experience we might disagree. Getting to know your teenager this way is much more satisfying than trying to bend them to the way you think they should be. Teenagers do not allow themselves to be bent in that way and it provokes rebellious behavior and relational damage. But, by accepting that some of the work of parenting our child has been finished by the time they become teenagers and that that chapter is now closed, it opens us up new possibilities.

At the end of the day our teenagers were always going to become their own person no matter what other plans we had in mind. This is not a failure or a let down it's an invitation to heal, to understand and learn, to let your teenager be the way they are and to insist that they let you be the way that you are, and to mutually enrich each other as a result.