Features
When Will You Be Back?
Prof looks at how parents and teens negotiate time spent together and apart
BY TERESA PITMAN
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| Prof. Lynda Ashbourne says she's enjoying the “new learning curve” of moving from clinical work to academia in the middle of her career. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
You're probably not thinking about it when you have a newborn in your arms, but the teen years sneak up on parents pretty quickly. And en route to that stage, there'll be no shortage of people warning you about the horrors of parenting teens: rejection, rudeness, slammed doors and constant arguing.
Fortunately, many of the horrors are more myth than reality, says Prof. Lynda Ashbourne, a newly appointed faculty member in the couple and family therapy program in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition. For her recently completed doctoral thesis in U of G's family relations and human development program, she looked at the ways parents and adolescents negotiate time spent together and time spent apart, and how this use of time affects their relationships.
“The common thinking is that teens just become more and more independent and don't want to spend time with their family and that parents have to just let go,” says Ashbourne. “What I found is that the relationship is much more nuanced and complex than that.”
It's not so much that teens choose their peers over their parents, she says. Rather, they choose to explore more of the larger world outside their family while still maintaining family connections. And parents are frequently in support of these choices.
“It's not about excluding their parents. In fact, the teens we interviewed told us how important their parents are to them.”
What surprised Ashbourne was how consciously and deliberately parents and teens alike make choices about how they use their time and how aware they are of the effects on their relationships.
“Teens use their time with friends and others to get a better sense of themselves and to learn about options, but they bring that learning back into the relationship with their parents. It's also a time for demonstrating trust and responsibility.”
She found that families valued and were good at using even small pieces of time they had together — such as chatting in the car.
“One teen told us: ‘I know I'm not here every night for dinner, but it still feels like the norm to be here, and it's still an important part of my life.'”
Ashbourne notes that technology can help teens and parents connect in new ways — or can leave them disengaged even if they're together.
“Teens can be at home, even in the same room with their parents, but they are really in ‘peer world' because they're on MSN with friends.”
On the other hand, if a teen is carrying a cellphone, parents often feel more connected because they know they can call if they're worried or need to check in. Just as important, they know the child can call them if there's trouble.
“It's kind of ambiguous, though. If the mother doesn't call but knows she could if she needed to, is she monitoring her son or daughter? Is she just feeling reassured or is there a connection? And how does this affect the relationship compared with the mother who calls her son or daughter's cellphone five or six times after school to check in?”
The families Ashbourne worked with for her thesis were somewhat different than those who had come to her for therapy over the past several years in her clinical practice.
“I've worked a fair bit with parents and adolescents, and often they are struggling with issues such as depression, drug use, suicide attempts and other high-risk behaviour by the teens.”
For those families, the picture of how they use their time looks rather different because the risky behaviours make trust and communication difficult, she says. But she uses the information gathered from her research to open discussions with families about parent-teen relationships. A discussion about how time is spent, together with and apart from other family members, often provides a more positive inroad into talking about the more significant issues, she says.
“The ways time and space are negotiated can point to areas of the relationship that are working well and changing over time, as well as those that are more problematic or ‘stuck.'”
After earning a master's degree in couple and family therapy from Guelph in 1993, Ashbourne spent 15 years providing clinical services in various parts of Ontario, including London. She has also worked in more isolated communities in northern Ontario and Newfoundland. Along the way, she became an accredited supervisor with the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and began supervising the work of new and experienced therapists.
Most recently, her work in London has involved training and supervising immigrant clinicians with the Family Service Thames Valley. Out of that experience, she is formulating new research questions about the challenges of providing therapy in a therapist's second — or even third — language.
Ashbourne, who began her faculty appointment in May, says she's enjoying the “new learning curve” of moving from clinical work to academia in the middle of her career. She will primarily be teaching therapy skills and supervising students in the graduate training program, but she will also teach some senior-level undergraduate courses.
“The supervising portion is the most familiar to me, but I'm very interested in doing more teaching and helping to set a good foundation for beginning therapists. I like making the links between theory and practice. How we conceptualize things theoretically will affect what we see or don't see when we're working with people, so it's important to be aware of that.”