Managing Parental Fears When Rearing an Adolescent
Parental fears come with the territory of parenting an adolescent.
Posted November 14, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
When deciding how to parent an adolescent, one can often feel caught between two contending fears.
At issue is freedom. Parents must continually decide if the young person has sufficient experience, judgment, and sense of responsibility, and enough readiness, to manage a more complicated and risky amount of choice. Parenting requires taking risks with your child’s life. What is scarier than that? This is why parenting is partly a fearful responsibility.
For example, at a bicycle-riding age, how far from home is the fifth-grader permitted to travel independently? It’s very common for parents who grew up without much geographical constraint on where they rode to find themselves more restrictive with their daughter or son in what feels like a more dangerous world today. “Don’t go beyond the street where we live, and be sure to wear a helmet,” they instruct, even though they never did.
Holding on While Letting Go
Of course, ‘holding on’ or ‘letting go’ is often not an either/or proposition, but more of a handoff. Before and during and after the fact of allowing new freedom, parents are often doing a combination of both.
All of these come into serious play, for example, when learning to operate the great offline and the great online freedom machines—the automobile on the road and the computer on the internet. These two technologies empower the teenager with enormous independent functioning, creating risk and serious responsibilities indeed. In both cases, for safety’s sake, parental education and supervision can count for a lot.
Adolescence Increases Parental Fears
Parental fears that come with managing a child tend to increase with an adolescent who is now impatiently pressing for increased worldly exposure and experience.
The world has changed since the parents’ youth. In fact, it has more than doubled in size because to the real, limited offline world of experience has been added the virtually unlimited online world of the internet. It used to be that when the child was home, parents could suspend supervision and securely know where she was. But today, that same child at home can be virtually traveling the web, who knows where, while social mistreatment at school can electronically pursue a young person into the sanctuary of their bedroom.
The Problem With Protection
One way for parents to feel protected is by knowing what is going on—or is it? In a sense, the multiplicity of competing newspapers and news feeds (“worry sheets”) has only become more wed to publicizing the sensational and scary because that old journalistic priority now holds more than ever: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Sensation sells. Thus, parents, with a need to keep up with dangerous happenings, are constantly assaulted with scary, horrifying images and stories that illustrate the violent world in which they live. Such coverage encourages fear by creating a worldview filled with horrifying possibilities. Told about a youthful victimization in graphic detail, a parent may think: “What happened to that child could happen to mine! Whatever happened to safe schools?” The more you know, the more you may have to fear.
Another natural response to quell parental fear can be to increase safeguards. However, while warnings and protections can avert danger, they also are emblematic of threat and so can increase fear with alarm. For example, when parents seek to reassure a 12-year-old, frightened after a neighborhood break-in, by placing new locks on the doors and windows and installing a security system, they may only provide credible evidence that further justifies the child’s fears. Now, their young adolescent sees practical grounds for feeling afraid. In the same way, practicing a school “lockdown” procedure in case of gun violence, while giving students a procedure to follow in case something bad happens, also pays a fearful price for emergency safety.
Managing Parental Fear
So, how are parents supposed to manage their fears? The answer is not: “Don’t be afraid.” The answer is to use fear wisely.
After all, fear is functional. It is part of a person’s Affective Awareness System, used to emotionally sense when something significant is happening in their inner or outer world of experience, directing attention there, and energizing a reflective, expressive, or corrective response. Different hard feelings respond to different hard circumstances. Just as grief registers loss and anger identifies violation, fear warns of danger.
However, while emotions can be very good informants, they can also be very bad advisors, so parents must resist the temptation to “think” with their feelings. On scary occasions, doing this can impel them into ill-considered, panicked words or actions that can be regretted: “I didn’t mean what I said; I was just feeling anxious !” Wherever possible, take time to subject the urging of strong feeling to better judgment’s rule.
Often, a productive way for parents to manage fear is to translate it into Constructive Worry—using worry to think ahead and, in doing so, encouraging the adolescent to learn to do the same. Focused on the present and driven by immediate wants, it’s easy for the young person to get caught in a tyranny of now and not stop to consider possible consequences. The powers of temptation and pressure from peers can create an urgency that is hard to withstand, making it hard to see beyond the present. Thankless though it may be, constructive worry is a parent taking Predictive Responsibility and, by example and instruction, teaching their daughter or son to do the same: “We want you to keep your worry wits about you.”
“You’re such a spoiler! You worry too much!” complains the impatient teenager.
“And you don’t worry enough!” replies the parent. “I’m not trying to create obstacles or scare you. I’m just asking that you take a little time to be mindful of possible harm, and if it did occur, give some thought to what you could safely do.”
At issue is the high-school senior pressing for permission to go to her first college party. Where she sees the excitement, the parent sees the dangers. “If you will take a little time to slow down and worry with me, to think ahead about possible challenges and risks, about strategies for dealing with them, and about having a back-up plan should things go wrong, I will be more inclined to let you go.” Call it constructive worry or taking predictive responsibility, but parental fear can be functional this way.
Realistic Parental Fears
What are realistic fears for parents to rationally discuss with their adolescent? Consider eight dire threats in adolescence that can lead to significant harm. There is increased risk of:
With some degree of statistical frequency, these ordinary dire possibilities become destructive realities. Parents can explain how all of these experiences are more likely to occur with substance use that alters mood, judgment, and reactivity. For example, many first sexual experiences are enabled by the use of alcohol and other drugs, making a young person more aggressive or more submissive than sober caring would normally allow.
Explain to your teenager that the safest path through adolescence is substance-free .
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Carl Pickhardt Ph.D. is a psychologist in private counseling and public lecturing practice in Austin, Texas. His latest book is Holding On While Letting Go: Parenting Your Child Through the Four Freedoms of Adolescence.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.