The Value of Humility When Parenting an Adolescent
How modest expectations about parental influence on adolescent growth can help.
Posted May 28, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Parenting is such a presumptuous occupation. I mean, who really knows how this job is supposed to be accomplished? The self-appointed “experts”? I don’t think so. The most they can do is to be thought-provoking. In the end, every parent with every child has to create their own best practices.
Personally, I believe in parenting with humility—with an absence of arrogance (prizing one’s rightness and wisdom too much: “I know all the answers!”) and of ambition (depending self-esteem on the child’s performance too much: “I expect my child to make me proud!”)
Humility acknowledges three hard facts of parenting life:
And these operating realities get more pronounced once the child enters the more complicated passage of adolescence . Now the push for more detachment for independence and freedom of action, and the push for more differentiation for individuality and freedom of expression, both energize the process of growing up. It was simpler parenting the closely attached and similar child.
How Much Can Parents Really Know?
Start at the beginning. Through birth or adoption , a stranger is given into their primary care. Now they have to get to understand the individual “hand” of innate human characteristics they have been dealt, and then to learn how to play this hand to foster healthy growth. Starting from ignorance, there is a lot to discover, and then they have to stay current with developmental changes that unfold.
Every parent parents behind this growth curve and so is continually scrambling to keep up and catch up. They figure out the girl or boy at one age only to be surprised and challenged by the next. Parenting is a process of constant learning to create adequate knowing.
Should your adolescent complain, “You don’t understand me!” or “You don’t know what my life is like!” rather than defend yourself, listen up. This may turn out to be a good time to learn. Always remember that when it comes to understanding your adolescent, your best teacher is that young person herself.
Really, the process of parenting an adolescent is like the short-sighted leading the blind. Most of what parents know about parenting is from what they’ve known growing up, while their teenager has never grown up this way before. The parenting process is more emergently experienced than deliberately planned, with a lot of trial, error, and recovery on both sides of the relationship, and that’s OK.
How Much Can Parents Really Control?
Parents operated in the Age of Command when the little girl or boy, largely nestled in the family circle, believed that parents had sufficient power of authority to "make them" or "stop them." When the child becomes an adolescent, parents soon realize that they have entered the Age of Consent, when the teenager knows that parents can’t make them or stop them without adolescent cooperation : “My choices about what to do or not to do are up to me, not to you!”
So now parents and adolescents realize that parental command depends on adolescent consent to get what they want. Parents do so by expressing caring and communication to make a convincing case, and sometimes giving or withholding conditions and resources on which the teenager still depends to encourage compliance. The parental job is to establish and assert a family structure of rules and expectations in which the adolescent can safely and responsibly grow, if the young person so chooses, which most teenagers elect to do most of the time.
Parents also realize that with their worldly and socially active adolescent, even in the most compliant cases, they have a lesser influence on their teenager than other powerful forces that they don’t control. For example, consider dictates of the teenager’s innate nature, societal change, cultural forces, chance exposures, peer persuasion , and personal choices. Parents have no control over these.
The older the adolescent grows, the less power parents have because independence is a process of emancipation. All this said, however, parents are usually the most powerful people in the adolescent’s world, and it is out of respect for that power and desire for approval from that power that much adolescent cooperation is given.
How Much Can Parents Really Get Right?
Parenting an adolescent is more complicated than parenting a child because the young person is functioning in a family of peers in expanding offline and online worlds of activity outside the sheltered family circle, honorably pushing against and pulling away from and getting around parental authority for more freedom to grow.
Now the “should I or shouldn’t I?” question for parents gets more problematic for them to make. Out of love for their teenager, they want to make the “right” decisions, but meeting that criterion is no easy task. Consider just a few of the common problematic questions they wrestle with.
“Should or shouldn’t I:
All these recurring questions and many more are judgment calls parents must routinely make that are often very difficult because of risks either way they decide. The invisible work of parenting, particularly a teenager, is all the hours of deliberation it takes. Only after the fact do the consequences of their decisions become clear, sometimes to the good, and sometimes not.
At the time, the impatient adolescent is often more sure about what she wants to do than worried parents are about what is wise to do. What’s the adolescent hurry? “If I’m to go on this senior spring break trip with my friends, I have to make my reservations right away!” To this pressing demand, parents might elect to say: “If you must know right now, the answer is ‘no.’ However, if we have time to think and talk with you about risks and arrangements, that might create a possibility.” In making their decisions, parents must not allow themselves to be swept up in the urgent adolescent tyranny of now.
When it comes to making judgment calls, most parents have a mixed record because, deliberate as they may be, they do not have perfect judgment. However, this uneven performance is par for the parenting course because how the young person is going to turn out will depend partly because of and partly in spite of whatever parents choose to decide.
A mixed job is the best job most parents can make of their daunting task—a human mix of strength and frailty, wisdom and stupidity, sensitivity and selfishness, good decisions and bad. And in most cases, the young person comes out mostly OK, always graduating their care with some unfinished business to complete the task of growing up. Now the young person has to finish parenting himself: to address what habits need to be corrected and to develop what skills still need to be acquired.
At a time when they feel they know less, control less, and are often less sure of what the right decision is, maintaining humility can help parents not put undue pressure on themselves during their child’s more complicated adolescent passage. In most cases, just giving a full-faith effort is going to be good enough.
Share this post Facebook Bluesky Linkedin Email
There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.
By submitting your information you agree to the Psychology Today Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy
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.
Get the help you need from a therapist near you–a FREE service from Psychology Today.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.