How to Launch a Teen: Philosophies and Routines

Of course, it is sarcasm of the highest order to suggest that we began the process of launching you into adulthood just last Friday.  My hopes for you have always been joy, curiosity, a sense of adventure, and confidence.  But I also understood that children need, even crave, the knowledge that naptime comes after lunchtime.  Structure and routine, as much as trust and safety, provide a firm base from which to experiment with life. 

Instilling any type of routine was difficult after we found your dad.  His cycles of activity are consistent--conversation, work, meals, media, sleep--but he has no use for the world's self-imposed slavery to the clock.  As a result, you have been exposed to two different choices about how to be in the world.  One is task-oriented and sacrifices structure and predictability for availability and the whims of inspiration.  The other is routine-oriented and trades flexibility for efficiency and consistency.

The chief disadvantage of adopting Dad's philosophy toward time management is that most of the world doesn't operate that way.  Apart from creative types, researchers, and entrepreneurs who can work as they please, the world generally requires structure from us.  You have had an opportunity through this year's home schooling to experiment with more flexible routines for study.  Graduate studies at university is a similar experience.  Your preferences with regard to structuring your time is one of the characteristics you might want to consider when you make choices about future career paths.

But I digress. 

One of the books we Eastern-philosophy-dabbling children of the '70s read was Khalil Gibran's The Prophet.  This is the section On Children.

          Your children are not your children.

          They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

          They come through you but not from you,

          And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

          You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

          For they have their own thoughts.

          You may house their bodies but not their souls,

          For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

          which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

          You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

          For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

          You are the bows from which your children

          as living arrows are sent forth.

          The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

          and He bends you with His might

          that His arrows may go swift and far.

          Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

          For even as He loves the arrow that flies,

          so He loves also the bow that is stable.

That's as close to my philosophy of parenting as I can describe....preparing for that moment when all that will be left for me to do is watch you soar.

I love you,
Mom

How to Launch a Teen: Examine Routines

If you've been keeping track of your Actual Days, you should have information on 3-4 days.  Using the categories you've devised to describe predominant activities, you can use this tool to play with your numbers. 

Compare your Actual Days with your Average Day estimates.  How are these the same and how are they different?  Did you engage in the amount of each activity you estimated but at different times than you expected? 

Now compare your Actual Days with your Ideal Day.  How are these the same and how are they different?  Are there any activities on your Ideal Day that are absent from your Actual Days?  That you do more or less of than you'd like?  That don't seem to happen at the time of day you would like?

Ongoing time management usually involves a comparison of the Actual Day to the Planned Day.  Continuing to record your Actual Days can simplify the identification and management of time stressors as these occur.  (Bring me a receipt for a page-a-day diary of your choice and I'll reimburse you.)  Having a recent record of your Actual Days can also help when you need to incorporate new roles and responsibilities into a working routine, when your priorities change, or when unforeseen events require alterations in your routine. 

I used the word routine twice in the last sentence.  Routines are built of recurring tasks that are done in a particular order, often in a particular place or at a particular time of day.  Repetition of routines helps form habits, and moving from one task to another in a smooth fashion is more time efficient than wondering what to do next. 

When we looked at my Average Day, what you couldn't see were daily routines built in to the categories I used.  If we were to break down what I do during Desk Time, my morning Desk Time on an Ideal Day would include multiple cups of coffee, several conversations with Dad, waking Jason up at 6:30am and prodding him to get ready for school until he leaves at 7:20am, plus:

• Check email
• Check Facebook
• Read my favorite blogs
• Check in with my online book club (LibraryThing's 75 in 2011)
• Play a few rounds of Wordscraper (Scrabble on Facebook)
• Write book reviews or a blog post
• Pay bills online

Desk Time later in the day might involve daily administrative tasks for work, filing, making phone calls, tweaking my schedule or routines, planning projects, online research or shopping, clearing and organizing my desk, or making shopping lists.  Having Desk Time routines helps me do these things more efficiently.

I have routines for planning dinner, doing housework, gardening, and going to bed.  Some work better than others.  What routines do you have?  Are there routines missing from your Average Day that would help you study / plan / create / work more efficiently?  What might those routines look like?

How to Launch a Teen: Mom's Average Day

Let's have a look at what I came up with for my Average Day.  The broad descriptions I used to describe the predominant activity in each hour are:  

• Sleep
• Desk Time
• Housework
• Keeping up with Trippy Roads Ranch
• Family Time
• Fix Dinner
• Dinner
• Read

This is what I think my Average Day looks like.

	AVERAGE DAY
12am – 01am	Sleep
01am—02am	Sleep
02am—03am	Sleep
03am—04am	Sleep
04am—05am	Sleep
05am—06am	Sleep
06am—07am	Desk time
07am—08am	Desk time
08am—09am	Housework
09am—10am	Housework
10am—11am	Keeping up with Trippy Roads Ranch
11am—12pm	Housework
12pm—01pm	Housework
01pm—02pm	Desk time
02pm—03pm	Desk time
03pm—04pm	Family time
04pm—05pm	Family time
05pm—06pm	Fix dinner
06pm—07pm	Dinner
07pm—08pm	Desk time – online socializing
08pm—09pm	Read
09pm—10pm	Read
10pm—11pm	Sleep
11pm—12am	Sleep

Totals:

Activity	Hours
Sleep	8
Desk Time	5
Housework	4
Keeping up with Trippy Roads Ranch	1
Family Time	2
Fix Dinner	1
Dinner	1
Read	2

I found a site that has online tools you can use to play with your numbers.

What does it look like if I break it down according to Dagfin Aas' categories?  Some of these are combinations of two or more activities with others are a fraction of the time spent in a single activity. Using Aas' categories requires some thought about what I do that fits the definition of contracted time?  For the moment, I choose not to include my writing time even though it could be argued that what I am doing could be part of some future business development. 

Time Use Category	Hours
Necessary Time (sleeping and dinner, plus (on average) an hour per day fixing dinner, showering, and getting dressed)	10
Contracted Time (about 1/3 of my desk time spent doing bookkeeping and filing)	2
Committed Time (housework and keeping up with Trippy Roads Ranch)	5
Free Time (reading and family time, plus the desk time that involves social media or writing projects like this one)	7

How does my Average Day compare with yours?

How to Launch a Teen: From the Doubt-Pushing Enabler

A few more days of information gathering on your part, and then we'll recap.

In the meantime, I've looked some more at Brad Sach's book. In the first chapter he establishes five categories (his word) of young adults: Progressing, Regrouping, Meandering, Recovering, and Floundering. He described the young adults in each of these categories with broad strokes, and rarely refers to them again in the remainder of the book. In Chapter 1, he identifies a number of developmental tasks for young adults:

• grieve because their childhood is over
• negotiate interdependent relationships with their support group
• establish an identity that is separate from their parents
• develop a personal philosophy
• overcome fears about leaving home
• create conflict with their parents
• engage in an internal dialogue about who they are
• learn to accept advice and assistance
• evaluate their self-management tools and learn new ones
• accept success and failure
• understand the relationship between freedom and responsibility
• learn to balance competing responsibilities
• further regulate emotions and behaviors
• expand their personal story to include being an independent, functional adult

I have a few problems with this book. First, the author doesn't offer any research supporting his ideas about launching children. No references at all. Everyone interested in the science of psychology will recognize my problem. Second, he abandons both the categories he establishes for describing the processes of young adults as they launch and the developmental tasks immediately after their introduction. Rather than using these as a structure for the remainder of the book, he meanders through a series of clinical anecdotes in which parents are consistently identified as disconnected, inflexible, overbearing, doubt-pushing enablers. Finally, I think the book would have benefitted from more structured questions and exercises related to the developmental tasks that were identified.

How to Launch a Teen: Loss of Free Time

As you continue to gather information about how you spend your time, I thought we could talk about humanity's relationship with time.  Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll sees time as an irreversible process. You can't put things back. The future cannot be remembered, and the past cannot be changed. Much like breaking an egg, raising a child. The arrow of time--that is what he calls our perception of time--has no basis in the underlying laws of physics. The future is not real until we create it. We humans are the time machines.

Time is so important to humans that, as a global society that can't seem to agree on much, we have included time in the International System of Units as one of only seven fundamental physical quantities. 

While the international base unit for length is the metre, the base unit for time is the second.  We like to break time up into little bitty pieces. 

Being able to measure time, whatever it is, has been an evolutionary advantage for humans and has made possible all of our agricultural endeavors. In the 21st century we continue to use time as a framework for our future plans, and we trade large sums of it (along with our knowledge, skill, and effort) for money.   

Yet our personal relationship with time can lead to unhelpful or negative experiences.  The use of time management, in combination with goal-setting, planning, prioritization, and self-regulatory skills, can reduce time-related distress and negative thinking. 

As you launch into life-after-high school, you are going to experience significant changes in how your available time is spent.  I flick through browser tabs selected from a Google of time use, passing through the International Association for Time Use Research at St. Mary's University, a business consulting firm selling stats from the American Time Use Survey.  (I wonder if the US Department of Labor knows about that?)  I discover the work of Dagfin Aas at Oxford University's Centre for Time Use Research,

Dagfin Aas (what an awesome name) proposes four categories of time use:  necessary time (eating, sleeping, bathing, exercising), contracted time (working, schooling), committed time (the productive chores of daily life like cooking, cleaning, and childcare), and free time.

In any phase of our lives, most of our time is spent in necessary functions.  For most children and teenagers, free time makes up the second largest use of time.  It makes sense to me that as young adults assume roles such as parent, employee, or university student, increases in contracted and committed time and the resulting loss of free time could create points of conflict in relationships and be a major source of stress during the launch.   So we'll watch out for that.

Love,
Mom

How to Launch a Teen: Time Tracking

Well done for working out your Average Day and thinking about what your Ideal Day would look like. Have a look at how they compare to one another. Is there anything that you want to do more of? Less of? Are there things you'd like to include in your day that you don't seem to have time for?

Time has been identified as a major source of emotional distress, along with situational stress, encounter stress, and anticipatory stress.  Time management is widely recognized as a fundamental skill for successful planning and as a tool for reducing time-related distress.  In part, the launch from adolescence to young adulthood requires you to make commitments about how you will spend your time in a way that may be very different from your previous experiences.

Before you can begin to manage your time, you have to know what you're doing with it.  You've already made some guesses about what your Average Day looks like.  Find out what really happens.  For the next few days, use this form to keep track of how you spend your time.  Each hour is likely filled with a large number of activities, so select some categories like "Gaming" or "Study" or "Socializing" to describe your major focus during that hour.

How to Launch a Teen: Imagine an Average Day

I was halfway through the introductory chapter of the book when I decided I wanted to know more about the author.  It turns out that Brad Sachs is an interesting man.  A graduate of Brown University, he maintains a clinical psychology practice in Maryland.  He writes and lectures, particularly in the area of family life.  He is widely interviewed by the media and also writes poetry and songs.  His books and CD are available at his web site. 

I search Google Scholar and find two scholarly publications.  One in Family Therapy discusses ways that therapists can overcome resistance to family therapy, particularly in working-class fathers.  The other, appearing in Contemporary Family Therapy, examines the use of systemic family therapy in an institutional setting.

Systemic family therapies focus on relationship patterns and dynamics rather than on an individual.  Systemic therapies are practical.  These therapies acknowledge that observation influences both the observer and the observed and that creatively calling attention to patterns of behavior provides a space for changes in the interactions and patterns of relationships.

But I digress.

Let's look at that Average Day.  How many hours would you sleep?  Study?  Chill?  Was it hard to think of an average day because your days are so different?  Maybe weekdays are different from weekends because your brother is home from school.

Now I'd like for you to think about your Ideal Day.  What does it look like?  When would you sleep?  Study?  Chill?  Be with others?  Use this form to make notes about your ideal day.

And by ideal day, I don't mean an awesome day out with your friends or the schedule of your dream 21st birthday.  Just an ideal average day that goes just like you want it to from beginning to end.