“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.” - Walt Whitman
Key Concepts:
- Think of autonomy support as being a coach. Someone who knows more and has more experience, but doesn’t dictate or spoon feed it to you. Someone who watches from the sidelines and offers tips, tricks, challenges and drills to support improvement. Coaches don’t jump up and play IN the game.
- Autonomy is a basic human need for us to feel we have some ownership and control over ourselves and our lives. Autonomy should expand over time and is essential to intrinsic motivation.
- Autonomy support increases your child's resilience because it supports mistakes. This is essential for adolescents who need to fail in a safe space before adulthood, learn natural consequences, and practice how to balance freedoms and independence.
What to Try:
- STOP doing what your child can do for themselves. Take an inventory of what they are not doing and start sliding those over to their category.
- Find responsibilities they want. Maybe it is decorating their room, having an afterschool job, taking on a new sport, or caring for an animal.
- Offer suggestions NOT solutions. Allow your child to work things out with your support, but not your interference.
- Focus on opportunities for failure. Encourage your adolescent to try things that are new or unknown. Let them know that failing is part of the process, not something to fear,
- Set rules you care about, not about everything. Curfews, devices, work, dating, those can be where the rules matter. But not everything can have such a tight boundary.
- Start from a place of trust. Talk to your children about your faith in them. Trust is a contract that they are working on, but you want to start from a place of believing IN them rather than against them.
- Work on open communication. Create a culture in the family where you openly talk about your values and opinions on the world, and where your teen can talk to you about theirs.
- Respect their choices. This may be in friends, in clothing, in style, in interests, etc. Your adolescents increasing autonomy means you cannot criticize or judge their choices.