Why You Must Protect – Not Overprotect – Teens with a Chronic Illness

You earned the right to be protective when you held your newborn in your arms and realized you were somehow in charge of keeping them safe. Your vigilance increased when your infant became a toddler and started to explore the world around them. However, your protective instincts likely went into overdrive when your child began to manage a chronic health condition.

Among the many reasons chronic health conditions strain caregivers is that they aren’t easily fixed just by using our protective instincts to come up with solutions. Instead, we live with the reality that we can only manage the condition. Wanting to protect- but not knowing precisely how- may heighten the instinct to shield our children. This runs the risk of having us become overprotective of them.

Our children appreciate our protective side because it sends the message they are worth keeping safe. The challenge is how to strike a balance between being protective and overprotective.

Why Adolescents May Reject Overprotective Parents

All adolescents deserve guidance and protective boundaries. But overprotection suggests mistrust. Saying, “I’ll do this for you” not so subtly suggests, “I don’t think you can do this on your own.”

Because adolescents struggle to figure out what they can handle, focusing on what they can’t do can cause them to harbor resentment or to act rebellious. Perhaps even worse, they may grow less confident just when they need to build self-assurance.

How To Strike a Balance Between Protection and Overprotection

There are important ways to give your child increasing responsibilities in managing their chronic illness. However, it may be that current circumstances with their chronic condition leave little room for error. In that case, you may need to be more protective about your teen’s health than other parents would need to be. If that is the case, it is even more critical that your child experiences growth and stretching in as many areas of their life as possible. 

My point: protect where you must, but do not generalize your need to protect a child with chronic illness so it becomes overprotection in other areas of their life. If you overprotect in all areas, you run the risk of your child not only living with a chronic condition, but also being defined by it. Your adolescent deserves – and needs – to develop normally in every other area of their life. 

How to Protect (As Best As You Can) Your Teen with a Chronic Condition

We should help young people understand that well-placed boundaries give them more — not fewer — freedoms. When we set clear boundaries, they know precisely what to push against. And we let them know that as long as they remain safe, we’ll get out of the way so they can test limits within those boundaries.

Rules and Boundaries Can Help

This is true of all issues that may arise during adolescence. For a young person with a chronic health condition, “safety” may hold a different meaning. We can allow them to learn about managing their own condition but not allow a situation where they could seriously risk their health.

Generally:

• Set clear boundaries beyond which your adolescent cannot stray.
• Allow for lots of opportunities for trial and error within those boundaries.
• Stretch boundaries as your teen demonstrates their ability to handle more independence. (This is the key to preparing your child to increasingly manage their health!)  

Preparation is Protection

It is a challenge for any loving, involved parent to get out of the way and allow their teens to make mistakes. You’ve earned the right to have more trouble letting go than parents who haven’t needed to worry as much about their children’s health. Take a breath and remind yourself that preparation is the best kind of protection.  Now is the time they can still learn under your watchful eyes. Rest assured, growth often occurs during those moments that leave parents holding their breath – while paying appropriate attention to ensure their children avoid real danger.  

Even in the management of their chronic condition, you still want to protect just as much as is necessary while loosening the reins and letting your child manage more of their care. It is vitally important they know that you have faith that they will ultimately learn how to care for themselves. 

This is not just about chronic disease. There are many areas of your child’s life where you assess what they can handle while encouraging them to learn more and earn the next step of independent decision-making. Driving, for example, is a new skill that broadens opportunities to (literally) navigate an expanded world. It can also be dangerous, leaving little room for serious error. Parents don’t tell a 16-year-old, “Get on the road. See what happens.” Instead, they first ensure their teens understand the rules of the road and supervise them as they gain new skills. Parents prepare teens to protect them. They focus on what their teen can do and build skill sets from there.

In the case of chronic disease, it’s especially important to help ensure teen involvement and increase their decision-making abilities while ensuring their skill-sets continue developing. Being involved in decision making, both at home and during health care appointments, helps teens gain confidence in managing their health independently, while still receiving support from parents and other trusted adults. Adolescence is the time to do it. It will meet their inborn need to stretch and gain independence. (And, it will fulfill your need to be watchful.)

Support Opportunities to Stretch

Young people with a chronic health condition can sometimes be prevented from participating in activities their peers take for granted. At the very least, they must stay focused on managing their health, which many of their friends do not. Simultaneously, they know their parents are more watchful of them because of their health concerns. This makes it much more critical to allow stretching and growth in as many areas as possible. This is a key to being protective while not being overprotective. 

The teen years are filled with excitement, anticipation, and stress. It is during adolescence when young people prepare for the launch into adulthood. A critical part of adolescence, therefore, must include practice with taking some leaps. Young people gain practice through exploring new opportunities. Your role is to ensure this practice is valuable and safe. That could mean going out of your way to ensure your teen is stretching in non health-related areas.

6 Productive Risk-Taking Opportunities

Here are six ways to easily support healthy adolescent development by encouraging them to stretch into new territories. 

1. Participation in sports lets young people learn to try, fail, and recover. It teaches them the importance of working together as part of a team. It allows them to receive and carry out feedback. Some chronic conditions may interfere with some sports activities, so speak to your doctor, nurse, or health clinician about activities your child can participate in.
2. Extending themselves in academic settings challenges teens in ways that prepare and expand their workplace potential. It also encourages them to think creatively outside of the box.
3. Joining clubs and after-school activities lets young people dive into areas that pique their interest and develop skills they may not learn in school.
4. Trying out for plays, contests, and competitions lets tweens and teens test themselves, occasionally fail, and learn to try harder or differently next time.
5. Doing household chores and managing tasks at home are excellent practices for the day when young people do all these things (and much more!) on their own. 
6. Having an active social life with peers and dating are key aspects of adolescence. Maintaining relationships can bring challenges and sometimes hurt, but the practice teens go through with relationships prepares them both for the workplace and the ups and downs that come with even the best life partnerships.

Demonstrate that We all Fail, Recover, and Grow

It isn’t just you who might be overprotective of your child; there is a chance they have learned to worry about failures more than young people without chronic health conditions. They may have learned through experience that a misstep has serious health consequences. This runs the risk of creating within them a generalized fear of failure.

Your role is to show that life can be hard on all of us and to err is human. Failures within safe territories are growth opportunities. They are how we improve and access our stress management skills. And they are when we learn to reach out to others for help.  

When you let go of the need to have it all covered, you model for your child how humans – imperfections and all – thrive.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01NR020005. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.