Infants are almost entirely dependent on their parents for basic survival needs, including love and nurturing. As a toddler, the child is still highly dependent yet seeks independence in small, but important ways; both toddler and adolescent seek independence and freedom without a strong grasp of consequences. For adolescents to fully understand the consequences, they must experience them. This is one of the most challenging roles of the parent; being able to allow their child to falter without rescuing. Many parents, out of love and concern, rescue their children before the fall or directly thereafter, never really giving the child the chance to feel the full weight of the consequence. What is done out of the deepest love quickly sabotages trust children have in themselves and quells growth.

As adolescents grow, they naturally seek autonomy from their parents as they explore and interpret their world. At times well-meaning parents attempt to rescue and “help” their child. A father, helping a small child after a bicycle crash, who says “#Hey, it's OK champ. You're a big boy, don't cry, you'll be fine#” is not guiding and assisting, but telling him how to feel. The parent is also simultaneously becoming more worried about how he'll deal with a crying child than supporting the child in the present. This behavior, though seemingly harmless, becomes a dynamic that stifles healthy autonomy and growth.

Parents with their own personal unmet emotional needs often can use their child to assist them in meeting those needs. As the child becomes more autonomous, enmeshed parents tighten their hold with regard to their needs being co-dependent with the child. The adolescents' growth is hampered and development delayed. Parenting one's teen morphs into dysfunction and becomes enabling and co-dependent. Parent-child relationships that function in this manner will misguide the normal teen development and atrophy existing parent maturity. The paradox is simple: What starts out of good intentions of nurturing can become co-dependency and hamper parent and child growth, but is hard to detect and work through since it began so innocently.

When co-dependency becomes the norm, a tsunami of symptoms such as entitlement, selfishness, defiance and overt reactivity also accompany what parents thought was helping. Parenting that started as a solution, such as helping a stumbling toddler, can become co-dependency during adolescent rearing that arrests the teen's being able to make healthy choices. Parents that operate within this paradigm often make decisions based on the nature of the co-dependency and not what would ultimately help the teen grow and mature.

For adolescence to unfold in healthy ways, parents need to allow the child to individuate from the family in order to find who they are and contribute their individuality to the family as a whole. Parents can break out of co-dependency when they, along with their teen, work to better understand themselves as individuals. Learning to understand oneself through therapy and/or life coaching and the nature of the patterns at home will allow each individual to find open waters without losing the consistent current of familial love.

Healthy parenting effectively creates emotional safety, which helps provide a foundation for well-adjusted, secure and confident children. It involves striking a balance between setting limits and boundaries, fostering the development of healthy independence and autonomy, using effective communication techniques among family members and modeling strength and confidence on a personal level. Effective parenting begins by taking bold steps to become stronger, healthier and emotionally stable adults.

Nancy Walsh Edwards is a board member of PACT (Parents And Community and Teens Together) and an independent educational consultant who specializes in working with families toward their children's and young adult's educational planning.