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For a masterclass in parenting young adults, watch season three of “The White Lotus.”If you want to up your parenting game, you can annotate a stack of books by authors with a bewildering set of letters after their names. Or you can watch season three of “The White Lotus.
” If you choose option B and want the CliffsNotes, read on.Woven through the lush breakfast buffets and eat-the-rich social commentary, “The White Lotus” has embedded lessons on parenting young adults. As a certified teen life coach who’s spent 20 years working with teenagers and studying adolescent psych, I’m blown away by the accuracy of the family dynamics playing out on the screen.
Mike White, the creator, writer, producer, and director of the show, knows what’s up when it comes to adolescent development.One of the main jobs of the adolescent human is to pull away from their parents in preparation for adulthood. Try to thwart that drive for autonomy and you fight a losing battle.
The parent who can roll with their preadult child’s need for independence is far more likely to maintain a close connection with their kid. Not saying it’s easy to roll with a defiant teenager. Just saying it’s worth the effort to unclench your grip on their steering wheel, a lesson nary a White Lotus parent has learned.
The scene in season three where Piper Ratliff tells her parents she’ll be staying at the Buddhist meditation center crystallizes this struggle. Piper’s mother, Victoria, has a bonafide freak out because Piper could end up with an entirely different set of values. “Different than what?” asks Piper, to which Victoria replies, “The ones we gave you!” With every cringe, with every critique of her family’s behavior, Piper has been telegraphing that those values repulse her.
Yet Victoria feels sucker punched by Piper’s revelation, as if she’s never met her daughter before.Piper, no! All the Duke, UNC and NC references (and controversies) in HBO’s ‘White Lotus’Young adults have to challenge everything you’ve taught them, in order to figure out which parts of their personality they’ll carry into adulthood – the parts which are intrinsically theirs–and which parts to leave behind, because they belong to you. Parents can avoid the sucker punch by understanding and embracing this fact: young adults are compelled to discover and achieve their own unique selves.
Full stop.When parents reach out to me about coaching, their concerns can be summarized like this: “my child is not succeeding in the ways I think they should.” And who would find fault with such concerns? Parents want their child to do well in school, opening doors to a successful future.
They want their kid to feel confident, have friends, and stop the TikTok bed rot. Parent goals: ten of ten, no notes. And in coaching sessions, their kids usually share the same concerns.
So what’s the problem?The problem is this: parents think kids should do it their way, the way the parents themselves would. There’s that losing battle. Teens are biologically programmed not to be a reflection of their parents.
When a parent can cut the invisible second umbilical cord of expectation, when they can step back and be curious about who their kid is, as an autonomous entity, the teen feels respected and harmony returns.Piper’s mom Victoria got this right in her revelation at the monastery. Spend one night here at the meditation center and try it, she says.
If you still want to stay, I’ll support your decision. This was perfect momming, as it gave her daughter the autonomy hit that the young adult brain craves. It allowed Piper to make her own evaluation and decide to walk away from the meditation center, rather than lock onto her original plan to exercise self-government.
Piper’s younger brother Lockey, on the other hand, has been trained to unequivocally follow his family’s directives. In the first episode of season three, Lockey’s parents whisper-fight him about where he’ll attend college. There are only two options: Chapel Hill, where his mom went, or Duke, where his dad did.
Lockey’s decision lies not in where he wants to go to school, but in which parent he wants to appease.Some version of this shows up in my coaching sessions all the time. Teens have been steered toward various options by parents and college advisors yet come to me bewildered and overwhelmed.
Why? Because no one has asked them, with agenda-free curiosity, what an ideal next step might look like for themselves.When I ask questions about their interests, their vision of a satisfying future, and their ideal setting for learning and socializing, we figure out what works for that kid, rather than what others think is best. The result? The idea of college becomes intrinsically appealing, and kids choose a school that is well-suited to them.
This, in turn, saves them from bombing out in freshman year at an ill-fitting school, then needing to start the process all over again.As season three continues, the quiet part is said out loud. Lockey is a pleaser.
His role is to anticipate and meet his parents’ and siblings’ demands, no matter what—cough, cough—those needs might be. In the end, by following his brother’s directive to drink muscle-up shakes, people pleasing is nearly the death of him.You won’t kill your teenager if you try to make them do things your way, but you might kill your chance of maintaining a close connection with them.
Hot tip: when a troubling situation arises, instead of telling your kid what you think, ask them what they think. Then sit back, listen, and let them decide how to proceed. I’ll bet you the fruit of the pong pong tree you’ll like what happens next.
Cyndy Etler is a dual-certified teen life coach and award-winning young adult author. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Today, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, NPR, and other outlets..
