I’m going to be sharing with you the various ways in which you can begin to get a little bit more independent in your lives. If you are a young person who is going through that transitional phase of childhood into teenage years or maybe you just come into a stage where you feel like there is more stuff that you should be allowed to do on your own without perhaps your parent’s intervention and oversight but you don’t feel as if you are quite being given that freedom and flexibility that you desire, make sure to closely follow my three steps!

Step 1: Be Consistent and Trustworthy

Step one in gaining more freedom and independence in your life is that you first need to be consistent. This is probably going to be over a period of time, longer than a day, probably let’s be honest now. Here’s what I mean by consistent: You need to be consistently mature. You need to show up in front of your parent as someone who has developed the mindset and skills of someone who should be allowed out into the big wide world. The challenge that you’ve got is that your parent or carer remembers the day when you diddly on the content. They remember the day that you drank all the cows whole and was stoned for two days and they remember the time when you drew on the newly painted walls.

They remember when you did those crazy childish things. Now those things weren’t bad as such, I mean they weren’t ideal! But they’re just the sorts of things that children do. If you want to be trusted with the freedom and independence that you now want, you need to make sure that none of those sorts of things is kind of creeping in because sometimes you’re in two worlds simultaneously. You’re kind of wanting to get into the more grown-up side of things but there’s also parts of you that still wants to be a child at times as well. If you are looking for the freedom and independence that you desire to maybe let your parent or carer let go of the reins a little bit and to let you do more things by yourself then you’re going to need to consistently appear to them as someone who can handle the big wide world and isn’t going to end up doing crazy childish things.

Step 2: The Key to Negotiation!

The second important thing for you to do is to negotiate. You can’t go in expecting all of your demands to be met especially the first time around. You’re going to need to be flexible and accept that some things you are not going to get exactly what you want but if you get part of them then you’ve made progress. Don’t go screwing up the progress by demanding more when there is no chance that you’re going to get it. For example, let’s say that you want to go to a party at your friend’s house and your parents said ‘yes’ great! But they requested that you are home by 11:30pm. Don’t then start an argument about the fact that you have to come home at 11:30pm because if you upset them they might say fine ‘you’re not going at all’ and you just went from not going to the party, to being able to go to the party to not being able to go to the party again.

Negotiation is when you accept that you’re not going to get all of what you want but hopefully, you get a significant enough proportion of it that it’s still worthwhile so a better solution would be to take the 11:30pm option. When you’ve come home early you then are proving to them that you can stick to the rules and that means that next time around you might be able to extend the boundary a little bit further.

Step 3: Be Reliable

Number three which is ‘you must be reliable’! If you start to become flaky then your parent will begin to distrust your word. Going back to the party, for example, if you don’t show up until half-past one then that’s going to cause your parent or carer to worry unnecessarily and maybe they will start to believe that you’re not trustworthy enough and therefore not mature enough to take on these sorts of responsible decisions in the future. You could end up discovering your chances of gaining more freedom and independence have lowered going forward.

It’s really important that they learn to trust you and to do that you need to start proving yourself to be a reliable person then you can start to once again strip to the boundaries a little bit further as you move along the line but make sure that you prove yourself to be a trustworthy person. Over time, by behaving in a consistently desirable way and that would ensure that they trust you for going forward and making even bigger and independent growing decisions so I hope that this article has given you some ideas about how to manage your parents and carers in the quest to become more free and independent in your lives.

By Gemma Bailey

www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org