My 96 year old grandfather was visited by an occupational therapist recently in his home. He’d been losing ground on his physicality. When she inquired about his morning routine, he mentioned how his daughters (who visit every day) would sometimes make his breakfast, get his pills out and make his coffee. “Yeah, have them stop doing all that. You need to do as much as you can.” 

You see, they thought they were helping by providing extra care for him, yet in reality this was contributing to his ever-increasing frailty. Enabling your developing teenager is a lot like the situation my grandpa was in. You've got good intentions, but the ways you're trying to help are actually protecting them from the life lessons, skills, and wisdom they need to develop. Let’s unpack this.

What Enabling Looks Like and Why We Do It

Enabling can look like supporting, because they both stem from love - the desire to help your teen. This can come in different forms, but a big one I see is protection. It’s healthy and natural to want to protect your teen, but when it escalates to behaviors like shielding them from the consequences of their actions, or being the “fixer” that solves the problems they create, you’re stopping them from crucial development. Part of maturation is learning from their mistakes and adapting, and if they are protected from that, they’re being robbed of that opportunity. 

Aside from concerns surrounding psychological development, enabling also creates incompetence. This can arise from helping them too much with daily tasks. Examples could include teens not cleaning up after themselves, not learning how to do laundry, clean, etc. This catches up fast when they move out and can't function independently, and they struggle to maintain a clean and orderly environment. 

➡️ Coach’s Insights: So if enabling is so bad, why do we do it? In our attempt to understand things, we tend to oversimplify. This is a heavily nuanced topic, and learning when to help and when to step back is very difficult. Enabling is complex and depends on many factors, including teen defiance, individual capacity for challenge,  mental health, and more. 

 Other than sheer difficulty in finding the right balance, other reasons parents fall into this pattern include fear, guilt, and exhaustion.

Fear that something bad will happen if you don’t help, guilt that you’re responsible for their struggles or shortcomings, or exhaustion that it’s ‘easier for me to do it myself rather than having to argue with them or watch them struggle with it.’ 

Just like my aunts with my grandfather - they were acting out of love, but sometimes love means stepping back now so they can stand on their own later.

The Line Between Support and Enabling

A critical reason why enabling parents struggle to make the change is that the alternative seems heartless. They believe stepping back would require distancing themselves or being “less” of a parent. In reality, finding the balance in support requires just as much love and consideration.  

Let’s look at a detailed example:

Your teen comes up to you in the morning and says they don’t feel well and want to stay home from school. You can tell that they are not telling the truth, and you heard them mention that they had a test scheduled for today. You haven’t seen them do any studying, but you know they’ve been playing a lot of video games into the night. 

❌ Enabling: You accept their request and call in for them. They learn that instead of studying, they can reliably procrastinate and you’ll call them in sick if needed. This pattern continues, and a few years later they end up failing a major college exam because their professor catches on and is less lenient. 

✅ Supporting: You call their bluff, and tell them they have to go to school and take the exam. You tell them to do their best, and that later in the afternoon you’ll help them set up a studying schedule, and support them. They might be angry and push back. You say: 'I know this feels hard, but I believe you can handle it. Let's figure out how to prepare better next time.'

Later, you help them set up an effective studying plan, which will help them on the next test. A few years later in college, when they're facing a big exam, they know how to prepare because you taught them the lesson when it mattered.

How to Stop Enabling (The Practical Steps)

Now that we’ve seen an example of how enabling and healthy support play out, we need to know how to show up as the supporter, and how to hold firm boundaries against enabling. As a teen mentor and parent coach, I believe that any sudden pivot in parenting strategies should start with loving communication. If you’ve been struggling with enabling your teen, suddenly changing tactics with no communication can be jarring, and lead to more conflict than necessary. Find an opportunity to sit down with them and have some open dialogue: 

“I realize I’ve been letting you down. I wasn’t sure how to show up for you and be there for you when you were working through things and growing as a person, and I’m working on being supportive and helpful to you without holding you back from growing into your potential. I value your autonomy and am going to work with you to build up your responsibilities and capability. I’m proud of who you’re becoming, and will always support you. Let's figure out together what that looks like.”

Then you can lead into collaborative goal setting and followthrough. This is where you create boundaries together. Focus on things you instinctively know they can handle. Maybe it's keeping their room to a basic standard, or taking responsibility for their own laundry on weekends.

For example, if you know that doing the full load of dishes will lead to pushback, starting with something simple like: “rinse all of your own dishes and put them in the dishwasher after dinner and when you have a snack.” 

Go through areas that are important to you both, and you can even take it as an opportunity to connect: “Is there anything you’d like to see more from me?” This takes the spotlight off them and makes it feel more collaborative. You’re trying to get them in the “goldilocks zone”, enough responsibility to elicit a groan or subtle annoyance (Good growth) but not enough to lead to strong defiance. 

  If you’d like more detailed support on those next steps, I have scripts available for you in my free E-book, which you can find in the notes below. Your teen might feel uncomfortable with the newfound responsibility at first, but the love and support are still there and available for them.

➡️ Coach’s Insights: The biggest factor that allows for a strong transition out of enabling and into healthy support is compassionate communication. If your teen thinks you’re suddenly becoming more strict or hard on them for no reason, they’ll lash out more. If they understand that you haven't withdrawn support - in fact you’re creating even more - they’ll respect you more and be more bought in to the idea long-term. 

Further Reading and Resources

Learning when to support and when to step back is one of the hardest balancing acts in parenting. These posts can help you navigate related challenges:

• [Permissive Parenting: Why No Boundaries Hurts Your Teen] - Enabling often goes hand-in-hand with permissive parenting. Learn why structure actually helps your teen feel safer.
• [My Teen is Defiant and Disrespectful: What's Really Happening] - When you stop enabling, your teen might push back hard. Understand what's driving the defiance and how to respond.
• [My Teen Won't Talk to Me Anymore: How to Rebuild Communication] - Shifting from enabling to healthy support requires open communication. This post shows you how to rebuild that connection.

If you're looking for detailed guidance on setting collaborative boundaries and creating the kind of structure that helps your teen grow, I created a free mini e-book: The 3 Pillars to Rebuild Trust and Communication with Your Teen. It includes scripts and frameworks for making these transitions without damaging your relationship. You can download it here.

Thank you for showing up for your teen. Until next time.