Dear Kerry, My 16-year-old has been procrastinating about his chores. Most of the time we manage with a combination of me reminding and him eventually getting around to them. In general I’d like to improve that pattern. But I have a more specific problem right now. I have recently been ill over an extended period and it has made me extra tired; I don’t have my usual reserves of patience. The other day I blew up at him and told him that I just wasn’t going to be able to deal with it all. To my surprise he didn’t get mad, just went and did his job. I don’t want to intimidate him or spoil our relationship, which is generally good and loving. Was there a better way to cope? NH, Ann Arbor

Dear NH, A long illness puts a strain on everyone in a family. You and your son have probably both felt worried with that extra burden, and we always have to factor in the impact of worry and the different ways people cope with it. For all we know, he may be provoking you to reassure himself that you’re still there to nag him! But I think you are also speaking to a more general question about relationships between parents and teens and what we can reasonably expect of them at different ages.

Little kids can daydream and pretend about having a baby, slaying their enemies, winning awards or earning money. Little kids get great satisfaction from their fantasies, which are also safe, since they can’t make them happen. Teenagers can actually do things. Responsibilities and consequences are real. That is both a blessing and a danger.

Unless teens can get genuine and dependable pleasure from constructive accomplishments, the risk is that they will seek a sense of satisfaction from unreal or destructive pursuits. Spending hours feeling powerful in video games takes away from real-life skill development and impact. Doing drugs feels good in the moment, but leads nowhere except to illness and interference with progressive development. Gang or clique membership offers an illusion of belonging and importance, but interferes with social skills and tolerance for others.

Young teens experiment with balancing peer and family influences, while they come to terms with their new capacities for real action. Your 16-year-old already has a lot of experience testing himself and assessing others. There has been a lot of new research demonstrating that adolescents’ brains are still developing - they don’t have complete adult capacities for judgment and impulse control until well into their twenties. But that doesn’t mean they are incapable of taking reality into account. They need our help to develop that skill and practice in using it. Their brains will change according to the interaction of physiologic development and experience. The more your teen makes good judgments, developing his emotional muscles of thinking and restraint, persistence and patience, the more his brain will grow into patterns of effective activity. The more good feelings he experiences by doing that, the more he will reinforce reality perceptions with pleasure.

What you described with your son sounds like a useful reality confrontation. He is at the age when confrontation is a constructive technique. Earlier it can just overwhelm young teens and they flee or get surly or defensive. You told your son that you just couldn’t cope any more at that time. This was a reality, hopefully temporary, but older adolescents are ready to take their parents’ situation and personalities into account in a new way. It doesn’t help kids to idealize parents or deny painful things.

Most helpfully, confrontation can be done in a calm way, presenting reality just as a fact. That’s not always possible, but I think your son got it. Ultimately, he will feel good and grow from realizing that he has weight to pull in the family and that you trust his capacity to do that. You may both look back later to realize that you began to see his grownup self when he went off to do his chores without further protest.

Kerry Kelly Novick is a local child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst, affiliated with the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council, and a family consultant at Allen Creek Preschool. You can reach her through AllenCreek.org, or you can email her your comments and questions for future columns. The ideas and opinions in this column are Kerry Kelly Novick’s and do not necessarily represent the views of Allen Creek Preschool, MPI or MPC.