Dear Kerry, My 16-year-old is basically a nice and wholesome kid. But at the moment she doesn’t seem motivated to work in school. She is very social and her grades are slipping. She is bright and it would be a shame to waste her future on the immediate gratification of Facebook and cell phone chat. Part of me wants to take away her cell phone or forbid networking sites, and another part of me wants to trust her judgment. I get conflicting advice from family members and friends - what do you think? AR, New Hampshire

Dear AR, You’re expressing the dilemma very vividly - how can we best support a teen’s growing autonomy and responsibility while retaining authority to step in constructively if her mistakes threaten to become too expensive for her future?

Do you remember how grownup you felt when you were 16? Learning to drive probably most symbolizes the reality of the new freedoms that go with this age. Literally and figuratively, 16-year-olds have freedom of movement. Genuine new competence combined with the feeling of unlimited potential is a heady mixture. It’s easy for mid-teens to get a bit carried away and feel they can handle anything and everything.

On top of that come big shifts in their self-images, which are reflected in a rapidly-changing social scene. Each high school seems to have its own timetable, but, sometime in the middle, the kids that have been hanging out together in groups start to couple up. They are embarking on couple relationships, a stage that will probably encompass the next 5 or 10 years, as they discover what is important to them, practice give-and-take, and develop mature mutuality.

These are important rehearsals for serious life choices they will make in young adulthood. It’s not surprising that they get preoccupied and sometimes flooded with the excitement, fun and worry of all this. Teens can feel that there is nothing more important than keeping up with all these new developments for themselves and their friends.

And now there are technologies like smartphones with text and email capability that enable teens to stay in constant contact with each other. There is no respite and no restriction imposed by realities like night falling, class being in session, the necessity for silence in some settings, and so forth. Friendships are, however, truly an important arena for growth, -- they can broaden kids’ perspective, deepen their feelings, and offer opportunities for enormous pleasure and satisfaction. Grownups can’t just dismiss them as frivolous.

At the same time, our wish to support autonomy and independence doesn’t mean we should abdicate. It is a parent’s job to teach methods for making good judgments, defining priorities, and achieving balance in life. I think that is the key to this common situation. It is easy to jump to feeling that we have to find or impose the solution, rather than remembering that the process of discovering a workable plan together will teach more. It will equip your teen to do that for herself as time goes on.

There are several different aspects of the situation that you could enlist your daughter to think about with you. You could talk to her about learning to plan simultaneously for the short, medium, and long term. A concrete exercise for thinking about this might be to choose some positive event in the future, like a family vacation or a promised treat.

Then you can talk together about what considerations apply to that right now: in the short term, the destination has to be chosen; then some time can elapse before reservations must be made; just before, plans for outings and expeditions can be discussed. You can probably hear the parallels to deciding when to take the SATs, doing some preparation, and getting a good night’s sleep the night before.

Thinking about the present and the future at the same time is a skill that teenagers have to learn; their brains are not fully mature, particularly in the area of planning and foresight. So they need our help to see that poor grades now will have an impact in the future. It isn’t a threat, it’s just a fact.

Acknowledging to your daughter that her friendships truly are important will go a long way in helping her feel respected and listened to. Then you can talk with each other about how to achieve a good balance in her life. With a bit of time management, she will be able to do her work and see friends. It might help her to leave her phone downstairs while she does her English homework, just to get back in the habit of uninterrupted focus on one thing. But this can be a practical and helpful suggestion, not an imposed sanction.

Together you can decide on how you will both be able to assess how effectively she is managing her time. Will the criterion be her grades over the next two weeks? The next month? If you think of it as an experiment, the results may be interesting to track. Along the way, she will rediscover the pleasure of doing well in school, as well as finding out that her friends don’t disappear if she is out of contact for an hour or two. And you will both rediscover the good feelings of working together to prevent a big problem.

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.