Phelps Starts Group for Parents of Teens

Support groups exist for new parents, mothers of toddlers and second-time mothers, but when children hit their teenage years, there are a lack of organized groups for parents to share their experiences. Starting March 18, Kane Phelps hopes to help fill this void in Pacific Palisades by offering a six-week support group that meets every Thursday evening at his office in the Atrium Building on Via de la Paz. He sees this gathering as a way to help parents realize they aren’t alone in raising a teen. ‘For many parents, it’s a new change, and they are feeling unnerved,’ says Phelps, who lives in Pacific Palisades. ‘We’ll go over concerns.’ As a supervising social worker for 25 years for L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services, Phelps has noticed that some parents of teens feel they have raised their children and now their children can take care of themselves. According to Phelps, nothing could be further from the truth. ‘Teens don’t need more structure, but it is critical they have structure,’ he says. ‘There have to be household and Internet rules for teens. ‘The baby part is easy because they give you a loving smile and you look in their eyes and you melt,’ Phelps continues, noting that it gets harder as children grow older. ‘As teens, their job is to move away from you.’ For example, teens want to do it their way’and then the anger and hormones kick in. ‘It’s hard to understand how they’ll get through it,’ he says. Phelps remembers one dinner at a restaurant when he corrected his 12-year-old stepson Chris’ manners. The boy retorted, ‘I hate you.’ ‘I did not respond particularly well,’ says Phelps, who had been married to the boy’s mother for two years. ‘I picked him up and took him out of the restaurant.’ (His stepson is now 40 and they have a loving relationship.) Phelps mentions the incident because it serves as a lesson. ‘You must maintain your center. Each parent has to reflect and strategize how best to step back. It’s absolutely necessary.’ The failure to do that results in escalation, power struggles and emotional tugs of war. ‘The key part is listening to what your teen is saying’not just the words themselves,’ Phelps says. ‘If it is an intense emotional confrontation, try to back away.’ He enjoys adolescents because ‘I like their energy, intensity and the aspect of the normal developmental cycle that involves risk taking.’ He explains that part of the issues with teens is that the brain’s prefrontal cortex is not completely developed. The cortex controls planning, working, memory, organization and modulating mood. As the area matures, teenagers reason better, develop more control over impulses and have better judgment. Phelps feels parents might be even more challenged today than in the past because of the increase of commercialized violence and sexuality. He sees the Internet as particularly troubling, because there are no rules coupled with total anonymity, such as when teens visit online chat rooms and pretend to be a different age or someone they are not. The lack of consequences for those actions and the ability to do it at a moment’s notice makes the Internet a natural fit for teens’ impulsivity. One way to help your teen avoid the pitfalls of outside influences is to keep the lines of communication open and help them find healthy activities”athletics, the arts, something they can gain mastery, while developing skills, which will help give them confidence about themselves,’ he says. Raised as one of four boys on a farm in Rhode Island, Phelps is not surprised that as a social worker he works with more boys than girls because females tend to assume the mother-figure role, while boys’ energy tends to make them bigger risk-takers. Following a long tradition (two of his ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence), Phelps was raised with the idea of giving back to the community. He graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a degree in fine arts, then worked with a film company in the Philippines as an actor/producer in 1963-64, making two B-movies, ‘Flight to Fury’ and ‘Walls of Hell.’ His roommate was actor Jack Nicholson. Phelps moved to Los Angeles in 1964, once again rooming with Nicholson and establishing himself as an actor. He eventually joined the South Coast Repertory Theater and founded his own theater, the Open End Theater. At a party in Malibu, he met DeeDee (of the singing duo Dick and DeeDee, who had several hit songs including ‘The Mountain High’), and they’ve been married 35 years. Although he was happily married and had three kids (Chris, Jesse and Carolyn), Phelps felt something was missing in his early 40s. He talked to his brother, a minister in Florida, and realized he needed to reconnect to his roots of giving back to society, which led him out of show business into social work. He earned his master’s degree at Antioch University in 1984. Visit: www.palisadestherapy.com or call (310) 281-1130. Support group meetings will be held at 860 Via de la Paz.