Even though you may feel intensely connected to your family, you probably also struggle to create your own separate identity. You may enjoy the feeling of intimacy that connectedness brings, while resenting how your family seems blind to your true abilities: “My family doesn’t think I can make mature decisions because I’m the youngest.”

The tension between autonomy and connection in families is especially difficult to manage during adolescence (Crosnoe & Cavanagh, 2010). As children move through their teen years, they begin to assert their independence from parents. Their peers eventually replace parents and other family members as having the most influence on their interpersonal decisions (Golish, 2000).

How can you best manage the tension between autonomy and connection in your family? Keep two additional relationship maintenance strategies in mind—sharing tasks and cultivating social networks. With these, you want to strike a balance between family relationships and outside relationships. First, for sharing tasks you want to balance your dependence on family members to help you carry out everyday chores with a reliance on yourself and people outside your family. Too much dependence on family members—especially for tasks you could accomplish on your own—can erode your self-reliance, self-confidence, and independence (Strauss, 2006).

Second, examine your social networks (including your family), and assess the degree to which family members constitute the closest people in your life. If you have few or even no close ties with anyone outside the family sphere, you may feel intensely dependent on your family and experience a corresponding loss of autonomy. Likewise, having no close ties to any family members can create a sense of independence so extreme that you feel little emotional bond with your family.