If you want healthy teenagers, start with a drug- and smoke-free pregnancy and a loving early childhood. Get all your children lovingly through their first six years of life and the traumas of teen-hood will remain manageable. You don’t have to know all there is to know about it to be a good parent. But you do need a plan and the courage to carry it out.
The elements are seemingly simple: love your children unconditionally, understand their individual natures, take good care of yourself, connect with a loving community, and be humble in the face of a glorious, violent, often unknowable world. The challenge is to do these things consistently throughout their lives. The more chaotic your own life, the more important it is to create loving order for your children.
Stop Arguing and Start Understanding: Eight Steps to Solving Family Conflicts is a step-by-step approach to these issues and how to pursue them successfully. You start by taking responsibility to see that the outcomes you want are achieved. Learn about your children and their problems. Hone your parenting skills to reinforce the outcomes you want. Train yourself to be loving, firm and effective. When you need help, search it out. Join the community around you and seek the comfort of family and friends. Stay true to your core values and beliefs and humble in the face of a task too big for any individual. And never give up.
Parenting teenagers will invariably challenge even the best of parents. Paradoxically, the strengths teens will need to succeed in this complex and demanding world are the very strengths they will use to drive us crazy. They build their skills and confidence through escalating contests with us, the people they trust the most to love them despite their defiance and misbehavior. If we lose our own restraint, good humor, and clarity about what’s most important, then their emancipation is compromised and our parenting tasks grow more frustrating and unsatisfying.
The art of parenting teenagers is the art of losing gracefully. As the father of two boys with all the advantages a parent could wish for, I learned they could beat me in many different ways. When one son turned twelve, we ran a 440 yard dash and I beat him by ten yards. In the rematch a year later he was twenty yards ahead after the first hundred yards. Two years later he was strong enough to snap me in half. My other son called me from an emergency room. His girlfriend had overdosed after a physical fight and he was talking with the police because he had hit her back. Both sons have let me know over the decade and a half since their middle teens that their parents had only the slimmest notion of what they were up to back then. And yet they both love their parents dearly and are beautiful, responsible adults. So what was the secret?
We loved them intensely, gave them as much responsibility as they could handle (and occasionally more), used discipline to educate rather than punish, and helped them whenever they asked for it.
So here’s the plan. (You’ll have to provide the courage.)
1) Keep your sense of humor.
Humor helps to keep our conflicts in perspective, and to not take ourselves any more seriously than necessary.
What were your own teen years like? What stunts and tug-a-wars did you pull on your own parents? The idea is not to keep your teens from doing something you don’t think they should do, it’s to keep them from suffering permanent harm. Anything short of that can be laughed at as a brush with catastrophe that didn’t happen.
Regina runs away to a friend’s house because she doesn’t want her parents telling her she can’t see her boyfriend. How can her parents respond so mutual respect grows and defiance becomes less necessary? First, they can appreciate that she isn’t in her boyfriend’s car enroute to Las Vegas. Then they can celebrate that someone else is going to have to put up with her for a while.
2) Respect your teenager’s efforts to individuate into a complex, tempting, sometimes emotionally treacherous world. Regina’s parents can start by respecting her motives and judgment. It’s understandable that she would want freedom to see her boyfriend. Remember, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet were only fourteen years old. Seen from her perspective, running to a friend’s house may actually be a pretty good choice. She goes to a safe place. She puts distance between herself and her parents. She lets her parents know she’s serious about her independence and gives them a chance to think things through. And she stands up for herself, an essential skill if a teen is to navigate successfully through middle school and beyond. She could have taken a wide range of more dangerous steps to prove that her parents are not in control. If her choices have exposed her to serious risks, then tighten the leash, ground her, and spend time listening carefully, so you have an idea how she is thinking about her dilemmas. And let her know in every way you can how precious she is in your lives and how glad you are that she wants to become her own person. Sadly for some families, the parents don’t get it the first or second time, they become more dictatorial or even abusive rather than understanding, and their teen is forced to more extreme and dangerous behaviors just to prove they cannot be controlled—in the long run a lose-lose outcome for parent and teen.
3) Reframe problems in ways that give everyone positive choices.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to succeed as a teenager these days? If your child isn’t doing well in school or keeps friends you don’t trust, ask yourself why. Why is he not motivated? What’s missing or what’s getting in the way? Put yourself in her shoes and see if you can figure out the pressures and temptations that she faces. Frame problems in ways that create positive solutions for you and them.
It is a fundamental task of adolescence to test personal boundaries, to test their own skills and strengths, and to test the wider world for its true dangers and possibilities.
The more successfully we managed our own adolescence, the more likely we have useful guidance for our own teenagers. Otherwise, we need to look for new ideas that have a better chance to help them than our strategies did for us. Think positively. Every problem has a potential solution. Look at the situation in ways that give you new perspectives and positive ideas to try. Humor works by reframing a situation in unexpected ways. You can also be deliberate in taking new approaches, including granting your teens greater responsibility, providing enhanced positive incentives to cooperate, providing more consistent discipline, and just plain listening to learn how they see and feel about their lives.
Gerard’s grades have been slipping for a year. He spends more time playing video games and instant messaging than on his homework. He says he’s getting his work done, but his last report card says he may fail two classes. He’s been hanging out more by himself than with friends recently and staying up to all hours of the night.
Maybe Gerard is just being lazy, but it still begs the question, Why? Perhaps he is being bullied, getting depressed, or finding new interests that trump school for now. Maybe he’s too distractible to keep up with the accelerating pace of his schoolwork. Or maybe he’s fallen in love. Might now be a good time for him to experiment with shifting his focus away from school and/or parents and family? What does he hope will happen as he pursues his current course? What’s the most serious harm he might face? What might he learn by taking responsibility for the outcome of his own decisions? If you don’t trust that he can take care of himself in his current environment, what help does he need from you or others? What will it take for him to accept help? Here again is a prime time to listen to him in order to understand what sense he makes of his situation. Parents can be uniquely effective in helping their teens to see problems in new ways that create more useful approaches to problems, that is, unless your teens have tuned you out for being overly anxious, controlling, impatient, judgmental, or not listening.
4) Be steady in your love, positive in your expectations, and firm in your discipline.
A key way to share love is to listen—intently with a goal to see it and understand it the way your teenager does. It requires of you time, patience, and heartfelt respect for your teen’s efforts to deal with the world the way she finds it. Our teenagers need our love, our encouragement, and our wisdom in the form of safe boundaries and timely availability. You child doesn’t become a different person when puberty takes her into adolescence. You already know the child’s strengths and shortcomings. Use this knowledge to adjust your expectations and discipline for the adolescent’s growing abilities and curiosity. Use your own experience of adolescence as a map. Set expectations together that define both what she wants from her adolescence and how she will achieve it. Share with her what you wanted as an example for conversation, then listen intently when she shares what she wants. The more you discuss it over time, the more developed the ideas will become. What she believes she wants at thirteen doesn’t limit what she may want at sixteen or nineteen. It’s a stepping stone that helps her arrive where she wants to be. Your role as parent is to help her to stay on track and to do the hard work it takes to reach meaningful goals.
5) Check out your understanding with other parents and available authorities. When your own map isn’t helping, or you don’t trust the map you’ve developed with your teenager, then ask others with experience for their input. The time may well have arrived for Gerard’s parents to talk with his teachers, and perhaps the parents of his friends. Does he have friends at school? How are they doing in school? Is anyone giving him a hard time at school? A bully, a girlfriend, or someone else? Is he having trouble sleeping or feeling unduly tired during the day? Is he worrying more than usual? Or is he just tired of you trying too hard to parent him?
Parenting can become an exceedingly lonely project. The more you connect with others who understand, the more support you will experience and the better able you will be to keep crises within manageable bounds. It’s always helpful to run your perspectives and ideas by other people. That way you can hear yourself as you tell your story and they can give you an outsider’s feedback as a check on the inherent tendency we all have to think we must be right.
6) Keep your sense of humor. If God had meant it to be easy, we’d have been given fully grown, independent, God-fearing children. So much for wishful thinking.
7) If all else fails, ask for help.
Accept responsibility to make your parenting satisfying. Don’t let the challenges beat you down. If that happens, ask for help. No shame, no blame, just let people know you’re in over your head right now and need someone to give you a hand. Ask a family member or a friend, ask other parents, ask your doctor or your pastor. Join a parenting group. Join a church or Scouts or Campfire or an Anonymous organization or a community sports program. Or start your own parent group, book club, parents’ night out, or neighborhood potluck.
Good luck.
David C. Hall, M.D. Child Adolescent and Family Psychiatry; Author, Stop Arguing and Start Understanding: Eight Steps to Solving Family Conflicts, Montlake Family Press, September 2001
