The dreaded teen years are here. Dr. Nanika Coor offers ideas for how to hang on to your sanity when raising teens.
They’re here—the teen years. The old close relationship you once had might now feel bumpy, and you’re not feeling as confident as a parent as you once did. You’re overwhelmed sometimes at how critical, sullen, or withdrawn your teen can sometimes be. Dr. Nanika Coor offers ideas for hanging on to your sanity when dealing with the ups and downs of raising teens.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hey parents! You're listening to the Project Parenthood podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Nanika Coor, clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll introduce you to the same respectful parenting practices that I use to help parents repair and deepen connections with their children. You’ll get tips for cultivating more parental self-compassion, more cooperation from your kids, and more joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them.
In today’s episode, I’m talking about ways to live more harmoniously with moody and sometimes snarky teens. Stick around till the end for this week’s parenting challenge!
In an effort to explain the major changes happening in the teenage brain, Dr. Dan Seigel uses an awesome metaphor. He invites us to imagine that it’s early morning and your parent—who loves you beyond all reason—gently wakes you up for the day and asks you what you want for breakfast. “Oatmeal!” you tell them. They relay this message to your other parent who is already in the kitchen making coffee. You come to the table dressed and ready for your day at preschool, and your parent puts a tasty and warm bowl of oatmeal in front of you as they give you a kiss on the forehead. You dig in happily!
For people who grew up with this kind of love and caretaking, it would be pretty hard to give up—it feels too good to be looked after like this! You’d stay here forever unless something drastic happened!
This is exactly the goal of the rapid and intricate changes in the brain that happen in adolescence—to make safe and familiar things like that yummy bowl of oatmeal less appealing while potentially unsafe and novel things become that much more appealing. Teens start looking less to parents and family for their oatmeal and start getting their proverbial “cup” filled by turning to peers and to society, moving ever closer to independence.
This neurological overhaul of the teenage brain means there’s a lot happening to them that they don’t understand and it’s happening super quickly! Let’s take a look at what teens are dealing with neuropsychologically…
Humans are driven to seek others for survival. First, it’s caregivers, then it’s friends, and then romantic partners. Evolutionarily, your teen’s brain is seeking membership in peer groups for survival. So for them, not being allowed to go to a party can feel like a matter of life and death! This focus on peers means that peer pressure also becomes more of a risk because of this intense desire to belong.
Parents and teens can often struggle during this time. You might feel rejected that your teen is turning away from you and toward peers—especially if your parents weren’t so comfortable with your own strivings toward independence when you were a teen.
At the same time, teens are becoming more aware that you’re just a plain old human being, where once they may have thought you were some sort of parental superhero.
Your teen might be moody and sometimes irritable or explosive—because in this stage of development, emotions more easily hijack rational thought and reasoning. They’re also more likely to misperceive negative emotions in other people.
You might notice your teen being particularly non-conforming and rebelling against the status quo. You might feel stressed that your teen won’t just conform to life as usual. And your teen might feel disillusioned or let down now that they recognize that you aren’t as all-knowing as they thought you were. They might even feel totally out of place in the family, especially when their own emerging values and beliefs diverge from yours.
You know that good feeling you get when you get some kind of reward? That’s caused by a neurotransmitter in the brain called dopamine—and your teen has less dopamine than they had as a child or will have as an adult. But when your teen experiences something new, dopamine releases way more quickly than it does for younger kids or adults. This means that novel things feel amazing to an adolescent—so naturally, the attraction to novelty is intense.
Low dopamine makes for more boredom, especially when faced with the same old activities and routines. Additionally, your teen’s brain tends to focus on the positive aspects of a situation and minimize the negative, making them more vulnerable to peer pressure. So your teen might engage in unwise or unsafe activities as their brain seeks a “pick-me-up.”
The complexities of this phase of development mean that you’re going to run into some challenging interactions with your child as they’re transitioning from childhood to adulthood.
Here are some ways of communicating that can help you have a more satisfying relationship with your teenager:
When your teen is venting their distress to you, you can find yourself in the realm of Big Teen Feelings. It’s not easy to hear your teen expressing sadness, fear, or anger, so it makes sense that your first instinct might be to make those feelings stop. This may be especially true if your parents dealt with your Big Teen Feelings by ignoring you, dismissing or ridiculing your thoughts, lecturing or guilt-tripping you, or criticizing your judgment. If you’re like most humans, that only made you more upset instead of less. Your kid is no different!
Instead of adding to their distress by pushing their feelings away, radically accept their feelings. Reflect back to them your understanding of their thoughts and feelings in your own words. This helps them make sense of their emotions, figure out their own solutions, accept their reality and muster up the courage to move forward. You can also vocally acknowledge your teen’s feelings without even talking—an empathetic “huh!” or “wow” or “I see” goes a long way toward helping a kid feel heard, and like their feelings matter to you.
Hold off on adding in your suggestions, feelings, and concerns until your child feels heard. You’ll know when they stop discussing the topic that they’ve “wrung themselves out.” I know you want your child to take your experience, values, and beliefs into consideration. So it can feel tempting to jump in with your own solutions to their problems—or what you see as problems that they don’t. But when you try to control your teen’s emotions, attitudes, and behaviors, it damages the connection between you. And connection is the thing that when it’s easy, warm, and strong, your child leaves their proverbial “door” ajar so that your influence can slip in and inform or determine their choices and decisions. If your child feels consistently heard by you, they’re more likely to consider your parental needs and feelings.
Sometimes it can feel like all you’re doing is reminding, checking, herding, and cajoling your child to contribute to the household, do school work, eat real food, bathe once in a while, and get up and out of the house on time. And when you're not trying to get your kid to do something, you’re trying to get them to stop doing something—like leaving their stuff all over the place, gluing themselves to a screen all the time, and being a Snarky McSnarkinson with everyone in the house.
In this effort to get your teen to start and stop doing things, you might resort to unhelpful strategies like blaming, criticizing, name-calling, threats, guilt trips, or just plain ordering them around. Coming at kids like that is likely to result in your child feeling angry, resistant, hopeless—generally feeling bad about themselves and you. On the other hand, using respectful language and a respectful attitude allows your teenager to hear you, respond in helpful ways, and cooperate with you.
Instead of coercive strategies that lead to resentment and resistance, you can describe the problem you’re having to them by only talking about yourself and what you would like or wouldn’t like. You can describe the feelings that something they are doing or not doing is bringing up for you. Give them information rather than blaming them when they make a mistake. Offer choices that meet their needs and yours instead of ordering them around or threatening them. Use one-word reminders instead of long lectures. Rather than criticizing, clearly and respectfully state your values and expectations. When your teen does something that rubs you the wrong way, use playfulness and humor rather than disapproving comments to let them know how you feel. These all may seem like small adjustments on their own, but when you focus on being respectful to your teen about the small things, you set yourself up for having influence with them when the big things present themselves.
It might seem like it makes sense to harshly punish your teen when they’ve made a major misstep, but you might be surprised to learn that removing privileges or making them do something they dislike to make them “pay” for their mistake probably won’t make them straighten up and fly right in any lasting way.
Punishment and imposed consequences lead less to teen behavior change and more to depressed, angry teens who feel bad about themselves, vengeful toward you, and alone with their feelings. They stop trusting that they can let you into their inner world and are more tempted to sneak and lie to avoid your punishments.
Fortunately, there are other ways to motivate your teen to behave responsibly. You can tell your teen how their actions impacted you, others or could impact them in the future, clearly explain your expectations, show them how to make amends or offer realistic choices for doing so, or if necessary, set firm limits in ways that keep the door of your relationship ajar, but also allows them to right their wrongs.
You can also work with your child to find mutually satisfactory solutions to impasses and conflicts. Even when there are concerns about things like sex or drugs, you can choose to keep your tone calm, neutral, and non-judgemental and ask general questions rather than accusing ones. You can show your teen that there’s nothing they have to hide from you because you’ll say or do something they want to avoid. Show them they can trust you—even with the scary stuff.
Punishment focuses your child on how “mean” you’re being rather than on whatever misstep they’ve made. The strategies I’ve mentioned, however, help teens look at what they’ve done wrong, understand why it was wrong, experience regret for their transgressions, figure out how to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and think about how they can make amends. Developing those emotional life skills is how your child will learn to take responsibility for their actions. They don’t learn those things simply from losing privileges.
Parenting a teen isn’t for the faint of heart. The brain changes they’re experiencing can throw you both for a loop. But maybe for the next 30 days you can challenge yourself to use some of the tools I’ve mentioned in this episode to communicate better with them.
But also—challenge yourself to see the positive aspects of those brain changes. Yes, they’re emotional—and that allows them to engage in life with passion and gusto. Sure they’d rather spend time with friends than with family much of the time, and that’s a good thing because that’s where they’re going to learn how to identify and maintain supportive relationships. They are going to take some iffy risks—but their desire for novelty means using unexpected humor, silliness, and creativity might also be a way to engage their cooperation more easily, and jazz up boring routines. Their desire not to conform to the status quo is what makes for discovery and innovation in their world!
Test these ideas out at home—and report back!
The teen years can be disorienting for both parents and teens. But if you’re able to create an environment where your teen can authentically express their feelings and mistakes without fear of losing connection with you, your teen will likely keep themselves open to your feelings and perspective and allow themselves to be positively influenced by your morals and values, and even more willing to accept your limits and boundaries. Remember that every teen is unique and no parenting tool works every time or forever, but it’s good to have lots of ideas in your back pocket. If you keep a respectful attitude and use respectful language with your young person, you give your relationship a good foundation for working together with them to solve problems when conflicts arise.
I hope that’s helpful! You can learn more about my work with parents at www.brooklynparenttherapy.com and on Instagram at BKPARENTS.
If you have more questions about raising teens, or any other parenting questions or stories, leave me a message at (646) 926-3243 and be sure to let me know if it's okay to use your voice on the show. Or, send an email to parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to Project Parenthood on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next week!