Difficult Conversations with Teenagers
Difficult Conversations with Teenagers
When difficult or problematic situations emerge with teenage children, how are they best addressed? Ask many parents how this unfolds within their own families, and they talk about an escalating battle of wills, epic kitchen showdowns, screaming, and emergency sessions with the family therapist. Parenting adolescents is indeed a tricky stage in any family’s life, as no longer are parents faced with fairly compliant and obedient children, but young emerging adults with their own ideas, needs, wants and feelings about particular rules and decisions. Parenting starts to become less about a benevolent dictatorship, and more about an early-stage democracy (within reason!).
As earlier blog entries have discussed, parents still ultimately have the responsibility and the tools (the fully developed psychological brain) to not just manage these difficult discussions more effectively, but also to model and teach these social skills through practice. In order to have these difficult conversations go down a different path, there are a few important aspects to consider.
- Explore some process of sorting behaviours (as discussed in an earlier blog entry) between those that need intervention and those that don’t.
- Prepare for these conversations ahead of time – what do you want to address, how do you want to explain the concerns, what do you want to see happen, what are you flexible and not flexible on?
- Have some pre-planned process in your head about what you can do if different responses start to emerge, such as your teenager losing their cool, or attempting to divert responsibility. One helpful way to think about this is a process of shifting gears between ‘explaining’ mode and ‘taming’ mode. If your teenager starts to respond with heightened emotions, take a few moments to tune into this and reflect back what you can see they are feeling rather than escalating further or ignoring the behaviour.
Usually, showing you are trying to understand them is enough to then return to what you were originally discussing, but sometimes this may require more time or other ways of bringing them back to the discussion. This could include a stop-gap such as “Until we can finish this conversation calmly and come to an agreement, I’m not okay with x happening (such as attending the party being discussed)”. This is a further opportunity for teenagers to ‘toggle’ between emotional brain and logical brain, and hopefully apply their brakes.
More next time!