Are you bothered or angry with your uncontrollable and rebellious teenager? Well! try to remember how you were behaving when you were his age. He might be the cub from that lion! Teenager age is when the kids grow physically and mentally, they feel they are not kids any more and they feel the need to prove their existence, power and personality. There are some keys dough that can help with the confrontation of parents-teenagers. In this article, let’s discover five ways to help you understand your teenagers and keep a good relationship with.
Teenagers don’t like receiving too much orders:
As we said earlier, teenagers try to show their complete ability ability to control their lives, even though we know they still can’t, but they believe in it. So parents better be less controlling. Giving the power of choice should actually start at a younger age to teach the kids to take responsibility and make them feel contributing and doing something important. Let them for example decide about some of their own stuff like, what to wear for school or for going out with their friends and give them also the chance to decide about family plans too, like picking the restaurant for the weekend’s family dinner or the destination for the next road trip. This will keep you close to your teenager as he/she will feel trusted and relied on, they will feel important within the family, which is what they are looking to prove in the first place, so why not help them out.
Communicate with them:
With open heart and mind, discussing and communicating with them the things that you see problematic. For an instance, if you think that coming late home after hanging out with friends is a problem, they give your justification for that. Maybe you are afraid something wrong happens with him at that late time, or you don’t feel comfortable about some of his friends or because you want to spend some time with him before bed time. Things that we parents see as a problem might not be an issue for the kids. So talk to them and most importantly, LISTEN to them, let them express what they think and feel.
Give them some room:
Take your time to discuss issues with teenagers, you don’t have to set the rule or set a solution for the issue right away, in one dialogue and within a couple of minutes. Give them the chance to think about it, and think of solutions that work for them and for you. This needs some back and forth ideas and a little bit of time to be settled.
Use calm voice:
Screaming is never a solution, it actually aggravates the resistance from teenagers. Yes it’s hard at the beginning, but if you are really sincere about building a better relationship with your teenager and live the rest of your life together is peace and love, you have to force yourself to talk with calm voice and remain calm even when you see or hear what you dislike the most. They will also notice that you are reacting in a different way now and they will think maybe it’s time to switch to being more cooperative instead or rebellious.
Avoid unrelated punishments:
Why would you chose to prevent your teenager from his allowance if what bothers you, is that he spends hours playing video games ? What relates excessively playing video games to allowance? Try to be realistic when giving consequences, so it’s seems logical to him. Giving unrelated consequences to the main issue makes kids in general feel hated, not given another chance and the punishment seems draconian. Here is an example of a related issue-consequence; you can set a time frame for video games such as one hour per day instead of stopping it at once. You just need to be creative and keep it logical to avoid conflicts.
Takeaway:
Teenage age is very critical, but it lasts for few years only, it needs patience and a little bit of technics that can help you and your teenager bypass in a more peaceful way.