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Parenting
with Gary & Anne Marie: Adolescence / Teenagers
Teen Challenge: Questions & Answers About Defiance and Rebellion
Parents are faced with varying
levels of challenges. For some parents, it is trying to get their teens to turn
off the light in their bedroom. Other parents are dealing with more grave matters:
drugs, sexual activity, and criminal activity. We believe the principles presented
here can be scaled up or down to fit most situations. As a supplemental resource,
this series of questions and answers provides general answers that fit a broad
range of challenges with teens. We trust you will find it of value to your unique
situation.
Question Summary
1. I didn't discover your books until too late. My teenager is in complete rebellion.
I'm so afraid and angry and hurt. What can I do?
2. My teenager won't even
talk to me. How can I work on the great communication suggestions you make in
this book?
3. My teenager is showing
signs that he doesn't respect me anymore. What can I do to regain my authority?
4. My teenager doesn't openly
defy me, but rather pushes the limit a bit. If I say be home by ten, she's home
at ten-fifteen. Do I have grounds to be upset?
5. My teenager came home
with a certain part of his (or her) body pierced. What can I do?
1. I didn't discover your books until too late. My teenager is in complete
rebellion. I'm so afraid and angry and hurt. What can I do?
There is a false notion
in our society that at age eighteen your kids will cease to be your children
and you can no longer influence them. Chances are, you're going to live the
next twenty, thirty, even forty years on this earth, so you'll have decades
with your adult children. You may not have had the best years with your children
in the past, but you've got the rest of your life to make it right. Begin by
evaluating your own parenting to be sure you're not contributing to the problem.
Then start working on rebuilding trust and influence. You haven't found this
information too late. As long as you and your children both live, it's never
too late to rebuild your relationship.
2. My teenager won't
even talk to me. How can I work on the great communication suggestions you make
in this book?
If you can't stand to look
at each other because you know you're going to break out into a fight, then
why not just slip a note under her door? It doesn't have to be a long note,
and it certainly shouldn't be accusatory. Write something as simple as, "I
really do love you. I'm just struggling, and I know you're struggling, too."
And don't be surprised when a note comes flying by you when you've got your
hands in the dishwater. Sometimes we communicate better when we're not face-to-face.
We can become so antagonistic to each other as parents and teens. Our physical
presence reminds us of a hurtful word or a hurtful action, and before we know
it, we're screaming. These walls can be broken down with just a simple note.
If you learn to express your love in ways your teen can understand, and you
persevere in doing so, eventually you will win through. Sometimes just placing
your hand on your teenager's shoulder and saying, "I really appreciate
what you've done," can break down a wall.
3. My teenager is showing
signs that he doesn't respect me anymore. What can I do to regain my authority?
Usually the lack of respect
for a parent has been there all along; it's just that the way a teenager demonstrates
disrespect is more visible, especially now that he is the same size or bigger
than the parent. Sometimes a teen feels a greater sense of security in himself,
like maybe he doesn't need to give respect to the parent anymore. In all probability,
respect has been missing for a long time.Your goal shouldn't be to regain dominance
over your teenager, but to achieve influence. It's natural to want to control
something that's out of control, especially when that something is your child.
But when you have teenagers, using force won't get you where you want to go.
You have no good options besides working to lead by your relational influence.
One area you'll want to work on is freedom. Not the unrestrained, do-whatever-you-want
type of freedom, but the kind of freedom in which your teen is emancipated to
communicate and to be his own person without the fear that an authority figure
is going to force him to become something other than what he is. It is also
possible that you have misinterpreted your teen. What you are hopefully headed
toward with your teenager is a peer relationship. But neither you nor your teen
knows exactly how to act as equals. What you've interpreted as a lack of respect
might be your teenager's first attempt at friendly familiarity. She might be
teasing you.
It's usually quite clear when a teenager means to show disrespect. So if you're
not sure, and if your child usually doesn't speak this way, you might at least
ask yourself whether you two are just reaching a point in your relationship
where you feel you can have a little bit of fun.
Don't try to regain control. Work instead on regaining your teen's respect and
trust.
4. My teenager doesn't
openly defy me, but rather pushes the limit a bit. If I say be home by ten,
she's home at ten-fifteen. Do I have grounds to be upset?
Assuming this happens regularly
and without good reason, this is what we call micro-rebellion. When your child
was four and you told her to stay on the carpet, did she stand with her foot
on the carpet but her toes poking over onto the tile? When she was ten and you
asked her to put her dirty clothes in the hamper, did she toss them near the
hamper?
As we say in On Becoming Preteenwise, for this young person micro-rebellion
is full-scale rebellion. Parents may tend to dismiss this kind of rule bending
as minor, but it is not minor to the child. Her toe may only be partly over
the line, but her heart is completely over. Rebellion of any size, uncorrected,
leads to contempt for authority. A micro-rebellious child who has not been corrected
in the early or middle years is going to reveal the true depths of her rebellion
as a teenager.
It's also possible for parents to unintentionally raise up a child who does
not respect their instructions. When your son was five, how many times did you
ask him to pick up his toys? If he delayed picking them up or did not pick them
up all the time, did you finally do it for him? When he was nine, how many times
did you have to ask him to put his bike in the garage before he finally did
it? Did you nag? Did you threaten punishment but never follow through? If so,
is it any wonder that your teenager doesn't think he needs to do what you ask?
Correct this problem by following our suggestions for how to regain influence
with your teenager. Eventually you will want to confront your teen about her
micro-rebellion. But be sure not to do it in the heat of the moment. When she
strolls in at ten-fifteen is not the time. But you might want to talk about
it tomorrow morning over cereal and coffee.
While the time for authoritative parenting is over with this child, it's never
too late to mean what you say. If you set a curfew for your teenager, there
has to be a consequence for breaking it. Otherwise it's not a rule; it's a suggestion.
It's time to grow a backbone, Mom or Dad. If your teen breaks the curfew without
a good reason, enforce the consequence. A parent who does not follow through
on promises will be despised.
There is something better than a curfew: trust. When the relationship between
parents and teens is very good, certain rules become superfluous. The Ezzos
set no curfew for their daughters. Because the girls had proven themselves trustworthy
in the small things, their parents were willing to trust them in this.
But it wasn't a blind trust. It was a courtesy trust. It had parameters on it.
The girls would tell their parents what their plans were and when they expected
to be home. If those plans changed, they called home. But even in those conversations
there was a mutual respect. It wasn't, "Hey, Mom and Dad, this is what
we're going to do, so deal with it." It was a dialogue.
5. My teenager came home
with a certain part of his (or her) body pierced. What can I do?
Every generation comes out
with new fads to shock old folks. It was shocking in the fifties to watch the
Fabulous Four come over from England with long hair. It created a rage: Suddenly,
long hair was in, and the good, Republican, short haircut was out. It also created
an outrage: People were talking about it, preaching about it, writing editorials
on it. Long hair was thought to herald the decline of the American ethical system.
Now long hair is mostly out and short hair is in again.
In the seventies, young girls started to wear bracelets around their ankles.
Originally, that was the symbol for a prostitute, so parents didn't want their
daughters wearing anklets. In time, it became just a style option and no longer
carried the connotation of prostitution. It became culturally acceptable. The
same is true for men wearing earrings or ponytails. Once it was done for rebellion;
then it passed into the mainstream and became just a fashion choice.
These days the rage is tattooing and body piercing: nose, lip, tongue, eyebrow,
belly button, etc. There is shock value here. Many times a young person will
adopt this style to express rebellion or nonconformity. Eventually, tattoos
and body piercing will pass into the mainstream. Young people will get things
painted or pierced simply because they truly believe it looks good. Some would
argue that this transition has already taken place. Indeed, we know several
delightful teenagers who have had their belly buttons pierced.
We think health concerns justify some limitations on body piercing. For instance,
tongue piercing is out: You can't eat, and there's a danger of infection. If
your teenager is considering body art or piercing, another thing you may want
to discuss is the very real possibility that this style may go out of fashion.
What may be considered attractive in ten years is a body without holes from
former piercings all over it. "Honey, just think about this: You might
meet someone in a few years whom you'd dearly love to marry but who is totally
turned off by the fact that you once had your nose pierced."
The question you have to ask when your teenager comes home with some body part
pierced is why she did it. Was it done to offend authority or flout the establishment?
Or did she do it just because her friend Julie did it, and it's the latest style?
If her motive is to keep up with teen fads, that's one thing. But if she has
done it out of insolence, the matter is more serious.
The teenager who comes home with something pierced in order to shock you is
saying, "Hello, where have you been?" The pierced tongue, lip, nose,
or eyebrow is your teen's way of telling you that there is a disparity between
who he is and who you are. When you see it, your tendency will be to give a
knee-jerk reaction. "What in the world have you done!" That may, in
fact, be the teen's goal: to at least get you to pay attention to him. You do
need to deal with it, but we would advise you wait until you're cooled down.
When your teen does something like this to show that he or she is rejecting
you and your values, your inclination may be to strike back: "How can I
hurt you for hurting me?" But that won't get you anywhere. Your teen is
crying out to you that something is wrong, and he wants you to fix it. Otherwise
why would you be the target of his shocking fashion statement? Just as suicide
is so often a cry for help, so something like this is often a cry for attention.
Your question has to be, "How do I win him back?" That's going to
be hard. The process will probably take months. You've got to regain the love,
confidence, and trust of your teen. This gets back to the whole premise of our
book on this subject which is that you're going to fix most teen problems through
the strength of your parent/teen relationship.
Article
by Gary Ezzo / Anne Marie Ezzo
