Personal Blog Writing: Parenting Teens

3 Easy Steps for Parenting Your Angsty Teenager

If there’s any true test of a parent’s strength and will, it is the battlezone many of us have come to know as the teenage years. With a well-earned reputation for combative natures and spontaneous bouts of sullen refusal, teens can certainly be a handful to manage.

Though it’s easy to dismiss this emotional sparring and struggle as an expected downward spiral, time with your teen can in fact be far less hostile, and actually more rewarding for all. Just follow these three simple steps!

1. Be Real. Be Human. Parenting a teenager can often feel like engaging in hand to hand combat – clenched fists, glaring eyes, and defensive stances. One strategy I have found with my own son is that if I can begin our engagement without the battle armor, he always responds by dropping it as well.

For me, what that looks like is being a real person for my son, making sure that he knows I have weaknesses and vulnerabilities. I am only human, and I can only expect him to be human as well. When I think and act as though I am invincible, he can’t connect. But, when I show my struggles and emotions, he meets me at that same emotive level.

One memorable moment with my son was recently, when I had had a particularly miserable day at work and was scrambling into mom mode – pulling myself together, and making my best effort to shift the focus to recapping his day.

But I couldn’t. I decided to be real. Instead of the usual, “Tell me all about your day,” the tears began to well in my eyes, and I could only manage “My day was rough.” That simple human reminder, unusual in our daily exchange, jarred my son into an empathetic response, and he was suddenly open and engaged in a conversation about our feelings and our respective tough days.

Being real with our teens about the ups and downs of life, at a level they can understand, helps them prepare to have some of those same ups and downs that are pretty much guaranteed in being adults. This step of showing humility can drastically help level the defensive battlefield before real conflict begins, and will make for less tension built-up, before heading to step two!

2. Keep it Open. If I had a dime for all of the sulky “I don’t knows” and snarky “whatevers” that can come from my teen’s mouth… I’m sure you can imagine how rich I would be! One important strategy to fight the apathy that I learned from working with high schoolers, (and not from my own kids), was that teens need to have a space to communicate. Openly. And on equal terms.

This sounds simple, but I have realized that when I am “momming,” I have a tendency to talk down – nagging, listing, criticizing, and controlling – which of course sound very negative listed here, and yet can be absolutely essential for a parent trying to manage a household.

To once again remove the battle armor in these instances, I try to instead opt for honest communication over condescension. I can set a clear expectation without needing to repeat myself and allow my frustration to seep through. Teens need to be spoken to as if they are adults - which they are too quickly developing into already – so that they can feel equal and respond in a more adult-like manner.

When it was time to talk about some serious concerns with my son, I decided not to speak “at” him from the edge of his room or over him at the table. Instead, I put him in the car. I have found that side-by-side conversations with boys is the best way to go to encourage openness and equality (and I know that some child psychology approach is behind me on this one). Sitting by my side, but not facing me, allows him to open up and speak freely, about his own thoughts and feelings, in a way that he cannot while sitting eye-to-eye. In that moment, my son was able to hear what I was saying and respond calmly and maturely, as a developing soon-to-be-adult would.

Next time you feel like tossing frustration grenades in dialogue gone wrong, try sitting side-by-side and using honest words to communicate instead!

3. Let it Go. Okay, not meant to be an Elsa reference, but it just works. The most important truism that I know about raising a teenager is that “this too shall pass.” This phase, full of ugly, hormonal head-clashing, will in fact be over soon. And at that point, when it’s truly over, I hope that a resilient, good-natured young man will be left standing in its place. The only thing I really will pray for at that point will be that I will have given him the tools that he needs to succeed from then on.

So what better way to prepare him for this end (or really this “launch”), than to have given him some practice with dealing with life’s punts on his own.

Now, I know this lesson well thanks to my own mom, an early iteration of the now-coined “hovermom.” Though she encouraged her daughters to be independent and tough, she was quick to step in to help when we needed it. So much so, that in some cases, when I fell, I wasn’t sure I could lift myself back up on my own. Despite her good intentions, my mom had not allowed me the full room to feel as though I was capable of handling my own ups and downs the way I needed to, to trust in my own ability and resilience.

For my son, of course I was there to pick him up when he was younger. But I have gradually removed myself from his bounceback process as he’s gotten older. The less I interfere with his choices and decisions, the more he learns to trust that he is capable of making them (or to identify realistically when he cannot go it alone).

As much as we can get caught looking in the mirror of our own past selves, our teens are not ours to shape; we have molded that clay already, and it’s time now to let them find their own true form and strength, even if it takes some trial and error. There will be mistakes, and I will stand by. But I will not fix them, because I know that letting go is the real trick to building a resilient kid.

All in all, there will be successes and failures in the process of being real, opening lines of honest communication, and ultimately letting go of your angsty teen. But the pains will be worth the gains in this case – a well-developed young adult in exchange for some humility and truth. Deal!

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