How Parenting Coaching Can Help You Parent Your Teen More Effectively
Too often as a parenting coach, I have observed that parents don’t understand the key changes they must make when parenting a teen compared to parenting younger children.
Failing to adjust approaches in response to changes in teens’ development breeds resentment and increased conflict at home.
Parenting coaching and classes can teach parents the shifts they need to stay closely bonded with their children even as they expand out into the world.
Even though parents know that the teen years bring a lot of changes, they still seem surprised to be rejected or treated poorly by their own children. When I taught 7th grade, parents would ask all the time, “Where did my sweet baby go?”
Or they would observe, “My daughter is driving me nuts. How do you have patience for kids who are so rude and combative?”
One important shift parents need to make is how they communicate with their tweens and teens.
Little kids need simple, direct instructions, given with an excited, upbeat tone. Think of a preschool teacher clapping her hands and gaily singing, “Clean up, clean up/Everybody do their share!”
A teen will find that kind of parental leadership insulting.
With tweens and teens, you will get much further asking questions that give some of the power to your teens:
• What’s your plan for getting your book report done?
• By when should I expect your room to be clean?
• Would you like to spend the day skiing with us or are you going to meet up with your buddies?
Note that these questions still set expectations: The book report needs to get done; the room needs to be cleaned; and you are not giving your teen the choice of sitting home in the ski lodge playing video games all day. At the same time, you are engaging your teen’s critical thinking and respecting their growing need for independence.
One of my favorite parenting skills is active listening.
We are so good at fixing things like making boo-boos feel better with our little kids, that it can be super hard for parents to realize that tweens and teens need the space to figure things out by themselves.
But that doesn't mean they don’t need us. They do. But more and more, they need us as a sounding board rather than a source for answers.
This is where the power of active listening comes in.
An eighth grader slams the door open, throws his backpack on the ground and exclaims, “Mrs. Stitt is such a b*tch.” He then rants and raves about how unfair she is and how she is trying to make him fail.
Your first parenting instinct might be to jump down your child’s throat with corrections—don’t slam the door, don’t leave your backpack in the middle of the floor, and don’t you dare talk about a teacher that way.
Doing so will only increase your teen’s defensiveness and hostility.
Instead, you would be better served by waiting until your child has calmed down (probably a snack would help) and then start some active listening by lovingly observing, “So you were really mad at Mrs. Stitt today. Tell me about that.”
The purpose of active listening is to gather information.
The longer you can stay quiet, only prompting your child with murmurs of “That sounds hard” or “Tell me more,” the more you are going to find out about what your child is truly feeling (in this case, maybe the hurt and even the fear under the anger). By allowing your child to speak freely without interrupting with criticisms or corrections, the more he soothes his emotional brain, and the more able he is to bring his rational, thinking brain on board.
Stay quiet long enough and you may find him owning his own mistakes, admitting that he wasn’t really paying attention in class when Mrs. Stitt went over what would be on the test or that he just skipped over the things he didn’t understand.
By sticking to active listening, you create a safe space.
You reinforce that you are his home base, always there when he needs you, not criticizing and not telling him what he needs to do. Teens need the freedom to express themselves even when they have not learned how to express themselves diplomatically. If you give them the opportunity to bleed off all their anger, your teens will be much more open to your gentle suggestion of how they might successfully approach their teacher.
Active Listening also meets your tweens and teens emotional needs
With our little kids, we can use our physical presence (hugs!) to reassure them they are safe and secure. What teens are seeking is validation and understanding. You might not approve of how they have handled things, but when you listen actively, your teens feel seen, heard, and understood.
When it is your turn to talk, you can still be empathetic to their struggle without approving their behavior. As adults, we well understand how bad it feels to miss important instructions or to screw something up. It is embarrassing and demoralizing. It feels awful. When you meet your kid there, leaving judgment aside, you are saying to your teen, I love you even when you mess up; I trust that you will figure this out and that you will do better next time.
Finally, active listening is a great first step for coming to agreements with your tweens and teens about your expectations.
The successful shift from parenting your 10-year-old to parenting your 20-year-old relies on you slowly but surely increasing both the amount of freedom and responsibility you give your teen.
I love active listening as a first step. When you listen deeply and really seek to understand your child’s needs and desires, he will be much more open to also recognizing and meeting your expectations.
For example, you might sit down with your six grader and say, “Now that you are in middle school, what are some of the rights and responsibilities you think you are ready for?”
At this point, stick to listening, maybe writing down a list of what your child says. Ask, what else should we add to this list?
Start by acknowledging what rights you are ready to grant—maybe the freedom to walk down the block to Starbucks after school or the right to go to bed 30 minutes later. Then you can outline the responsibilities you would like your child to meet at home.
You might say, “If you are old enough to keep yourself safe crossing a busy street and hanging out with your friends in a public place, you are old enough to contribute to the smooth running of the household. What two or three weekly jobs would you like to take on?”
In this way, you are appealing to your teen’s complex reasoning and sense of fair play. By giving a choice of chores, you are appealing to their need for autonomy.
As part of respecting your teen’s growing maturity, be sure to also negotiate consequences for unmet expectations.
Even as your teen is ready for more responsibilities, they are still learning and growing. That means they are going to mess up many times before they meet your expectations consistently.
Again, strive for communication that is consensus-building rather than top-down finger-wagging. I would ask, “If you don’t do your chores, how do you want me to respond to that?”
Kids often don’t know how to answer that question, so I might follow with, “You are arguing that you are mature enough to spend some time after school with your friends at Starbucks. Because of that, I am assuming that you are mature enough to do your chores when you say you will. If you don’t do them, should I yell at you? or take away your screen time? Or??”
At this point, most kids ask for a reminder or a grace period. My advice as a parenting coach is to give it to them the first time and to still make an agreement for what an appropriate parental response would be. You might start by brainstorming ideas with them for remembering (set an alarm, write it in your planner, take the garbage out right after ballet on Wednesdays), but at the end of the day, I would ask for something in return like their help running errands on Saturday afternoon. If they are unwilling to make such an agreement, I would feel they were not mature enough to go to Starbucks on their own.
Parenting a teen is about shifting from control to guidance. With little kids you need to be the clear leader of the family—the captain of the ship. By the time your teens turn twenty, your job is to be their wise guide -their Yoda.
Letting your child go is one of the hardest jobs of parenting.
My free checklist, Are You Raising an Adult, will give you a way of evaluating how far you are towards working yourself out of a job and sending an empowered, responsible individual out into the world.
You can also view a recording of my webinar called The Pro-Active Parent’s Guide to Launching a Young Adult.
Questions? Email me HERE.