Do you still feel a little lost when it comes to some aspects of parenting your teen or tween? That’s certainly understandable.

Just 8 years ago I had no idea what I was doing with my teenage son and was messing up right and left. You can listen to my story in episode 10 if you're new to the podcast.

In short, my behavior caused a deep rift between my son and me and negatively impacted his behavior and his mental health, (not to mention that it brought my marriage to its knees).

And because I’ve now spent thousands of hours studying the science of parenting adolescents, I tend to forget that most parents don’t understand any more than I did back then.

I often feel like I’m repeating myself too much, that everyone knows this stuff by now. Then I’m reminded when I see a post in a Facebook group or overhear a parent in the checkout line—that this information and these skills that I teach are not intuitive and I need to work even harder to not only make sure you get it but to also reach as many other parents as possible.

Today I want to talk to you about how you can end up in such a negative spot with your teen without even realizing it, so you can change your mindset and your path forward. If you feel like you just don’t quite get this teen parenting thing yet, stay with me and by the end of this episode, it should be a bit clearer.

PODCAST INTRO

Don’t you agree that it’s sad that the most important job we’ll do in our lifetimes as humans is left up to chance and intuition? Raising another person to adulthood should require at least a master’s degree if not a doctorate. I remember thinking how crazy it was that I was actually allowed to walk out of the hospital with this tiny human – I didn’t even know full well how to keep him alive.

But I had the books, and I had my own ideas. I knew I didn’t want to make many of the mistakes I felt my parents had made with me and my brother. I knew I wanted to discuss more, explain more, be more present and patient.

But my son is what you might call, strong-willed, and I’m certainly what you’d call anxious and those two traits don’t mix well between parent and child.

I can pat myself on the back for the job I did up until around age 13, but looking back, that’s where I began to falter—as many of us do.

But we have so many factors working against us. Let me explain.

When our kid reaches puberty, most of us are taken off guard with the shift in their behavior and their response to us. What we’ve been doing has worked pretty well all these years, so we’ve just continued on as a matter of course.

We don’t realize that our parenting must adapt to the current situation. And that situation is that our kid no longer thinks, feels, or acts like a kid.

Their brain has started a process, much like the one they went through during the toddler years, and it’s going to last for the next 10, 12 or 15 years.

This process causes a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex to have a hard time doing its job of managing the brain’s executive functions – things like regulating emotions, making good decisions, using self-control, planning ahead, organizing, focusing – all the adult-like skills we tend to expect them to have by the time they’re a tween.

And to make it even harder for their prefrontal cortex to perform these functions, there are other parts of the brain that are super sensitive, all revved up and have a huge impact their thoughts, emotions and behavior.

For example, they feel unpleasant or negative emotions more often and quite suddenly. They can snap at you for nothing, they can be so moody, snarky, and even downright mean.

They can engage in really risky behaviors – especially when with other teens – things you never even dreamed they’d do.

Their thought processes change. They don’t quite think like an adult yet, but they think they do! They feel like an adult, they want to do what they want to do and don’t understand they don’t have the executive function skills to be able to safely do so!

They want more control, they want to be acknowledged as being more mature and able to handle more and make their own decisions. And they want more than anything else to be accepted by their peers.

Understanding that these thoughts, feelings and behaviors are caused by neurobiology and not their own free will, is crucial to your relationship with your teen. Because if you don’t understand, you can’t be empathetic and you can’t adjust your parenting, which just sets you up for disappointment, anxiety, power struggles, and behavior problems.

We tend to want to keep treating them like kids and keep all the parental control we’ve had so far, yet we expect them to act like adults.

We just don’t realize that this combination of mindsets will flip our world upside down and cause more chaos than we can manage.

Besides not knowing any better, there are several really good reasons we tend to want to hang on to all the control and expect so much of our teens and tweens.

For one thing, from the time they were infants, we’ve been in charge. We made all the major decisions. They went where we wanted them to go – we made the rules, and they followed them. Generally speaking, we were the boss and had all the control (some of us more than others).

And no one tells us that we have to start sharing this control with our kids once they hit puberty. That their brain changes and that the same parenting tactics are no longer going to work – that they’ll simply backfire.

We’re just trucking along thinking all is right in the world and suddenly, BOOM, out of nowhere, we have an 11-year-old who think’s their a 20-year-old.

It’s jarring, but we don’t know what to do other than what we’ve always done…and that doesn’t work because they’ve changed. They can’t possibly respond the same way to the same tactics we’ve always used.

It's not our fault that we don’t intuitively understand that we have to adapt to our kid. We don’t get it. We haven’t bought a book on parenting in a while, and we thought we were past all the hard stuff.

We may even start thinking that it’s just our kid acting this way – that there’s something really wrong. We don’t see what’s going on behind closed doors in other homes and don’t realize that kids save their worst behavior for their own parents.

We’re quite simply uneducated, unprepared and stumped. Not our fault.

Additionally, most of us end up parenting the way we were parented (despite our desire to do just the opposite). We do what we know. Our childhood defines our adulthood. Those experiences are deeply engrained into our brain’s wiring and without even realizing it, they impact how we think, feel and behave. This is the very mechanism by which trauma passes from generation to generation.

If you think hard, I’ll bet you can track at least one of the fears or anxieties you have about something back to a fear or anxiety one of your parents had. And that same fear likely impacts the way you’ve parented your child.

For example, my now, 90-year-old mother experienced sexual trauma as a child. She was very hesitant to allow me to spend the night with friends and she told me why. I was just as cautious with my son and rarely even had babysitters because of it.

I believe the attitudes and parenting styles that have been passed down for generations should also come under the heading of generational trauma. In the western countries, we come from a long line of authoritarians. Parents who demanded adult behavior from even the youngest of their children. Parents who were told by the experts of the day that showing love or allowing for expressed emotions would make children weak and spoiled. Better to break their will and show them who’s boss from the beginning. The focus was on performance, obedience, adult-like behavior. Children were working in factories until the early 1900s and kept working on farms, raising younger siblings. They were hit, smacked, spanked, and punished to keep them in line.

My father was locked in a closet as punishment or made to stand in the middle of a wash tub for long periods of time.

Many of our parents, grand-parents and on back, were straight-up, emotionally and physically abused, no matter how you look at it. And that authoritarian mindset still persists as it’s been passed down generation to generation. Even despite mounds of science, and millions of experts all over the world trying to spread the word to help parents understand that kid’s emotions matter, authoritarianism persists.

Even you, as listener of this and other podcasts, a reader of books and someone who seeks to be a better parent – you likely still have these remnants of authoritarianism floating around in your brain just waiting to pop up at the “right” moment.

Thoughts like, “I can’t let her get away with talking to me like that”, “I’ll make damn sure he doesn’t do this again”, or “no way is my kid going to act like this.”

You may not even be aware of these thoughts; they may be floating around largely unnoticed by your conscious mind. They come from deeply embedded ideas, passed down to you and further solidified in your mind by other family members, friends, other parents and society at large. And whether you’re fully aware of them or not, they still impact your emotions and your parenting behavior.

Speaking of emotions, another reason we want to maintain control over our teens and expect adult-like behavior from them is because of our own fear or anxiety. If we can control it, we don’t have to be as worried.

Now, again, you may not even realize what’s going on – this may not be a fully conscious response to your teen’s behavior. Again, we don’t always consciously acknowledge our thoughts or even our emotions—we just act.

But whether you’re aware or not, this fear still comes out in your behavior.

For example, your daughter made a really bad grade on a test yesterday and today you notice her walking out of the school with someone you consider “unsavory”.

Without awareness, your mind takes you out of the present moment, and sends you into your past, causing you to compare the current situation with your daughter to your niece. Just a couple of years ago, she flunked out of school at 16, started hanging out with a “bad crowd”, doing drugs, and ended up with a baby at 17. Your poor sister went through hell.

You can feel the fear over your daughter’s future rising up – you feel it in your body – down to your bones. And the thoughts are also in your mind, and you’re anxious as you can be, but you may not be attuned to your inner voice and your emotions enough to understand what’s going on.

You may feel that you’re angry, you may act out in anger. You start hounding her daily about studying, questioning her about everyone she talks to at school, lecturing her about the types of people she should be friends with and saying no to all sorts of requests. In the back of your mind, if you can control her behavior, you can quiet your fear, you can make sure she doesn’t end up like your niece.

So, it’s our mindsets, our feelings and our behavior that must adapt to our kid’s adolescence.

Instead, when they begin to express their need for autonomy and their behavior doesn’t comport with our expectations, most of us, for one reason or another, double-down on our parental control. In other words, we set up more rules, we nag, lecture, track, snoop and punish.

And guess what all that does? It threatens their autonomy. We’ve not only ignored their need for more autonomy beginning in puberty, but because they continued to express that need in one way or another (likely through behavior we didn’t like), we’ve tried everything we could, to curtail that behavior.

What happens next? They push back harder, they act like they hate us, they’re mean and nasty and throw teen tantrums. So, we, again, double-down on the control. We’re constantly on top of them, give them no room to breath (because if we do, what will happen? They’re going to ruin their future!)

By now, all they want to do is get away from us at all costs. They find a boyfriend or girlfriend, they stay closed up in their room, they barely speak, the lie, sneak, use substances, and do what they want. Even taking to door off the hinges and permanently grounding them doesn’t help.

The outcome, when we can’t accept that we have to share the control with our teens, will always be the same—disconnection, animosity, and ultimately, rebellion.

Now let me be clear—I’m in no way saying that as parents, we should just back off when they hit middle school and let them make all their own decisions and do whatever they want to do. Not by a long shot.

Parenting without firm boundaries and rules, will not produce any better outcome than too much control will.

The science is very clear on this. Parenting must be a balance of kindness and firmness—it should not be too controlling, not too permissive, and certainly not neglectful.

In short, parents must address their child’s emotional needs while also teaching them there are consequences to their actions, without being unkind or using coercion or punishments.

For some reason the initial scientific researcher, felt in all her wisdom, that this style of parenting should be called authoritative parenting (as opposed to authoritarian, which is what I discussed earlier – the old school, spare the rod spoil the child sort of parenting. Why on earth? That’s way too confusing, right?

So, here’s what’s happened over the years, because of that confusion in terminology and because of plane old marketing—people made up their own names for it.

I’m sure you’ve seen a variety of other parenting styles discussed on social media, blogs, and in podcasts, and books; gentle parenting, positive parenting, respectful parenting, connected parenting—well, they’re all referring to the same thing – authoritative parenting. Some may put a little spin on it here and there, but we’re all talking about the same thing.

Don’t worry about the terminology. Certainly, what I talk about here in the podcast and teach in Parent Camp falls under the authoritative heading—kind but firm. My framework consists of a blend of science-based parenting approaches that many other experts talk about, plus many that apply specifically to parenting teens.

And I throw in a ton of brain science and emotional intelligence, a dollop of emotion coaching, a smidge of motivational interviewing, a big helping of collaborative problem solving, plus a bit of positive disciple and positive communication techniques.

Because when parenting teens it boils down to making sure that they feel seen, heard, respected, and understood by you. You need them to feel these things so they will trust you. And you don’t want them to be afraid of you, of being treated unfairly.

If you get it right, this means you’ll have a strong enough emotional connection with them that they’ll want to make you proud, they’ll not want to disappoint you, they’ll want to align themselves with your values, seek out your advice and do what you’d want them to do.

If you get it wrong, they’ll fear you, resent you, never share anything with you and will want to do just the opposite of what you’d want them to do.

That emotional connection starts with your understanding and your empathy for what their brain is putting them through, which is a big part of helping you regulate your own emotions about their behavior, which is critical to being able to respond to them in a way that will not threaten their autonomy…and to be able to calmly teach them the skills they need for adulthood rather than punishing them for not having perfected them yet.

So, your relationship – your connection with them is the key to less chaos in your home, fewer arguments, less anxiety for you, and better mental health and behavior for them. And it all starts with your mindset, your understanding, your emotional regulation and a few key communication skills.

If you haven’t yet, please listen to my series on connection in episodes 104, 106, 108 and 110. And to my fundamentals of parenting teens series in episodes 130 through 137.

And please go download my free parenting guides too – you’ll find guides on the teen brain, emotional awareness, sleep, teen anxiety, ADHD, negative thinking and more.

I’ll have the links to these episodes in the episode description right where you’re listening. And you’ll find a link that takes you to all of my free parenting guides there as well.

That’s it for Speaking of Teens today – thank you so much for being here with me to the end. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it – it’s such an honor to able to talk directly to you, wherever you are in the world. If you’d like to help me help even more parents, it would be wonderful if you would share the podcast with anyone you feel it could help – Facebook groups, parent organizations, friends, family. That would be the biggest gift to me.

And if you need more support parenting your teen, please come join us in the Speaking of Teens Facebook group. We have a wonderfully kind and thoughtful group of parents, grandparents, steps and fosters and we’re always willing to help you.

Alright, until next time, please be sure to connect with your teen in at least some small way, each and every day.