Picture yourself sitting alongside your teenager in the cockpit of a small airplane, high above the earth…each of you with a instrument control panel in front of you.

Your teenager’s in the pilot seat and you’re in the copilot’s seat as their instructor – a seasoned pilot. The buttons and knobs and levers in front of you will control all the buttons and knobs and levers on their panel.

Your goal is to make sure they learn to take off, keep the plane in the air, make it to their destination, and land safely.

Here’s the challenge: They know nothing about how to fly the plane, they have no experience, yet because their brain doesn’t work like yours, they feel extremely overconfident that they can fly this plane already, without you. Knowing this is how they think, you have to figure out a way to get them to allow you to teach them how to fly.

Not only do they feel you have nothing to really teach them about flying, but their nervous system is extremely jacked up, they love to take risks, they want to impress all the other “pilots in training”, and they would prefer that you just strapped on a parachute and jumped out of the plane.

So, if you want them to learn to fly, you first have to understand this about them, and figure out a way to get them to let you stay in the plane (you have to win them over), you have to keep their nervous system as calm as possible (because they can’t learn how to fly if they’re too emotional or anxious), and you’ll have to let them learn to use that instrument control panel while you’re there to take control if they stall the plane or send it into a nose dive.

You walk a fine line as the instructor. You have to make sure they don’t throw you out of the plane…because you know if you’re not there to  step in when they make a dangerous mistake, they could veer way off course—crash even.

But if you take over the controls too often, they’ll never learn to fly solo. And if you’re not a steady and calm instructor, they won’t learn to be a steady and calm pilot. It’s a huge responsibility.

Stick around, this analogy will make much more sense in a few minutes. I’m going to tell you 3 of the most important things to remember to help you, help them keep that plane in the air and on course.

PODCAST INTRO

As I said a minute ago, first things first--you have to make sure that your teen doesn’t send you parachuting out of the plane (or worse), that they trust you, want to listen and learn from you. What I’m going to tell you here will help make that happen. I’m talking about the connection with them, your relationship and ensuring that it’s strong so you can remain influential, get their buy-in, and help them stay safe (whether they’re flying a plane or just walking to the corner store).

Just as in our analogy, if they don’t trust you, don’t feel safe talking to you about things, you lose your job as instructor…they’re not going to come to you for help, your opinion or advice. They will not want to listen to anything you say, they’ll not want to do what you feel is important. They’ll pretend to listen, hide things from you, and take risks they probably wouldn’t if they just felt they could invite you into their world.

These three ideas I’m going to talk about are things I find myself reiterating during Parent Camp or anytime I’m talking to parents. If you keep these things in the forefront of your mind at all times, it will help keep you in that copilot seat, where you can have more influence in your teen’s life and positively influence their behavior. I’m going to talk to you about

1. a) remembering that they don’t think like you do,
2. b) working on the way you respond to them, and
3. c) discussing instead of declaring

Let’s start with remembering that they don’t think like you do. Of course, you know your teen doesn’t think like you do—that’s why you argue. They have different priorities, different opinions, desires, interests. You know this, intellectually. But in the heat of the moment when you come upon a half-eaten bowl of petrified cereal, milk and dog hair under the foot of their bed, covered in a pile of dirty socks and underwear, you just can’t understand why any civilized human would be able to sleep in such a disgusting environment.

They don’t think like you do. Their brain doesn’t work like yours does, they don’t know what you know, they don’t really care to know what you know, their priority is not cleanliness and order, their priority is bonding with friends, becoming part of a group, having people like them, feeling good about themselves as much as they can.

If you want to be mad about it, you can be but no matter how mad you get or how many times you try to impose your priorities (your thoughts and feelings) on your kid, it’s not going to work. You will not change how they think because they don’t have the capacity to think like you—their brain is not yet built for that. You may be able to get more cooperation from them that will align with your priorities, but you can’t change how their brain works right now. They will not be able to think like an adult for years to come. Right now, there’s a major problem with the part of their brain that helps make good decisions, regulate emotions, use self-control…literally the thinking part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex). That part of the brain is busy doing something else right now—it’s literally rewiring. The connections between brain cells are sitting there waiting to add a layer of armor and get stronger for the things that your kid does over and over, things they practice or experience or do. And that’s great in many ways—your teen can learn faster and better than any other time in their life. But while all that strengthening and learning is going on, it does make this part of the brain less able to interact with other areas of the brain and do all the other things it’s meant to do. This is in no way your kid’s fault—no more than it’s their fault that they haven’t reached their full height yet or can’t grow a beard. It’s developmental, it’s neurobiological, not willful.

All of the baffling, maddening behaviors you see in your teen right now start with the fact that their brain works differently from an adult’s. From the seemingly “entitled” demands, the attitude, rude behavior, lack of empathy for you to the focus on friends over family, the thoughtless, crazy things they do, and emotional eruptions…all of this is because their brain simply works differently from an adults.

Now notice I say that these behaviors start with the differences in their brain. But these things can become more tolerable or become much worse depending on how you respond to them.

Back to the analogy. Imagine you’re in that plane, shoulder to shoulder with your teen, instrument control panel and throttle in front of each of you…when they veer ever so slightly off course.

You immediately respond by jumping in and taking over the controls -- you pull the throttle as hard as you can in the other direction. You over correct, sending the plane further off course.

They respond to that maneuver by getting out of their seat, coming over and grabbing your throttle to jerk  it back in the opposite direction.

That plane’s not going to stay in the air very long is it.

That’s what we do. At the first sign of trouble, we overcorrect. We panic because we either don’t realize or don’t remember that teen’s don’t think like adults and therefore don’t act like adults and rather than working with that, we work against it, we try to force them to think and act like we do. We don’t do that to them when they’re younger, but the older they get, and the more divergent their behavior becomes, and the less kind they are to us, the more neglected and unloved and betrayed we feel, the more likely we are to feel that they’re doing this on purpose. We may even blame ourselves for not having corrected this sooner, so we give that throttle a yank and end up in a nose dive.

Remind yourself over and over again that your teen is not an adult and they do not have the capacity to think like an adult. You have to work with what you’ve got and you can’t be indignant about it. Being angry about how they behave is like being angry that a dog chases a squirrel or a cat won’t come when it’s called. Instead of being angry, you work on helping them work with the brain they have right now.

If they can’t remember something, you work with them to come up with a way they can remember. If they keep making the same mistake, you work with them to get to the heart of the problem and help them devise a plan to do better next time. Anger, and overcorrection will always make the matter worse. Work with them to correct course rather than grabbing that throttle. Their brain doesn’t work like yours. You’ll find a link in the show notes to episodes 130, 131 and 132 and a free parenting guide to help you learn more about how your teen’s brain is changing right now and what that does to their thoughts, emotions and behavior.

 

 

 

 

 

 

b.

Now, moving on to the next big thing to remember, that will make life so much better with and for your teen… work on how you respond to them.

Like I said a minute ago, when we get upset about our teen’s behavior, we tend to overcorrect. We yell, take their phone away for a week, and give them a big lecture for good measure.

Why does this happen so often?

Well, it starts with how you think about your teen’s behavior—your misunderstandings of (again) how their brain works and how that impacts their behavior.

So, let me back up and give you the big picture.

Imagine a triangle. On the bottom left corner of the triangle you see the word “thoughts”, at the top corner of the triangle is the word “feelings” and at the bottom right corner is the word, “behavior”.

Thoughts, feelings and behavior—if you change any one of these three things, the other two will also change. For example, if we smile when we’re sad, we can actually feel happier and create happier thoughts.

But mainly we talk about this triangle from left to right: our thoughts, impact our feelings, which impact our behavior.

For example, let’s say you’ve found vapes in your son’s room several times in the past month, despite his assurances that he’s not vaping anymore. And today when you detected a hint of cucumber in the air you think, “I know he’s still vaping and just lying about it.”, which makes you really frustrated and anxious even, which leads you to search his room and his backpack, ask prying questions, and even accuse him of lying to you, which causes a really big blowup.

Your negative thoughts (your assumptions about his vaping) caused you to be fearful that he may still be doing something you know to be bad for him, and frustrated that you haven’t been able to get him to stop, which led you to overcorrect (searching and accusing), which caused the plane to nosedive (the big blowup).

Unfortunately, this happens to us all the time, far too easily.

The key to stop this series of thoughts, emotions and behavior is to first realize you’re actually having such negative thoughts or emotions so you can stop and examine them and do something about it, before they lead to a negative behavior and conflict with your teen.

But for most of us it can feel like this cascade of thoughts, emotions, and behavior happens almost simultaneously, which makes it really difficult for us to take that pause between thoughts and feelings or between feelings and action.

We hardly realize we’ve had a thought or felt something before we find ourselves scolding or punishing or questioning, which we often instantly regret.

I was recently talking about this very thing with a good friend who happens to be a therapist. She’s so used to thinking about her thoughts that it was almost shocking to her that there was a time when it never occurred to me that I had thoughts all day long that determined how I felt and acted. Or that I never stopped to think about how I felt or why I felt something.

But it’s quit common for many of us go through our daily lives merely reacting to people and situations without ever pausing long enough to ask ourselves why, much less try and change anything. We may want to change but have no idea where to start.

And that makes sense. If you don’t understand how this triangle works, and you’ve always just lived in the right bottom corner of the triangle--in your behavior—it would have never occurred to you that you could change.

But here’s the funny thing about self-awareness…once you have it, you can’t go back.

Once I started thinking about my thoughts, it almost drove me a little crazy at first. But before long I was talking myself out of some really negative thoughts, which helped me be less reactive, calmer, and more thoughtful with my responses to others—especially my son.

I’ve talked about this many times—the thoughts we have about our teens most often lead to fear and anxiety, which leads to that overcorrection…to try and control the situation. When we’re afraid and nervous, that’s the automatic response—to control whatever it is that’s making us nervous. Feeling out of control makes us more anxious.

If you’re anxious about a big presentation, you practice until you feel you have it under control—that you’ll do well. If you’re anxious about a big trip, you might make a long to-do list and start packing days in advance—so you feel more in control. And if you think your teen is doing something that could harm them now or in the future, you want to make them stop it…like now!

So, you first have to examine the thought, “I know he’s still vaping and just lying about it.” Where is that thought coming from? It’s based on the past experience you’ve had with your son saying he’s going to quit in the past yet continuing to vape, right? So the past is creeping into your present thoughts. Ask yourself where’s the evidence this is true? A whiff of cucumber in the air isn’t the best evidence. But that doesn’t mean you have to go looking for it—as a matter of fact, that’s the behavior we want to stop. The digging and questioning and conflict. This negative thought is pulling you back to the past and causing you to project that past experience on the current situation. It’s causing you to feel certain about something that you cannot possibly be certain about, based on the smell of cucumber.

A good way to start examining your thoughts and emotions is to work backwards after a blowup with your teen. What was the argument about, what were you feeling in that moment (most likely it was fear or anxiety even if it presented like anger—so really dig here) and what were you thinking that led to that fear? Journaling about the blowups with your teen is a great way to start this examination, so is mindfulness meditation. I have a free parenting guide called Emotional Awareness Strategies that can help you get started. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

Once you become more aware, it allows you to slow down that trip from thoughts to emotions to behavior, and allows you more time to pause between each one and consider what comes next. You may be able to change your thoughts, which can change your emotions and behavior, or you may be able to at least pause between emotions and behavior so you can manage the communication with your teen differently (hopefully in a way that doesn’t spark an argument or blow up). Your emotional regulation is so important as a parent that it’s an entire Section of my course in Parent Camp. If you cannot manage how you interact with your teen, you’ll only make their behavior worse.

I’ll also link to a few more episodes about this issue in the show notes.

 

c.

Now, here’s the third thing I want to emphasize that will help keep you in the copilot seat (strengthen your connection), but will also help them learn to fly that plane better (by downregulating their nervous system and giving them more chances to take the controls): Ready for it? Stop declaring and start discussing. Every decision that involves your teen, requires a discussion.

Anytime there’s a difference of opinion or interest between you and your teen, where there’s a decision to be made, no matter how slight, instead of making that decision alone and then declaring it to your teen, you should be collaborating with them through a calm and reasonable discussion and negotiation.

Let me explain.

Let’s go back to our plane analogy: Remember although they know nothing about flying, they think they do. They think they can do this without your instruction. Now, you know better of course but you have to work within their framework if you want them to learn. You have to win them over, you have to negotiate when to let them take the controls and when to jump back in. And all the while, you have to make sure their jacked up nervous system doesn’t take over. Not an easy job.

You’re parenting an adolescent who already believes they’re capable of doing many adult things, making adult decisions, and if you want to stay in their circle of influence, you have to work with that different point of view.

I already said that you have to remind yourself over and over again that your teen is not an adult and they do not have the capacity to think like an adult. But now I’m telling you, that they think they do! So, again, you have to work with what you’ve got. You need their buy-in, their trust, their cooperation if you’re going to safely get them through adolescence. And you’re never going to get that by bossing them around, telling them how very wrong they are for thinking they’re an adult, treating them like a child, punishing them, yelling at them.

Imagine you’re back in that plane and they hit the wrong button and the plane banks a hard left, are you going to yell at them and just take the controls back from them if you’re trying to teach them to fly? No, you’re going to explain what they did wrong, help them understand how to do it correctly and let them try again. I’m liking this analogy—can you tell?

If you’re getting low on fuel or a gauge seems to be off, you’re going to talk it through with them, ask them what they think they should do, talk it through and come to a decision together rather than just taking the controls and telling them what to do—that’s not instruction.

Again, it’s the same with parenting a teenager. When there’s a decision to be made, it requires a conversation—this is how they learn (how to think things through, how to advocate for themselves, how to negotiate, how to stay calm under stress, how to do better next time).

Here’s what I’m saying. Stop yourself before making any statement to your teen that tells them how things are going to be. For example, “no more leaving the house within an hour of dinner”, “no, you can’t have $25 for that T-shirt” “If  you don’t stop leaving your dirty clothes in the floor I’m going to stop washing them”. Those are a declarations and they aren’t instructive. What have they done wrong? What was their decision-making process that led to their mistake? How can they do better next time? Declarations are not helpful.

Making unilateral decisions and declarations are not only unhelpful, they say to your teen, “you’re not worthy of my time to discuss this with you” “you’re not an adult and therefore I can make this decision about you, without you” “I don’t respect you and I don’t care to help you figure this out”.

It’s like slapping their hand and taking over the controls without so much as an explanation. That doesn’t feel good, it’s not going to make them want to keep you in the plane and take your instruction or advice in the future.

Work from their perspective. How would you want to be treated? Would you want someone making decisions and taking your controls without talking about it? Of course not.

 

So, anytime there’s a problem with their behavior, a choice they’ve made, an expectation they haven’t lived up to, a question about what they or aren’t allowed to do…it calls for a discussion, not a declaration.

These discussions don’t have to be big sit-down conversations, they can be a few sentences between you. The most important role you play in this discussion is listening and making it clear to them that you’re listening. Your teenager wants to be heard. They want you to understand where they’re coming from rather than you simply jumping to conclusions about them and making unilateral decisions. They want to be given more freedom and trust. They want to be given the opportunity to make mistakes as long as those mistakes aren’t likely to hurt them in some way. But at the very least they want an opportunity to talk about it.

Of course, you have to be careful how you say what you want to say. You can learn to tell them what you’re concerned about without blaming them for anything. Start those sentences with “I feel” – “I feel really frustrated when you leave your clothes in the floor”. Ask them for ideas for how to work together to resolve the problem, listen to them, brainstorm, try to negotiate something with them if at all possible.

Treat them the way you’d want to be treated. Take the time, show them that respect and you’ll be amazed at how fast they’ll learn how to fly that plane.

 

 

 

Okay, that’s it for another episode of Speaking of Teens.

If you’re new here, welcome. Please check out previous episodes…like my series on connection in episodes 104, 106, 108 and 110 and please follow the show so you’ll get the new episodes each Tuesday.

And if you’re an SOT OG, you know how much I appreciate you! Thank you for spending time with me every week (or whenever you can). We’re just getting started here!

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