This is Speaking of Teens. I’m Ann Coleman.

Just a handful of years ago I was desperate to figure out why my sweet 16-year-old boy had turned into a kid we didn’t even recognize anymore. My husband and I were beside ourselves. It was beyond unbearable.

Constant arguments, outbursts, and meltdowns. He was so anxious and depressed and angry and acting out in all sorts of dangerous ways.

We were terrified that he was going to hurt himself or end up in jail.

So, we did everything we knew to do to fix him – to make him stop acting the way he was acting.

We went to psychologists and psychiatrists who evaluated him or talked to him - gave him medication. We went to counselors to try and figure out what to do to help him change – to change our whole situation.

And out of all the professionals we saw, none of them ever explained why all of this was happening. Nope – I had to read that in a book. And after 2 solid years of hell, that’s when things began to change.

This week on the one-year anniversary edition of Speaking of Teens, I want to explain what my husband and I did not understand back in 2017 and 2018. After 4 years of intensive study of all things adolescence and parenting from many different perspectives and fields of study, I want to share with you, a 4-part framework that will help you avoid conflict with your teen, build a stronger relationship with them and positively influence their behavior.

My son was about to turn 18 as I was just learning how our behavior is firmly entangled with our thoughts and emotions – each one of the three impacting the other – one changes, the other two change.

And I was just discovering how that both mine and my husband’s thoughts, emotions and behavior were impacting our sons, and vice-versa.

Thinking about it now, it seems intuitive. But when I was in the middle of the constant chaos, I couldn’t see beyond what was right in front of my face – and that was his behavior.

Like so many parents, I was under the impression that as my son moved into adolescence, my job was to control him. I thought being “strict” would “keep him in line” so he wouldn’t get in trouble. That’s what I was told – it’s what I heard other parents saying.

And as soon as I found out he’d started smoking weed at 14, I was bound and determined, he was going to stop it and he was going to not get into any more trouble.

So, I doubled down. I wrote behavior contracts, I lectured, I tried to reason with him, I made stricter rules, I argued, I yelled, I tried punishing him – all the while, my husband and I were disagreeing about how I was reacting. He wanted to take a softer approach, but I was afraid of that – I couldn’t let him think he could get away with acting this way – it would just get worse, and I wasn’t having it.

I didn’t trust him, I questioned everything he did or told me. I tracked his every move, dug around for information. And the more control I exerted, the better he got at hiding things from me, at lying to me, sneaking around, and getting into trouble…so I tried to control him even more.

So, by the time he was 16 or so, things had begun to spiral out of control – his behavior and mine. Looking back, it seems so clear what was going on. But when your in the eye of a hurricane you just want the wind to stop blowing – you don’t want the meteorologist to explain how it happened.

So, in that first book I read, I learned how it isn’t our job to make our kids behave a certain way, that discipline isn’t about punishment or using external force. I learned a little bit about emotions and behavior and how my own behavior had apparently made a huge impact on my son’s. I learned how to talk to him when he was emotional. I learned I need to get a grip on my own emotions by figuring out why I thought about his behavior the way I did.

Just based on this information alone, I began making changes in the way I interacted with my son (who was, by then, days from turning 18). It wasn’t easy, I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do or say at first but even with my initial feeble attempts, I could see a shift. As I learned more, and practiced, our relationship began to heal and his whole demeanor changed. That’s when I knew I had to help you discover these bits of wisdom earlier in your child’s life that I did.

Over the past almost 4 ½ years I’ve wound my law practice down to just a couple of clients so I could take on the full-time study of the science of adolescence and how to best parent an adolescent.

There’s no way I could have done this when I was in the middle of those two years of hell with my son. And it’s taken me this long to read, dissect, write about, and absorb hundreds of scientific studies and journal articles and books from different fields of study and different points of view within those fields. I literally wrote a 58,000 word “book” complete with full citations, to make sure I understood it!

Based on all of this work, I’ve just recently developed a 4-part framework to help you  decrease the conflict and build a stronger relationship with your teen, while influencing  positive behavior change in them. And I’ve covered these things in bits and pieces in previous podcasts - but I’ve never shared it this way – bringing it all together for you. So, I hope this helps you see the big picture and gives you some direction in your own parenting – it sure would have helped me.

If you’ll check the show notes, I’ll have links to the specific episodes plus any free guides I have and even book suggestions for each of the parts of the framework.

Alright - the first part of the framework is understanding how the changes occurring in your teen’s brain messes with their thoughts, their emotions, and their behaviors

The reason knowing this is so important is because it takes a lot of the confusion out of the picture for you (and for your teen, if you explain it to them) and allows you to have more empathy for them, which will help you with your own emotional regulation and treatment of them. These are the basics:

• it’s typical adolescent behavior for their brain to misinterpret a neutral situation, statement, facial expression or tone as “threatening”, which sends the brain and body into fight or flight mode, meaning they’re going to be angry or nervous or some derivation thereof.
• teens are more likely to develop negative thinking patterns, which lead to unpleasant or negative emotions, which show up as less than desirable behaviors;
• their brain insures that they take risks – both good and bad and the more they do something, the better they get at it – so it’s easier to learn a foreign language but it’s also easier to become addicted to substances;
• a combination of neural networks make them much more likely to be embarrassed and self-conscious about everything and make being accepted by peers their top priority above all else, which also plays into the risk-taking behavior, when they’re with these peers.
• their brain tells them they’re becoming an adult and that adults get to make their own decisions and have more freedom so they begin pushing for more autonomy in their life – more say and more freedom
• all of these issues are so intense because the parts of their brain that cause them are in overdrive while the part of their brain that helps them use self-control, make good decisions, plan, organize, focus and problem solve – is still being programmed and is much weaker until at least their mid-20s!

The second part of the frame work is for you to be fully aware of your own emotions, so you can regulate them better – especially when you’re engaging with your teen.

As I said before, thoughts, emotions and behavior all influence each other. For example, (the thought) - you think your kid is drinking alcohol behind your back, (the emotion) - You get totally freaked out and beside yourself anxious about it, afraid she’s going to mess up her life, (the behavior) - You start checking her phone behind her back, digging in her drawers, and limiting her activities outside of school and tell her nothing is private anymore.

So, your thoughts, emotions and behavior regarding your teen not only impact you, but they impact your teen’s thoughts, emotions and behavior, the level of conflict between you and the relationship with them.

For example, when your behavior becomes more controlling like this, your teen who needs to have more autonomy and feels like an adult, is going to resent your control and will be more likely to lie, sneak around, hide their behavior, which then impacts your thoughts, emotions, and behavior by just confirming you have a right to be worried, and so you tighten the control even more – and the cycle continues. Do you see the problem? It’s exactly what happened with me and my son.

Learning how to dig deep and figure out what emotion you’re feeling and why is crucial to being able to regulate that emotion. Decide if it’s legit or uncalled for. What is it you feel? Are you afraid, nervous, worried, furious, frustrated, or disappointed about something your teen is doing? And what is it about this situation that’s causing this emotion, what are you thinking about? If we’re talking about this drinking issue - was your father an alcoholic? Your teen’s father or an older sibling of theirs? Where are these thoughts coming from? Learning to be more emotionally aware allows you to then check yourself and to be calmer in the moment. Mindfulness is the key.

I can’t tell you what a big difference this made in my interactions with my son. Just thinking about and understanding where my thoughts were and what emotions were coming up for me when he was smoking weed or getting angry…I was finally able to take a step back and approach things rationally. Wow. Again, I’ll have resources in the show notes.

The third part of the framework is for you to understand how to communicate with your child to help them through their own unpleasant emotions and avoid causing unnecessary blow ups.

This is really huge. The pieces of this part of the “puzzle” make so much sense yet most people don’t intuitively communicate this way with their kids. This is called emotion coaching but people throw it into all sorts of different parenting frameworks and call it other things. The name doesn’t matter – the fact is, it works. Let’s look at a typical scenario with your teen’s unpleasant emotions.

For example, you hear him in his bedroom slamming things around, stomping back and forth and growling to himself. You don’t dare go in but here he comes into the kitchen, opening and slamming pantry doors, same with the fridge until you have to ask, “what’s up sweetie?” So, he goes into this tirade about a group text, and something was said by someone and blah blah blah. He may be using cuss words or admits to using an app you’ve told him not to use so before he can get the whole story out, you interrupt and say, “Don’t talk that way – and I told you to delete that app from your phone. Besides that, you won’t even remember most of these people in a few years – stop paying attention to what they say – brush it off.”

You’ve already done a few things wrong here – most of us do it. First, you interrupted – don’t interrupt. Let them say every single thing they want to say. Let them get it out and explain and vent.

Next, you immediately scolded them for their language and using the app. This is not the time to talk to them about their behavior – even if it’s something they’ve done right then – like being ugly to you or being sarcastic or whatever. When they’re upset, it’s not the time to try and correct their behavior. They will not hear you OR you’ll just make them more upset.

And third, you told them to just not pay attention to what other people say. If you’ve ever said anything like that to your teen, you’ve likely seen the blowback. Most people in general don’t take kindly to being told their problems are “no big deal.” And the reason is because, it IS a big deal – the biggest of deals. And you just told them they’re overreacting, or that they’re stupid for feeling the way they do (that’s how they take it). You’ve invalidated their feelings.

And remember, the first part of the framework is understanding how their brain impacts their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. You need to remind yourself of that and try your best to put yourself in their shoes.

This is a friend group we’re talking about – the most important thing in their life right now – bar none. If their status in this group is threatened, it can’t be a bigger deal. And rightly so. Their whole job is to work their way out of the nest, find a new “family” so to speak, find a mate and have babies eventually - and perpetuate the species.

They have no other life experience to compare this to. This life is all they know. They don’t know what you know and you’re just going to upset them further by essentially telling them they’re overreacting – they will not agree.

First, they can’t help how they feel in that moment. Second, they don’t have a fully developed brain that will help them use self-control and calm themselves down. You have to be their calm. That’s why it’s so important that you get a grip on your own emotions – the second part of the framework. When your kid is dysregulated and you come flying in all dysregulated – it never ends well – trust me.

So, here’s what you do when you teen’s upset – in a nutshell. Remain calm when they’re not. Listen fully. Give them your undivided attention. Let them say everything they need to say, without  interrupting. You may have to ask a few questions that will help you clarify what’s going on and exactly how they feel though.

Then, reflect back to them what you hear them saying, acknowledge how they feel – validate their emotions by helping them with the words to describe it “I can see you’re really frustrated and hurt that no one seems to believe you – it really sucks to feel like you have to convince people you’re telling the truth.”

And if you can give them a comforting gesture like a hand on their back or shoulder, even a hug if they let you – all the better – a loving touch helps produce oxytocin and can really help them calm down in that moment.

In the end, you can ask them if they want your advice or even wait and see if they ask – but never give it otherwise. Usually when you get this far, they will have already decided what they want to do about it anyway – although they may not tell you.

If you have any correcting to do – you save it for after the conversation, when they’re calm. If they can’t get calm, you’ll have to separate, tell them you’ll get back together later and discuss it calmly. That’s it in a nutshell.

I’ll be honest with you, when I first tried this with my son, I was like a fish out of water. I couldn’t remember for the life of me what I was supposed to say or do when he was actually upset.

You know why? Because when he got upset, if I heard him growl or stomp around, I was SO conditioned to respond by getting immediately anxious myself. My brain and my body told me, “there’s a blow-up coming” and those blow ups weren’t new – they’d been happening his entire life, it’s just that now they were big boy blow-ups and they scared me.

So, in the beginning, until I learned to be more mindful of my emotions and to remain calm, I just pushed the anxiety back down and instead of hiding out or telling him to calm down or it was going to be okay – I listened. I’d let him tell me in an often very angry and sarcastic way, what was going on and I kept my mouth shut unless I needed to clarify something and until I could form the words to validate his emotions.

I had to really work on this – go back to my books, refresh my memory. So, it may not work the first few times you try it – you have to practice a little. And in fact, they have to get used to what you’re doing too. They’ve also become conditioned to your response to them – they may be used to you invalidating their emotions or avoiding them or arguing with them.

I think it was probably maybe 3 or 4 times going through this before it started sinking in with him that I was acting really differently than before. But then as soon as things started falling into place, I started seeing him calm down when I listened and reflected and did all the things. It was pretty amazing really.

And before too long, I started seeing little glimmers of my sweet boy again. He was happier, and gradually became calmer and the meltdowns were gone and there was no medicine.

It makes me so sad when I think about the years I went without knowing these things, without having these simple tools and getting my emotional act together. That’s why I want you to understand. Please don’t wait to make these changes. And, I’ll add, it’s certainly not to late now. You heard me say, my son was 18 by the time I really learned what I was doing here. If I can do this - You can do this.

The fourth piece of the framework is understanding how to discipline your teen without causing conflict and forming a rift in your relationship. And you really need those other three pieces of the framework to get this fourth right.

This piece of the framework is multi-faceted. First, you have to get your mindset right about the fact that your teen is individuating. They’re trying to figure out who they are, they’re separating from you physically to be with friends more but they still need that emotional connection with you – you need to be their safer harbor. They need to be able to trust that you’ll always be there for them no matter what.

You also have to understand that you’re no longer their manager – you’re their guide the rest of the way. You have to lose any trace of “it’s my way or the highway attitude.” There’s no room for demanding, bossing, commanding, lecturing, or thinking that they need to bend to your will. If you keep that mindset, you’ll only see conflict and you’ll ruin the relationship with your teen.

Next you have to learn 3 fundamentals of teen discipline. The first is that discipline doesn’t even mean compliance, control, obedience, punishment, consequences. That’s not the goal of discipline.

Discipline actually means to teach – it’s not about compliance or punishment or obedience – none of that. Punishment doesn’t teach – it might scare someone – it might control someone in the moment – but it doesn’t teach them how to act long-term.

If someone CAN’T do something, all the rewards and punishments in the world won’t help. And right now, your teen’s brain can’t do a lot of things well. It sucks at all executive functions – remember, planning ahead, focus, problem-solving, self-control, making decisions…

It’s your job to help them learn how to do these things - you have to show them, guide them, not simply punish them when they don’t behave the way you want them to.

Many of us were raised by parents who had that my way or the highway mentality. That authoritarian style of parenting has been passed down for many generations. And the goal was to control the child – make them comply – bend to your will.

But you know what mountains of scientific evidence tells us? That type of parenting is horrible for kids. It’s horrible for their mental health, it’s horrible for the parent child relationship and it instills fear in kids rather than teaching them how to behave (it’s all about external control and force and doesn’t teach a kid how to use their internal control to regulate their own behavior).

And By adolescence this authoritarian parenting style is especially counterproductive. If you’ve used this type of parenting style when they were little and you don’t switch gears, you end up in a spiral of power struggles and acting out. Not good.

So, parenting a teenager requires that you view all of their behavior, their mistakes, their rule-breaking, failure to meet expectations, all through the lens of teaching them the skills they’re lacking (rather than trying to control their behavior, punish, show them who’s boss – all of which will backfire)

Start with the end in mind. You want them to be able to take care of themselves and be responsible young adults by the time they leave your home for college or work, right?

You don’t do that with punishments or by fixing their problems for them (which many of us do – we go to the opposite extreme)

The second foundation is autonomy support – Remember we talked about how they are individuating, trying to figure out who they are, they’re moving more towards friends, feeling more like an adult. A big part of this is them wanting more freedom, and at the very least wanting more to feel like you respect and appreciate their input in their own life. They want to be consulted, they want to be able to give you their opinion, to be heard on any subject that affects them. Dad’s thinking about taking a new job that will require your teens moving to a new state and a new school? You better have a family discussion. The orthodontist says they need head gear? You better discuss it with them before saying – sure thing. You don’t want them staying up late doing homework? When do they want to do their homework?

Respecting their autonomy means treating them with the same respect you’d expect for yourself from another adult. It means not making unilateral decisions, not talking to them like a child, not telling them to do something. So many of us cause conflict with our teens because we threaten their autonomy without thinking a thing about it. “Get off that game and come take out the trash” “I want you getting that project done before dinner” “Put your phone over here right now” – you can basically take that word combination out of your vocabulary – “right now”.

The third foundation of teen discipline is maintaining your emotional connection with them. When they reach adolescence, you can’t pick them up and put them in the car or make them wash their hands. By the time they’re this age, your sole influence lies in the connection you have with them. Will they trust you with information? Will they want to please you? Will they hear your voice in their head when they’re away from home?

If you handle the first 2 foundations right, you’re 2/3^rds of the way there. Guiding and teaching rather than forcing and punishing is a big part of it. Supporting their autonomy is another huge chunk. Another big piece though, that a lot of us miss is the daily interactions with our teens .

So much of our daily interaction is mundane or routine and often even negative. Now, remember that teens see negativity everywhere. Their brain is kind of geared that way. So every time you’re sarcastic with them, remind them for the hundredth time to do something, scold them for forgetting something, ask them another question, it’s another negative point for you.

Here's what we say about this: research says it takes 5 positive interactions for every one negative interaction to maintain balance in a marital relationship. Other researchers have likened this to any relationship. But because of the sort of negativity bias built into the adolescent brain, you could be looking at 10 positives or even more to balance out one single negative. Dr. John Duffey describes this as an emotional back account. Negatives are withdrawals and positives are deposits and you better have more deposits than withdrawals unless you want to go in the hole. And once you’re in the whole, you’re going to be floundering to find that connection again with your teen.

To help with the positives you’ve got to work at making little connections with them daily. Get them to show you something cool about their latest video game obsession. Get them to show you how to work an app. Listen to their music with them, watch their favorite YouTuber with them, bake cookies, take a walk, make a midnight snack run together. Do whatever you can to keep those negatives to a minimum and pump up those positives.

The other part of this discipline framework is to understand how to make rules and decisions and work out problem behaviors with your teen and when and how to use natural and logical consequences.

I’ve discussed several times on this show that when you’re trying to determine rules or make decisions about whether your teen should be able to do something, there are 5 criteria Dr. Laurence Steinburg (expert in adolescence) suggests using to determine whether the parent should retain control over the issue: is it potentially dangerous, unhealthy unethical, illegal or likely to close some door better left open – everything else should be in the teen’s control – or their personal domain.

For example, curfew falls under the potentially dangerous category and is in the parent’s control. But even if it is in the parent’s control, this is where autonomy support comes in where you should always be willing to hear them out and let them have their say and negotiate something with them if at all possible.

On the other hand, hair styles don’t fall into any of the 5 and therefore should be completely left up to the teen.

And when we look at when to use consequences, we need to think back to that first foundation of teen discipline; teaching them the skills they need before they leave the nest one day. Fortunately, there’s usually a way to do this without using consequences. Episode 22 was about discipline and consequences, so I’ll be sure and link to it in the show notes. The main thing I want to say here is that we get into this mindset that unless we make our teen miserable, they’ll just make the same mistake or break the rule or misbehave again. But what does that turn your consequences into? A punishment and we’ve already said punishments do not work – they don’t teach anything other than fear or resentment or to be a better liar.

You can absolutely get creative and come up with better ways to teach your teen how to do something or not do something without taking away their phone or grounding them for a week – especially if it’s the first time they’ve done it. And, by the way, most experts say any consequences you do issue should never be more than 7 days no matter the infraction.

So, let me review briefly this 4-part framework for building stronger relationships and decreasing conflict:

#1 You need to understand how your teen’s changing brain impacts their thoughts, emotions and behavior, not be caught off guard by it and develop empathy for what they’re going through, which will help you respond to them more appropriately

#2 You need to become more aware of your emotions and learn to regulate them, stay calm – especially when your teen is not calm – if you have a problem with this – be sure to check the show notes

#3 You need to learn how to respond to your teen when they’re experiencing an unpleasant emotion. Basically-learn emotion coaching.

#4 You need to learn how to properly discipline your teen, keeping teaching skills, autonomy support and connection top of mind. Remembering that things are a discussion now – you’re guiding not managing.

That last part of the framework, #4 is what makes up the Discipline and Consequences Boot Camp that I just launched to the first group of moms. I’ll be relaunching that course in the fall, followed by the other 3 parts of the framework. So, stay tuned for that.

So, there you have it. Be sure to check the show notes at neurogility.com/52 for links to all the episodes that correlate to this framework along with links to the free guides. And thank you so much for being a part of my life for the past year. For emailing and DMing and rating the show. I can’t tell you how much it means to me knowing that I’m helping in some small way. And if I have helped you, please do me a favor and share the podcast with a friend or two or a co-worker or a family member who has a kid between 10 and 25 – they’ll appreciate it, I’m sure.

I’m looking forward to spending the next year with you and growing our community and getting to know you better.

This podcast is sponsored by neurogility.com, where I help moms build stronger relationships and decrease conflict with their teens.

Our producer and editor is Steve Coleman, researched, written and hosted by me, Ann Coleman.

I’ll be here again soon – go hug your teenager.