The way you think and feel about, and act towards your teenager, determines their behavior. You want their behavior to improve…we’ve got to work on yours first.

This is the 5^th episode in my fundamentals of parenting teens series.

Now, in the last episode I explained how your teen’s need for autonomy is the overarching theme throughout adolescence. They need to feel respected, heard and have more control over their life, make more of their own decisions, even have more responsibility…because they feel more like an adult now than a kid.

So, your parenting has to change. You go from being the boss to being a guide, working WITH them to help them become a mentally healthy young adult rather than constantly instructing and correcting, you have more respectful discussions, negotiate, look for the wins.

Because if you try to maintain your boss status (and all the control), you WILL threaten their autonomy. And what happens when you threaten a teen’s autonomy?  Lots of arguing and power struggles, conflict galore.

And what does that conflict do to your relationship? Your connection with your teen? It ruins it. It makes you their arch enemy…and who wants to listen to their enemy and do anything their enemy wants them to do? No one.

So, if you make yourself the enemy, they’re not going to hear a word you say, they’re going to sneak around, lie, and do their best to cut you out of the picture. You’ll be on the outside looking in…not where you want to be if you want to have any influence in their life.

I’m not saying you have to be their best friend…you can’t be, you have to be the parent. But you can’t do your job unless they trust you enough to talk to you and tell you the truth more often than a lie…and full circle…they’re not going to do that unless you support their autonomy.

So, your behavior is the key here…no way around it.

And where does your behavior come from? Your feelings or emotions. And what causes those emotions? Usually, your thoughts. How you interpret a situation…in this case, your teen’s specific behavior. Understanding this cognitive triangle: thoughts lead to emotions, which lead to behavior…is the basis for cognitive behavioral therapy…the most common approach therapists take to help us change our lives.

If you’re threatening your teen’s autonomy and causing conflict or even rebellion, the first place you start is with your thoughts. Thoughts about what? What do I mean?

Well, despite feeling like our emotions just pop up out of nowhere and happen TO us, most of the time, they’re preceded by a thought that we have—an interpretation of the situation.

For example, your son walks in the door after hanging out with a friend down the street that is known to smoke weed and he goes straight the cupboard and starts complaining of being starving. Your immediate thought is, “I’ll bet they’ve been smoking weed together. He promised he wouldn’t and now look at him.” But guess what? Our thoughts come in so strong and hot that we may not even realize we’ve thought anything…we may simply notice our feelings in the moment. You may feel furious, or disappointed or a little of both, it all depends on your thoughts. But you know what else? You may not even slow down long enough to notice those emotions…you may jump right into a lecture or questioning, or accusing or consequencing.

This is often how it happens—we do something or say something (we respond, act, behave) at almost the same time we have the thoughts and feel the feelings. It’s not a really drawn out process.

And sometimes, there may not even be a thought involved. Remember when we talked about the amygdala in the 2^nd episode of this series? The amygdala reacts automatically to anything it perceives as threatening (which may not even be something that’s physically dangerous). It can remember things from our past and send us into fight or flight mode without a single thought—it’s automatic. So, in this same scenario, if, like me, you grew up with a sibling who smoked a lot of weed and have a major aversion to this kind of thing, 10 that old amygdala can remember that and send you into a tizzy at the first sight of those half-closed eyes, or maybe a whiff of skunky cannabis.

But either way, there are things you can do to change how you respond in the moment to your teen so that you don’t threaten their autonomy and make their behavior worse. 11 Remember that you have a fully formed prefrontal cortex so you can calm that amygdala down 12 and you can also learn how to manage those thoughts, change your emotions and tame your behavior.

So, let’s talk more about your thoughts. Visualize that cognitive triangle with thoughts at the bottom left, emotions at the top and behavior at the bottom right. The goal is to create some time and space between our 13 thoughts and emotions or between our emotions and our behavior…our reaction. How do we create that pause between thoughts and emotions?

First you need to accept the fact that it is indeed your individual interpretation of the situation that causes your emotion…not the situation itself. Your THOUGHT about the situation.

In other words, the objective fact that your teen’s told you to “eff off” or was an hour late for curfew or forgot your birthday…neither your teen nor their actions cause you to feel an emotion. For you to feel angry or sad, or worried or anxious about their behavior, you have to THINK about it in a certain way.

As an example, there may be a parent somewhere who just shrugs off an “eff you” – they may even say it back to their teen. Your teen uttering a couple of syllables to which the English language has attached a specific meaning…does not in itself, CREATE an emotion in you.

But your thought, “I didn’t raise my kid this way” or “how dare she talk to me that way, my father would have slapped my face if I said something like that” or “where have I gone wrong?!” These THOUGHTS will absolutely cause you to feel certain emotions.

Specific emotions are not universally linked to specific stimuli or situations or actions. It’s all very subjective depending on each one of us, our personal history, the way we see the world, the particular circumstances, our past experiences with this particular kid, and our attitude towards that kid. You and I might react completely differently in basically the exact same set of circumstances.

So, again, when we encounter a situation, we interpret or appraise it, we feel a certain emotion or emotions about it and then we react or respond based on those emotions. 15 Our emotions don’t happen to us – we are responsible for them ourselves – we can control this process.

It is factually incorrect to ever say something like, “you make me so angry” or “if would just do what I say I wouldn’t get so frustrated”. All those times we blame someone else, or the situation, the way someone said something or the thing they didn’t do – all those times…although it might feel that way, it wasn’t them or the situation, it was solely and completely up to us as to how we interpreted it, felt and responded.

Imagine that triangle again…16 we have an opportunity, after the stimulus or the situation pops up, to determine how to think about it, which then determines our feelings and behavior. And we have another opportunity to pause and reassess between feelings and our reaction. It feels instantaneous I know…they do something, you react. But you have the ability to slow this process down and create the space you need to take control of your reaction.

 For example, let’s say your teenager told you (with a smirk on their face, that your outfit was cheugy. You could choose to take that personally and think “wow, how dare they talk to me that way after everything I do for them” and feel really pissed off, or you could choose to think, “yep, that’s typical meaningless teen snark” and feel a little empathy for what their brain’s putting them through, and say something like, “yep, that’s me, cheugy-McGee.

And even if your first thought was, “wow, how dare they” and you felt angry, you still have time, before you act, to take a breath and reappraise the situation to remind yourself that their words are meaningless, change your feelings, or at least prevent yourself from scolding or correcting them…which we know will only cause an argument and do nothing other than harm your connection with them.

Being able to change your thinking or interpretation of a situation, or at least pausing long enough to give yourself the chance to rethink it, takes practice and you can’t do this if you’re completely unaware of your thoughts and feelings.

So, you have to first learn to observe your thoughts, notice your inner self-talk before you can do anything about it.

Maybe you haven’t paid much attention to your inner voice before but it’s there and it chats away at you all day long, instructing, criticizing, directing…18 so start paying closer attention to it.

We’re often so busy moving from task to task or doing several at once (or distracting ourselves on our phones when we’re not busy) that we literally can’t hear ourselves think. So, your assignment is to start paying attention to your inner voice right now, because here’s the thing, just because we think it, doesn’t mean it’s right or true. Our brain very often distorts the truth of the matter, jumps to conclusions, makes assumptions, comes to the worst possible outcome, even causes biased thinking.

We have to accept that our thoughts can be way off base, which means our emotions are based on incorrect information, and our behavior or reaction will be totally inappropriate. I’m sure you can probably think of a time when this happened to you.

For example, perhaps your teen has a hard time getting up in the mornings, complains when you remind them to do a simple chore, avoids doing their homework, and sleeps in on the weekend and takes naps in the afternoons. You take all this as a sign that they’re lazy, which causes you to take every little thing they do (or don’t do) as confirmation that your conclusion is correct.

Now your brain is biased to see only the things that confirm your thought that they’re lazy, which makes you extremely worried for their future, anxious about their ability to graduate high school, their ability to earn a living one day and support themselves. And these thoughts and emotions cause you to react to their behavior. Every time you see them being “lazy”, you remind, correct, lecture, maybe you even yell or punish…all of which threatens your teen’s autonomy, causes animosity, power struggles, and possibly even major rebellion. All because your brain misinterpreted typical adolescent behavior and thought of it as “lazy”.

You must be willing to objectively examine your own thoughts and feelings, and try to figure out why you think or feel a certain way about something. Are you seeing things clearly? Is there something from your past popping up and improperly influencing you?

For example, my brother had a major substance abuse issue from adolescence up until the day he died in his 50s. And when my son started smoking weed, all I could think is, “he’s going to end up just like my brother”. That thought led to all sorts of other negative thoughts, which led to my fear, worry, and anxiety about his future. And those feelings led me to scold, question, lecture, plead, punish…and try to control him so my fears wouldn’t be realized. And my behavior, in fact, did just the opposite…it caused him to rebel, shut me out, and do even riskier things.

Our negative and often incorrect thoughts about our teens, can not only ruin our relationship with them but can drive their behavior over the cliff.

Be willing to admit you may not be right in your thinking all the time-recognize that your brain takes short cuts and makes all sorts of mistakes. This is one of the most important things you can do to help you regulate your emotions.

Now that you understand how the changes going on in your teen’s brain affects their thoughts, feelings, and behavior, it should allow you to be more empathetic and patient and make it easier to reappraise difficult situations with your teen. You can remind yourself that they’re not doing it on purpose, that they’re doing the best they can right now, and that it won’t last forever.

This is why one entire module of my course inside Parent Camp is learning about their brain. This understanding allows you to see their behavior for what it is so you can change the way you think about it and avoid a lot of the confusion and anger,  which leads to so much of the disconnection and animosity which just leads to their worse behavior.

Now, let me give you a few ways you can check your negative thoughts about your teen, in the moment. When you notice that thought, you can

• ask yourself if you have potentially misinterpreted typical teen behavior caused by their changing brain.
• ask yourself what evidence there is to prove what you’re thinking is actually true. And I’m talking about real solid evidence not that circumstantial crap, okay? For example, you probably wouldn’t get a conviction on weed-smoking with, “well he was hanging out with someone who does it and he sure seemed hungry” – there’s a ton of reasonable doubt there, don’t you think?
• You can also ask yourself, is there another reasonable explanation for what I’m thinking. Again, with this example, could your kid just be really hungry because he hasn’t eaten in several hours?
• You could also ask yourself, if this was your best friend’s kid and they just told you about this exact situation, what would you say to them? Would you say, “oh yeah, it’s obvious he’s smoking weed – no doubt”? If you wouldn’t make that assumption about someone else’s kid, don’t make that assumption about yours.

Now, besides trying to reappraise the situation and change your thoughts when you notice them, there are things you can do on a regular basis that will help you learn more about your thoughts and feelings in general and to calm your nervous system, so you are less likely to react without pausing first.

I talked about a couple of these things here (journaling your emotions and mindfulness meditation) in this video so please check it out. But today I want to give you a couple of other strategies to consider.

After you’ve done the journaling exercise in that other video, I want you to start a journal to keep up with your emotional interactions with your teen. Anytime you or they react emotionally, I want you to write it down. Note the time of day, what was going on right before, who was present, whether you were tired, sleepy, hungry, or stressed, whether they were tired, sleepy, hungry, or stressed, what was said by whom and how and what you thought and felt at the time. If you do this for several months, you will be able to spot the patterns in your interactions, including your thoughts and feelings. This should give you more clarity on where these thoughts are coming from, situations or statements to avoid, and more. It’s a great exercise.

And to help with your reactivity in general, to help calm your nervous system, I’m going to say something that will probably make you roll your eyes but just hear me out. Stress causes us to be more reactive, it keeps our nervous system on high alert and it’s bad for our mental and physical health. And before you say, “well what am I supposed to do about stress, that’s just part of life?”, yes, you’re right, it is, however, there are plenty of things we can all do to alleviate as much of it as possible.

For example, (and this falls into the over-hyped category of self-care, but it’s simply a fact) we have to get 8 hours of sleep, we have to nourish our bodies with healthy food, drink lots of water, and exercise at least a few minutes a day. These are the very minimum that we should do. If you’re not getting enough sleep, change your bedtime habits, if you’re not exercising, at least take the dog for a walk during the day, if you’re not eating healthy enough, start by adding in rather than taking away. This is the very least you can do for your family…because if you’re not taking care of yourself, you can’t take care of them.

You can also learn to say “no” more. That committee can find someone else…really. You can avoid those sign-up sheets or emails for volunteers. You deserve to have a life too and you can’t if you’re always giving, giving, giving. So, start saying “no” or stop volunteering (no one’s going to even notice).

Give yourself a break from social media…or at least stop looking at your friends who have kids the same age as yours. The comparisons, even if you don’t consciously realize you’re doing it, will wreck you. Unfollow, limit the time you spend, or just delete the dang app. Seriously, we survived before we had social media. Meet friends for coffee instead.

Speaking of meeting friends, do that more often (if you’re an extrovert), go have fun, or start a hobby or get back to one you haven’t picked up in a while.

These are just a few of the ways you can bring more light into your life, take care of yourself, reduce your stress and therefore reduce your reactivity.

I want you to understand that the way you manage your thoughts, emotions, and behavior has an enormous impact not only on the relationship with your teen and their behavior, but how they will end up parenting their kids.

They’re learning through you and the way you parent them will be passed on for generations. Think about that. If you find yourself unable to stay calm and grounded, you owe it to yourself and your family to do something about it. If my suggestions here aren’t enough, consider reaching out to a therapist, you can also check out Parent Camp, I’ll link to it in the description.

I’ll also link several other audio podcast episodes there that can help and my free parenting guide, Emotional Awareness Strategies.

You can do this.