The following material discusses the different perspectives you and your teenage child may have on things. It is important to keep this in mind when parenting.
To discipline effectively you must develop a better understanding of yourself and your teenager. This starts with examining the differences between your agenda and your teenager’s. Agendas include values, expectations, and goals. And they describe what you hope to achieve or get from a given situation with different needs, goals, and emotions. Constant quarreling between you and a seemingly difficult teenager may simply arise from a misunderstanding of agendas.
In general, the parent’s agenda is to finish raising the child upon whom they have lavished years of patience, generosity, and love. They may have felt relatively successful at parenting until puberty struck. Then suddenly the kid who shared their interest and accepted their ideas and suggestions starts telling them that they are out of it, that they know nothing that is relevant to the twentieth century, and that their presence is barely tolerable.
Parents view this as ungrateful behavior and a bad attitude. In fact, it is the result of the teenage agenda. The task of adolescence is to master the skills needed to become an adult. Its agenda is to grow up and learn about life. Unfortunately for parents, this is not accomplished by following the parents around and imitating their every move. Rather, it is done by testing, rejecting, exploring, and sometimes failing and then beginning the cycle again. It requires time, courage, and patience from both the parent and teenager. But it is the only way any of us become functional adults.
If your teenager could express his or her agenda to you, it might sound something like this: “Mom and Dad, you need to understand that I’m going through a developmental stage. Sometimes I need to act disgusting in order to be separate from you. The stage will pass, and you will like me again when I am eighteen.” If your kid said that, you’d probably have a heart attack. The point is that adolescence is a developmental phase that passes. The challenge for you to learn not to take much of your teenager’s behavior personally. I know that sounds difficult, if not impossible. It’s hard to accept negative remarks about your appearance, taste in clothing, and ability to drive from a fifteen-year-old and still retain your sense of humor. But I’m going to help you learn to react differently, so that you can unlock the struggle with your teenager.
Let’s look at some of the specific items on the agenda of the adult and the teenager to identify potential areas of conflict:
The Adult Agenda
Your agenda as the parent of a teenager is to implant values for adulthood. Your goal is to see that the values you cherish become embedded in you child’s brain. You fear that if you don’t do this now, the kid will never become the wonderful human you’ve been working to produce. Because your teenager’s agenda is to test and reject many of you values, conflicts naturally arise.
Another parental agenda is to keep as much control as possible over the teenager. Parents fear the loss of control over the behavior, attitudes, and developing values of their child, although this is the reality of parenting growing children. So now we have a situation developing: The teenager wants less control, and the parent wants more control but feels less. Naturally this leads to growing tensions, causing the parent finally to resort to saying, “I’m your parent and don’t you forget it!” Parents also try to coach their teenagers in their choice of friends. parents will often tell their teenagers that they don’t pick friends well -that they can do better than the group they have chosen. You are worried about the type of friends you teenager has chosen and how they might influence his or her behavior. Your agenda is to surround your teenager with people of good character and acceptable (your) values. A teenager’s agenda is totally different, concerned only with whether those friends are cool, cute, or fun. Their values? Those are their values.
The Teenager’s Agenda
One of the most important issues of the teenager’s agenda is to find things out in his or her own way. The years of experience and good advice offered by a parent won’t substitute for the teenager’s need to test what he or she feels about his or her own life. Sometimes this testing takes the form of rejecting your most cherished beliefs, such as religion, political persuasion, and the importance of the family. When choosing life-style and social values, the teenager is more likely to model him- or herself after peers or the parents of friends. Few things are more infuriating to a parent than to be told “Jerry’s mom and dad are so much cooler than you are.”
Another important agenda of the teenager is to be accepted by friends. If your kid says, “God, mom, you embarrassed me when you started laughing in front of my friends. Don’t act so silly.” Or, “Dad stop trying to be so cool in front of my buddies, like you’re one of my friends.”
This behavior relates to teenagers’ need to express their separateness and independence. They feel an intense need not to seem like our little kid. They may also want parents to conform to the image that they think is appropriate rather than accepting that parents are individuals too.
Another important agenda of teenagers is to learn to weigh the relative importance of their values versus yours. For example, teenagers may be reluctant to look to the future because it scares them. Discussions of college, competition, employment, and finances can be frightening to anyone. Your teenager may act uninterested in what you have to say. Actually, he or she know that what you have to say is valuable, but just isn’t ready to deal with the issues.
Another agenda you’ll have to accept with a teenager is the need to outsmart you, to get around you. Try to understand this issue. Your teenager may say, “I’m going over to Jane’s house.” Maybe, if you’re lucky, you find out that in reality your daughter is meeting her boyfriend. The message a teenager sends with this behavior is, “I want to run my own life. You won’t like the things that are important to me, so I’ll just keep them secret from you. I’m going to do what I want.”
Most teenagers don’t step too far out of line, but they do do lot of maneuvering. Parents need to deal and cope with this but it is important to keep in mind that this is normal behavior for an adolescent. Defiance, negative attitudes, and rejection of your attempts at guidance are necessary parts of the normal, healthy adolescent’s process of discovering how to grow up. Your teenager’s job is to listen to you but to weigh and measure your words against what he or she learns about him- or herself and the world. As a parent your job is to understand your teenager and try to set up reasonable guidelines for growing up.
Points to Remember in Effectively Parenting Teens:
- Discipline is a learning process. It involves both preventing and correcting problems.
- Many discipline problems are prevented by giving teens choices within appropriate limits. Teens then experience control over various areas to their own lives.
- Reward and punishment are inappropriate in equal relationships. Reward and punishment imply that the parent is superior, they stimulate rebellion and resistance.
- Natural and logical consequences replace reward and punishment. They require teens to take responsibility for their own behavior. They promote self-discipline.
- A “natural consequence” represents a violation of the natural order. For example, a teen who skips lunch is hungry. A “logical consequence” represents a violation of the social order. For example, a teen who comes in too late from a date may not go out the next evening.
- Logical consequences are effective only when they are logical to the teen, presented as a choice, and administered in a firm and friendly way.
- Parents can spoil consequences by:
- Being inconsistent
- Pitying
- Being over concerned about what others think
- Talking too much
- Using inappropriate timing
- Feeling and communicating hostility
- Having hidden motives
- Playing detective
- Rejecting the person instead of the act
- Use the following guidelines when applying consequences:
- Determine your teen’s goal of misbehavior
- Determine who owns the problem. (sometimes it’s the parent)
- Present choices.
- Follow through if your teen chooses to take the consequence.
- Choose your words carefully.
- Focus on positive behavior soon after correcting the misbehavior.
- Negotiate consequences whenever possible.
- Never give a choice you or your teen can’t follow through on.
