Communicating with Your Teen: Give Up on Lectures and Advice

Independence

There is probably no more unsettling realization for the parents of teenagers than coming to grips with the reality that all your hard-earned advice, wisdom, and life lessons are falling on deaf ears. Much to your chagrin, your teenagers seem to want no part of what you have to offer. Even though, in your mind at least, you are different from how your parents were when you were a teenager; and, in that regard, you believe you have lots of useful information to offer.

Most parents, however, don't take the refusal of their advice so easily. Despite our teenager's protestations, we continue to offer our advice and lecture them, even if we're sure they aren't listening. We can't stop ourselves. We don't know what else to do, and the idea of doing nothing and sitting powerless on the sidelines isn't an option. Of course, the impulse to "help" is good as long as we learn to use this energy in a slightly different and more indirect route. A much more effective route.

Independence
A hallmark of teenagers is the need to establish their independence as they forge a stable identity for themselves. A tall order for any age—and one that most adults have yet to fulfill—yet teenagers think they can and must fulfill this quest, and usually in a semester's time. Few engage in this quest in an orderly manner. As in many other areas of their lives, teenagers are apt to exaggerate and push too hard in their insistence upon independence, especially with their parents. This is because the best way they know of to establish a sense of independence is to push away the people they have been dependent upon for so long: mom and dad.

This stage is never graceful or elegant, and it is frequently punctuated with many mixed messages—the sort of Go Away and Come Here double communications that teenagers are famous for and that drive their parents crazy.

He's like a two-headed monster, and each time we interact, I have to figure out which head is speaking, and fast! One part of him demands to be treated like an independent adult at every turn. Buying clothes for him turns into an argument in which he accuses me of trying to control him. Me, I was just trying to do a nice thing by buying him a new pair of jeans; but for him, you would think I was trying to micromanage his every move.

Then an hour later he wants to know if I'll wash his uniform for his game later that day. And, of course, if I try to connect the dots for him between the mixed messages—wanting near total independence and needing me to take care of his laundry—he looks at me as if I were from another planet and simply says, Mom, I don't want another lecture. I just want to know if you are going to wash my uniform or not.

In staying connected to your teenager, you need to understand how this need for independence shows itself at different times and how to recognize it for what it is—normal, healthy adolescent development. You also need to know how it permanently changes some of the ways you used to communicate with your teenager, lectures and advice topping the list. But don't give up hope, when some lines of communication become tangled because of independence issues, other lines, in fact, are opening.

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Excerpted from:

Copyright © 2003 by Michael Riera. Excerpted from Staying Connected to Your Teenager with permission of its publisher, Perseus Books Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

To order this book visit perseusbooksgroup.com.