Dealing With A Mean Teen
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by Marsha Maung
Nov 8th, 2008
I was a mean teen. Yeah, I gave my mother heart palpitations and drained my father’s pockets when I was younger – and then gave them a mouthful whenever they tried to ‘advice’ me against making foolish decisions. After a couple of years trying to pummel sensible thoughts into my head, my father finally came up with this – “You’re an adult now. You make your own decisions. You bear your own consequences”.
My father did not keep to his words because despite my wayward decision-making habits during my teenage years, he continued to bail me out whenever my decisions brought about corresponding results.
How to deal with a teen
There is no magic wand that we can wave in the air that can give us a magic formula for ‘how to deal with a teen’. Every teenager grows up at their own pace according to his or her own personality, believes and also the experiences that they’ve been through.
70% of how we deal with a teen now will continue to ‘live in them’ for the rest of their lives. 20% of what they’ve learnt during their growing up years CAN be unlearned and altered while the rest remains.
Therefore, it’s absolutely crucial for parents to put the right foot down at the right place right from the start.
Listen and listen well
This article was brought about because I’ve just had this eye-opening talk with a teenager who has so much hatred in her and yet there’s a part of her wailing for attention and affection. All she wanted was for her parents to listen to her – and yet, deep inside of her, she knew she was all alone in this journey.
There is a very deep hatred that I feel inside of her that I want to dispel and discard; but I cannot because I am not in the position to. I hurt to see her like that because I know what it feels like.
If there’s a ‘terror teen’ award, I would have and should have won it because I live by noone’s rules. Not my parents, not my peers. I listened only to myself and my friends.
On the very same note, I feel very strongly that parents should always try to make time to listen to their kids talk instead of chastising them when they’re wrong. Listen to them whenever they voice their dissatisfaction and weigh it with an unbiased heart – that’s the only way to get into the heart of a teenager.
Help the segregate angst and purpose in life
Most teenagers have self-conflicting thoughts. They want to be free to make their own decisions, they compare their own lives with their friends’ and then they FEEL VERY DEEPLY when they’re angry.
Our role as parents is, perhaps, in a very gentle way help them face reality, find their purpose and then segregate between negative and positive energy surfing through their brains. Angst is bad for a teenager – prolonged angst is bad for everyone!
But in a teenager, it will merely bring about negative behavior in them – now or in the future.
Based on a reminder sent to me by a loyal reader, I've been advised to add the following to this article. Thank you, SL.
Tell them you love them
We tell them this when they were babies. It was much easier then because....why? They were babies? Accordingly, many parents stop saying 'I love you' to their kids by the time they hit 10 or 11 because it's just not something that adults do to their kids, anymore. But this is not true. My own elder son is already 8 and I continue to keep telling that I love him all the time because of one simple reason....because I DO LOVE HIM. And it's just such a pity that the barrier of communication between parents and kids (teenagers) becomes stronger because of doubt, self-doubt, finger-pointing, blame and inability to believe in the love that existed between parent and teen since the time they were babies. The love never ends...why should we, then, stop telling our kids we love them?
Hugs galore
The reader also pointed out that there's something called 'hugging' that is missing from the parent-child routine. I am an all-time big fan of hugging. My husband knows that nothing beats a good hug at the end of a hard day. With the same analogy, if parent and child has a close-enough or huggable relationship with each other, it's easier for bridge a gap or sit down and talk because when there's tension and disagreement (there'll be plenty of that!), at the very least, both of you know that despite all of that, the love remains.
Teenagers need to FEEL THE LOVE all the time and through hugging, they not only know that you'll be there for them despite their flaws and personal battle with life, they can FEEL it.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marsha Maung is a Malaysian-based freelance writer with two kids. She spends her time ferrying her kids around, watering her plants, writing web content, SEO stuff, ghostwriting books and also indulges in the occasional Facebook-ing. Visit her blog for more dirty details on the life and times of a mother, writer, designer, housekeeper, coffee-maker, poop-wiper, chef...and just about everything else under the sun.
REPUBLICATION RIGHTS! IMPORTANT!!
Listen up! I am a very nice person, if you think this article is neat and you'd like to publish it in your website, all's cool with me but with one condition. Only one and from the bottom of my heart, I wish that you would, in all sincerity, allow me my one single wish....to place the following codes into the your website at the END OF THE ARTICLE. It's not going to disrupt much, so please do it?
Either paste the above ABOUT THE AUTHOR stuff into your website (with links included) or copy the following codes into your website. That's it! Thank you! *muax*
<b>Marsha Maung</b> is a Malaysian-based <a href="http://www.marshamaung.com" target="_blank">freelance writer</a> with two kids. She spends her time ferrying her kids around, watering her plants, writing web content, SEO stuff, ghostwriting books and also indulges in the occasional Facebook-ing. Visit her <a href="http://www.marshamaung.blogspot.com" target="_blank">blog</a> for more dirty details on the life and times of a mother, writer, designer, housekeeper, coffee-maker, poop-wiper, chef...and just about everything else under the sun.
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