It is quite possible that the only thing more challenging than being a teenager is being the parent of a teenager. Being a teenager is a really interesting time in your life because you’re not quite a grownup and not quite a child.
A lot of teenagers have trouble managing the spirit and their time and it can create a lot of conflict in the family and with friends. So, here is some helpful tips and information about managing teen-conflict.
A lot of the time, a teenager will have trouble following the rules of the family. They want to make their own rules, but they have trouble recognizing the freedom that they actually might have. At the same time, parents have trouble letting their teens grow up, and sometimes they have trouble giving the kids the freedom that they actually deserve.
Believe it or not, it is easy to see a lot of commonality between the feelings of teenager and the parents are having. For example, everybody experiences frustration, stress, time pressures, disappointment, a lot of worries about money, and also a fear of failure, failure at being parent, a teenager, at your job or at school. A lot of the time, because parents and teenagers are very different, but also really quite the same, a lot of conflict can result and sometimes the best way to handle conflict is just to try to calm down.
Here is some tips for calming down if you are in a fight.
First of all, while you’re having an argument. You want to pick your battles. You want to make sure that you are not getting angry just to get angry. You want to make sure that whatever it is you’re discussing is something that really matters to you. If that is the case and you’re still really upset, take a deep breath and count to 10. You really want to think about what you are saying before anything comes out of your mouth because words can hurt a relationship and create even more conflict in the long run. If you have a time, go for a walk. Take a little walk around the block and think about what is going on.
And finally, no one knows you better than you know yourself. So take an opportunity to really try to step back and be objective and talk to yourself about what is going on. You can remind yourself to relax and stay calm. You can remind yourself to maybe a better time to have this argument in somewhere else if you are in a public place and you want to have a time to focus and really have the attention of the other person.
It’s important to accept people’s feedback if your teen is telling you something and they keep repeating themselves and really trying to get a point across, maybe they have something to say, and of course that goes for teenagers too. Now in the parent, that is where the teenager sees how they should behave in these situations. So it’s really important to monitor, as a parent, the way that you speak to your teen because they are looking to you to learn as well.
So in these situations, you can try to use humor. You can try to express your love in the middle of a difficult moment and you can try to reframe the issue, create a parallel issue that maybe they have a different perspective on that they can be a little bit more clearheaded about. And then you can ask yourself questions about the way you handle the conflict to make sure you did it in a loving and respectful way, to make sure you had the opportunity to express yourself and to make sure that you gave your child the opportunity to express themselves as well.
If you follow these steps, maybe you can remain clearheaded and try to avoid some conflict and help manage it with your teen.
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