Mistakes Parents Make with Teenagers

This is Going to Be FUN: the Podcast

Episode 35: 4 Frustrating Parenting Mistakes

Episode Summary:

Mistakes Parents Make With Teenagers

Has your teen's behavior ever left you scratching your head and wondering what in the world is happening in that brain of theirs? If so you are not alone!

Not understanding how your teen's brain works is making your job way harder than it needs to be.

Learn the 4 parenting mistakes that might be contributing to your frustration...including a sneaky mistake that most parents of well-behaved teenagers miss. (Spoiler alert: this one could unintentionally be doing serious damage to your teen's emotional health).

The solution to these 4 mistakes is actually really simple: you need to understand how your teenager's brain works!

But since you probably don't want to spend hours researching the teenage brain and reading through endless pages of boring medical jargon, I am giving you the Cliff's Notes version and answering all your questions about the teenage brain at a FREE workshop Thursday, March 2.

After March 2 you can get immediate access to A Mom's Guide to the Teenage Brain: the Secret to Frustration-Free Parenting Workshop replay in the ENJOY community.

Mistakes Parents Make With Teenagers

We recently got home from a family vacation. As a mom of 6, family vacations have always been fun, but they never actually feel like a vacation for me.

Even getting ready to leave on the vacation is a lot of work as a mom. You have to make all the vacation plans, book the hotel, activities and transportation. Make plans for all the stuff you are going to miss while you are gone. Find someone to watch the dog. Get the house clean-ish so you don’t come home to a nightmare.

You have to plan all the grocery shopping around not having a bunch of food going bad while you are gone, but having food up until you leave and good snacks for the car or plane. And, of course, you have to get all the laundry done before you can start packing.

When my kids were little, I used to pack everybody’s suitcases so I could make sure everyone had clothes that I actually wanted in my vacation photos and not just character pajama tops and bright neon basketball shorts.

And still, the number of times we arrived at a destination with a broken pair of flips flops as the only pair of shoes that child brought are more than I can keep track of. 

As the kids have gotten older, though, I have figured out a better system. I have a packing list on the notes app in my phone and I customize it for the trip we are taking and then print a copy for each child.

I always have good intentions of checking their bags to make sure they packed what was on the list, but the reality is I rarely get to that because I am busy packing my own bags at the last minute. 

I have learned though, that not being specific with the packing list will always result in frustration when we arrive on vacation because unless I am really specific, the kids often pack the wrong kind of stuff for the vacation we are on.

A Surprise Vacation

Let’s imagine together that someone surprises you and tells you to pack your bags for a 7 day vacation. 

Immediately you are going to have some questions, right? Where are we going? What will we be doing there? How are we getting there? What will the weather be like? Without the answers to these questions it would be pretty challenging to pack your bags.

Now imagine instead they tell you to pack your bags for a 7-day vacation to California in May.

You would have a much better idea of what to pack, right? You would have a general idea of the season and styles of clothes you would want to pack and you’d be sure to put in some sunscreen and leave out your big fluffy coat.

You’d probably make sure you packed a swimsuit and some flip flops. But you would still have a lot of questions. Are you going to the beach? Does the hotel have a pool? Will you be going to Disneyland? What other activities are on the agenda? Are you driving or flying there?

But imagine they tell you to pack your bags for a 7 day vacation to Anaheim, California in early May. The weather is expected to be low 80s the whole time you are there, no rain in the forecast.

You will spend 3 days at Disneyland, 2 days at the beach and the other 2 days you will be traveling because it is a road trip. You will be staying at a hotel with a water slide. They don’t provide beach toys, but they do have towels and beach chairs you can check out.

You have reservations at a fancy restaurant that has a dress code for dinner one night and your hotel room has a kitchenette with a full size fridge. 

How much easier would it be to figure out what to pack in this scenario? The more you know and understand about the trip you are taking, the better you can prepare and pack the right stuff for the journey.

Raising Teens is Like Trying to Pack Without Knowing the Destination

So why am I sharing all of this with you? Because, I think this a perfect illustration of why so many parents struggle when it comes to raising teens.

When you found out you were going to be a parent, you started learning everything you needed to know about having a baby. You might have taken a parenting class or read a parenting book or two or three. Once they were born you took that baby to the doctor regularly…and they sent you home with pages of printed information to get you through the next few months until your next appointment.

There are a lot of resources out there to support parents in caring for a brand new baby, toddler or school aged child. 

But as those kids get older and approach the tween and teen years, the doctor’s visits are spread further apart. And instead of a packet of printed information you get a half sheet basically telling you that if it is hard, that is totally normal and there’s really nothing you can do about it but provide a stable, consistent home environment with rules and consequences.

There are books about raising teenagers, but they all seem to offer conflicting advice….set firm boundaries and hold fast to them no matter what, don’t have any rules or your kids will just break them, demand respect, be your teen’s best friend.

There also aren’t as many people sharing their personal experiences with teenagers online…except the horror stories and the cautionary tales.

Or even less helpful, the anecdotes from parents portraying their perfectly behaved, honor-roll teens who are the star of the team and seem to never do anything wrong. 

Basically heading into the teen years it is like the invitation arrived telling you to pack for a 7 day vacation with a warning that you need pack with care so you are prepared, but with no additional information and no return address.

So there you are left to figure it out on your own. You got a lot more detail about packing for the infant vacation and the toddler vacation and the pre-school vacation and the elementary school vacation. And so you figure this vacation will probably be similar so you pack a lot of the same stuff and hope for the best. But those vacations were to California. And this one is to Alaska. 

If you show up in a small frozen-over town in Alaska with a suitcase full of shorts and t-shirts and flip flops, you are going to be ill-prepared for the snowshoeing adventure or a snowmobile excursion that are planned for you. And as you stand there shivering and probably sustaining frost bite in your fingers and toes, it is likely to be pretty miserable.

Understanding your teenager

The strategies that worked when your child was little, just don’t work when they are teens. And it isn’t because they aren’t good strategies, it is because you are trying to wear shorts and a t-shirt to a snowmobiling adventure in Alaska.

Understanding your teenager is the key to making the most of the teen years. It is the key to making parenting easier, more effective and more enjoyable.

Knowing how their brain works, being aware of the factors that are influencing their behavior and understanding what they need and want is going to change the way you approach parenting them.

Just like knowing the details of your vacation helps you pack more effectively, understanding how your teen’s brain works will help you parent them more effectively. 

4 Ways you might be Making Parenting Harder than it has to be

As I coach parents of teens, I have noticed a few common roadblocks that significantly decrease the effectiveness of their parenting strategies and make parenting way harder than it needs to be.

1. Misinterpreting your teen’s behavior
2. Unrealistic expectations for your teen
3. Misinterpreting compliance
4. Overcorrecting from one extreme to another

Misinterpreting your teen’s behavior

So many parents are misinterpreting their teen’s behavior as dangerous, problematic or intolerable when it is actually a part of their teen’s normal, healthy development.

Because they see their teen’s behavior as a problem, they tighten the reigns and end up slowing down their teen’s healthy development.

Because they are misinterpreting their teen’s behavior, they are creating more tension in their relationship which causes their teen to push back and act out more.    

Unrealistic Expectations for your Teen

When parents don’t understand how the teen brain is wired to respond and react during adolescence, they end up having unrealistic expectations for what is normal.

They try to solve problems that were never actually problems to begin with and get frustrated because nothing they do works. They are left with disappointment, unmet expectations and a giant wedge in their relationship with their teen. 

Misinterpreting compliance

Misinterpreting compliance is one of the most heartbreaking mistakes I see parents make because they don’t realize the long-term effects it could have on their teen and their relationship. Certain personality types are wired to want to please at any cost so they are obedient and compliant even when it is at their own expense.

Parents think that the strategies they are using are working well, but in reality they are unintentionally damaging their teen’s self-concept, intuition and confidence. They are unknowingly fueling feelings of shame and resentment in their teen that will continue to build over time. 

Overcorrecting from one extreme to another

If you were one of those kids who complied at their own expense you might still be healing from the wounds of shame and self-doubt as a result of the way you were parented.

So many parents who have trauma from their own teen years often struggle to trust themselves and their instincts and end up overcorrecting from one extreme to another.

Because they lack confidence and don’t trust their own intuition, they try all sorts of different parenting strategies and when one doesn’t work, they move to the opposite extreme. This creates confusion and inconsistency for your teen at a time when their healthy development requires stability and consistency. 

Avoid the Roadblocks 

When parents really understand their teenager, they are much less likely to fall into these traps. Part of understanding your teenager is really getting to know them for who they are: listening to them, learning about them and opening the lines of communication with them.

And the other part is understanding how the teenage brain works and what healthy teenage development looks like. We like to think that because we were once teens ourselves, we already know this stuff…we get it. But we really don’t.

Things are different for our teens than they were for us, but also, traditional methods of parenting work against healthy development in teens. And unless you have done a bunch of coaching or therapy, you might not even realize that ways that kind of parenting is still impacting your life and relationships. 

Understanding your teenager will help you be more compassionate and patient. It will help you foster a closer, more connected relationship with your teen that will last long after they leave the nest.

But more than that, it will empower you to tailor your parenting to work WITH your teen’s biological development instead of working against it. It will help you get better outcomes with less frustration. 

If you want to understand why your teen does the stuff they do and how you can work WITH biology and brain development to make parenting a whole lot easier and more effective, I would love for you to join me at the free workshop I am teaching to help parents understand the inner workings of the teenage brain.

I will be teaching the workshop live so you can ask questions and get help applying the information to your own situation, but you will also get a recording in case you can’t make it live or just want to listen a few times to soak in the information.

If you are listening to this episode after the workshop has already happened, you didn’t miss it! The recording of the workshop will be posted inside of the ENJOY community so you can get immediate access to this workshop as well as all the other amazing resources to help make parenting easier, more effective and more fun when you join.

Mentioned on the Show:

• Join the free Teens are the Worst Facebook Group to continue this conversation
• Parenting teens doesn’t have to be so hard! Join the ENJOY Coaching Community now to get everything you need to make parenting teens easier...including the replay of the Understanding the Teenage Brain workshop.
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