The Struggle of Parenting Teenagers: Part One

The struggle of parenting teenagers isn’t something new. It’s the age when children start to practice being adults. Their minds develop in ways that enable them to start seeing the world in a different and critical light. Parents and other adults can experience teenagers as engaging, productive, and fun, or, on the other hand, as disrespectful, stubborn, and troubled.

The Stress of Parenting Teenagers

Everyone has their good and bad days, but what happens when the worry starts to creep in for parents? That worry says, “The bad days outnumber the good.” The struggle intensifies, and a growing fear of what is to come takes over.

Do any of these sound familiar?

• “Is this normal behavior?”
• “Does this mean they are _____?!”
• “How do I get the lying to stop?”
• “I just don’t know how to talk with my teenager.”
• “All they do is argue with me.”
• “My teenager just needs more self-confidence.”

If so, you are not alone. Teenagers can experience depression, body shame, low self-confidence, new levels of stress, and access to substances. These issues, along with developing brains, can lead to communication struggles and difficulties regulating emotions.

This article is part one of two articles that develop an understanding of the struggles parents face when deciding how to parent through teenage years. This article will attempt to expand your perspective on common issues teenagers face and common responses parents have to those issues. Part two will dive into alternative responses, where to look for help, and when to seek a therapist.

Common Issues Face by Teenagers and Their Families

Self Esteem

Teenagers develop a new level of ability to see others, compare with others, and are trying to work out what is good/right and bad/wrong for themselves with new reasoning capabilities. This can lead a teenager to lose or decline in self-esteem, whether internally done (comparing themselves with others they see) or externally influenced (when others make negative comparisons of them).

Communication Breakdowns

Communication breaks down in a family when teenagers struggle to express themselves. It also temporarily becomes more difficult for teenagers to process and relay information as their brains are distracted by new developments. Receiving correction is also not processed in the same way, as the teenager can try out reasoning skills and work through their newfound independence and desires.

Lying

Because teenagers are prone to compare themselves to others, are working on their own sense of right and wrong, and thinking in new ways, they can be prone to lying or communication that leaves out details. Lying or leaving out information can quickly become a habit that frustrates the entire family and creates a lack of proper communication across circle groups (i.e., family, friends, school, sports, etc.).

Fighting

Teenagers have developing reasoning skills. While practicing the art of reason, it has the potential to become a fight. These fights can range from simple rebuttals to full-blown screaming as teenagers get wrapped up in their own understanding, and parents are at a loss for how to respond and maintain authority.

Isolation

Teenagers are finding their way, developing rapidly, and often taking on increased responsibility, so they need more downtime, and they crave social connection. These needs and cravings create a propensity to isolate from family and spend less time in or around the home.

Self-Harm

Self-harming behavior is alarming to families, and at times, shameful as well. Any level of self-harming behavior can be difficult for families to manage and address. Any such behavior also has the potential to create new questions for the family and decrease trust in the teenager.

• Physical Physical self-harming behaviors include actions such as abstaining from eating, purging after eating, over-eating, cutting, burning, slapping/punching/hitting. Teenagers may engage in these behaviors for several reasons, such as low self-esteem or to escape various types of stress.
• Sexual Teenagers may engage in reckless, rough, or other inappropriate sexual behavior (i.e., sharing themselves via pornographic avenues). Again, teenagers who engage in these self-harming behaviors do so for a number of reasons.
• Substances Substances can be drugs or alcohol of any amount. Teenagers may reason that there is no harm being done when using these substances. However, many studies have shown harm from the use of any controlled substance, tobacco or otherwise, on the developing and developed brains of individuals. Just because there is no perceived harm does not mean it is not there.

How much substance use is recognized as a problem can range from any use to abundant use. People often claim that there is no problem with using substances unless there is a frequent negative impact on the person’s life. No matter when or if the substance becomes a problem to the teenager or their parents, the motivation for using the substance is something important to be addressed.

Any of these issues, or any additional not-so-common issues that you and your teenager face, can present a level of difficulty that surpasses what parents and teens see as their capacity to deal with on their own. In other words, it’s normal to face new challenges that you and your teenager will need help with.

The parent response can vary from incident to incident and parent to parent. Below are a few common responses from parents.

Common Responses When Parenting Teenagers

This is not an exhaustive list by any means. This list includes reactions that parents have when facing any issue with their teenager’s behavior post-reprimanding, such as yelling and/or silence.

Take away privileges Whether it be a response to try and restrict access to the troubled behavior or an attempt to simply decrease freedom, taking away privileges is typically a common first approach. While this can seem like it works, it often doesn’t fix the behavior and yields only temporary results-if any.

Some teenagers are extremely reactive toward their privileges (such as electronics) being taken away, and others couldn’t care less. Either reaction can lead parents to wonder how to encourage their teenager to behave better.

Send them to church This is not every parent’s approach, but it becomes a part of many Christian homes where parents make it a rule to attend church. Parents who have teenagers who are engaging in difficult behavior will demand that their children continue joining them at church, or send them to church by themselves.

The difficulty of this approach comes when parents believe that the church will “fix” the teenager. Many times, it does not fix the behavior and can drive a wedge between the teenager and the church.

Send them to an expert Similar to sending the teenager to church, outsourcing the problem to an expert is thought by parents to be the “fix.” Sending your teenager to an expert will only have the opportunity to yield positive results if the teenager is open to admitting they have a problem, desires to work with the expert, and can access the tools and implement them.

Let them be This may sound like an odd one to add to a list of common responses of parents of teenagers caught in problematic behavior, but it is an important one to highlight. Letting the teenager “be” can come as a first response or after a different response wears off. For example, some parents may restrict freedoms for a week after an incident, and then simply allow the freedoms to be restored (sometimes prematurely) without any other intervention.

As a first response, parents can reason that they don’t have much insight to help the problem, the teenager will eventually self-correct, or that the problematic behavior isn’t “that bad.”

Help Parenting Teenagers

Any of these reactions are appropriate and/or fitting at times. The above reactions may be all a parent needs to see their teenager turn around in their behavior and straighten their ways.

What happens when the struggle of parenting teenagers seems like it’s too much, when the parent’s reaction doesn’t seem to evoke any level of change from the teenager?

It is common for parents to have at least one encounter of feeling lost and not knowing what to do with their teenager’s behavior. In part two of “The Struggle of Parenting Teenagers,” we will explore alternative responses to the ones found above, where to find help, and how to tell if your teenager needs a therapist.

Want to talk with someone today? Contact our team at cachristiancounseling.com or call us at 619-877-2560.