Family Matters

It was Monday morning and I had just taken my 7-year-old daughter to school. On the way back, I passed my son’s high school. As usual, the high school intersection was full of parents dropping their kids off. I turned left after a motorcycle. A parked car started making a U-turn and hit the motorcycle! The rider flew in the air over 30 meters and his motorcycle dragged on the ground after him. It looked like a scene from a stunt movie but this time it was real - no stunts, no practice - a young man was on the ground, next to the traffic light, surrounded by dozens of high school student who had crossed the street to go to school.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about the things that cause parents to have a bad relationship with your teens. This post contains more of those things. If you have teen kids and want to have good relationships with them, read what they think and get some ideas to do things differently.

Remember, you do not want your teens to think of you as “just another parent” and that “all parents are just the same”. Therefore, you need to be different.

Teenagers have been asked about the attitudes of their parents that are the source of their bad relationships. It was amazing that they all expressed the same frustrations, same difficulties, same attitudes they hate. To them, all parents were the same. Here is a list of things parents do or say that teens find frustrating.

Last week, I wrote about the things that parents say that turn off communication between them and their teens. Today, I would like to talk about the buttons teens push to set their parents off and “make” them lose their minds.

From their early years, kids have an inherent sense of their parents’ weaknesses. They learn it by themselves - they do not need to go to school to study what works and what does not work. They are so sophisticated, they can tell you what works on Daddy and what works on Mommy, even if they are very different.

For me, 16 was the sweetest thing there was. Life was divided into before and after - before my awakening and after it. Later on in life, there were many times when I wished I could send my 15-year-old self some wisdom to make her life easier.

Somewhere between parents and teens, the messages of love and caring get lost. Bringing fear and anxiety from their own experiences, parents sometimes forget what works and what doesn’t. It is amazing to find that the sentences we say to our teens are the same sentences we hated when our parents said to us.

This week, I had a talk with my 19-year-old daughter about leaving home. Because some of her friends had left home and then had to come back due to financial difficulties, we talked about the emotional aspect of “going back home”. When we talked, she told me about the feelings of shame, failure, disappointment and many other negative feelings that would be associated with having to go back home. It was after this talk that I realized there is one more thing I want my kids to know.

When I was training to be a life coach, our instructor said to us that our level of disappointment is related to the gap between two things - our expectations and the facts. Although this may sound simple in principle and you may be saying to yourself, “Well, of course”, stop and think about real-life situations where you find yourself disappointed and you will soon see the problem.

One day, I got a phone call from a mother, who was interested in our kids coaching. I talked to her for a while to get a good understanding of her situation. During this conversation, we talked about things that were application to many parent-child situations, which I have since repeated with many parents, so here it is for everyone’s benefit.