Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘trust’

This series is meant to help parents of teens and parents of kids who are turning into teens understand what teenagers think and what they go through as part of this tough period of their life. Each “twisted” thought is followed by something parents can do to help their teenagers and everyone else involved.

As in previous chapters, here are 5 things teens think and feel that scare them and make them act weird, and what you can do about them. I hope it will help you find alternative ways to address the issues and prevent them from keeping those thoughts any longer.

My parents are cruel and weak

“I think my parents are cruel. They hate me. They scream, shout and always tell me I’m wrong. They brought me into the world to torture me. They are weak. How can I trust them when I need help if they are so weak?”

What parents can do

When children are upset, they may think that you are behaving the way you do with the ultimate purpose of hurting them. Many parents mistake discipline for power when in fact, abusing your power and yelling, shouting or telling kids they are wrong are signs of weakness and may cause your children, especially teenagers, not to trust you to support them when they need help. This is because using pressure and force is all about you, not them.

Being a teenager is not easy. Being a parent of teenagers is not easy either, but there are ways for parents to help make life easier for both. Here is a list of 5 more thoughts that teens have, which your behavior and attitude as a parent can change to make the teen years much nicer.

I must be adopted

“Maybe I was adopted. That explains the way they treat me. I’ve heard them saying I looked like Mom, but I look at my photos as a baby and I don’t look like either one of my parents or even like myself today. They could have adopted me when I was just a baby. That makes sense. I think this is why they love my brother more than they love me.”

What parents can do

Every child has this horrible thought at some stage. It is very natural to question your parents’ behavior as that of adoptive parents. There is no real way to prevent this thought from getting into kids’ mind, but there are good ways to make sure it will go away quickly, before it creates any damage.

Talk to your kids about their birth and talk about it a lot. Kids ask question about their pregnancy and birth to check if all the stories match. If Mom tells one story and Dad tells another one about the same birth, that will be odd, but if they tell the stories over and over and everything matches, they must be true!

In the past, people thought that teens’ behavior during the teenage years was directly connected to physical changes they start to experience at the age of 12, which makes them feel strange with their body changes and confuses them. Today, the approach is that adolescence is a more gradual process that starts with the first time children want to try doing things on their own, sometime as early as the age of 3.

If teenagers seem confused to you, it is mainly because they have reached a point in their life when they need to define who they are, what they think, what they like or hate, what their beliefs are and what they wants to be later on in life. These thoughts are tough. I know many adults who have not reached that self-definition yet, so this is not easy for a 12-year-old to do, although they are expected to have some clue about it.

Around the age of 10, beliefs that were part of children’s identity are shattered and they need to put the pieces together to survive emotionally. Kids with high emotional intelligence can do that, but most cannot, so they have to ask for help from those who unintentionally create the problem – their parents or their teachers.

This series will give you a sneak peek into teens’ confused brain and help you understand why it is so hard do be a teenager. I still remember my adolescence, I am raising my second teen, the third one is reaching puberty soon and I have worked with lots of teenagers in the last 25 years, so this list is quite reliable.

Kids go through many periods as they grow up, including the “What?” period, the “Why?” period and the “No!” period. Each one of them serves a purpose and, if the parents go through it well, the children develops another healthy part of their character and understand the world a bit better. But the “Me too” period seems to last all the way through childhood, adolescence and sometimes never ends…

From the parents’ perspective, “Me too” can be very annoying, because kids sometimes ask for really inappropriate things, but for children learn about the world by observing and mimicking others, so there is nothing more natural and healthy than wanting what the others have or trying to do what the others are doing.

In our family, 10-year-old Noff is much younger than Tsoof (16) and Eden (23), so when she wants something they have, they used to get upset, until they got used to it.

When she was little, we often tried to respect her choice of food, so we asked her what she wanted to eat, gave her some options and helped her prepare the food she liked. But often, when she sat at the table, she saw that Eden had something else to eat and seemed to be enjoying it very much. Noff would promptly forget she ever wanted anything else and ask Eden to share.

“Eden, can I have some mango too”, she would say.

“But you said you wanted cereal”, Eden would complain, “I brought enough mango for me, because you wanted something else”.

“Yes, but now I want mango too”, Noff explained, as if that was the most obvious an innocent thing in the world. And for her, it was.

Personal integrity and honesty are very important to me. One of the strongest values my dad managed to pass on to me is the truth. Numerous times during my childhood, I saw him sacrifice acceptance and even money in order to follow what he believed to be true and real. He also repeated that lesson to me often.

While growing up, however, I found out this was not the case with everyone. There were many situations in which I knew the truth and witnessed people denying it or acting as if the opposite was the case.

When I talked to my mom about it, she told me, “Sometimes, people don’t exactly lie, but they tell a ‘white lie’ to avoid complications or embarrassment”. The world, it turned out, was not a courtroom drama, where it was “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.

In fact, it seems that lies have been institutionalized and you cannot get very far without them anymore.

Some time ago, I attended what I thought would be a series of presentations on building great websites, but turned out to be a series of presentations on various topics, including personal philosophy, business, training and other things. One particular presentation was called “Do not lie” and it made me revisit the issue of living honestly from an adult and even a parent perspective.

Our world is a weird and wonderful place, but sometimes, we act in weird ways that make it not so wonderful anymore. In many situations, there is a conflict between what is good for us personally and what is good for everybody. In others, the conflict is between what is good for us right now and what will be good in the future. Without considering the implications of our actions, they sometimes make the world just a little bit less pleasant.

Of course, when we do many of these things and lots of other people do them too, the decline accelerates. I often think of my kids and the kind of place I would like them to have when they grow up and it makes me worry.

When we lived in Texas, there was a period of frost every year. That was bad for the lawn, roads were slippery during morning rush hours and there were always accidents because of the frost.

Yet, a friend of mine found a way to have fun with his kids during that time. Before going to bed on Friday night, he would water his driveway, which was short, straight and steep. When his boys woke up on Saturday morning, the driveway would be ready for some extreme sliding!

This went on for a while and nearly became a family tradition, except one day, my friend’s mother-in-law came to visit on Saturday morning and slipped on the ice. She was thoroughly upset with my friend’s carelessness and promptly sued him (and her daughter, who was married to him) for her medical expenses.

The following year, my friend’s insurance raised his premium and he stopped wetting the driveway.

People are social creatures. They live in groups, they need the groups and they rely on the groups to survive. This creates some dependency that no one likes. Yes, some people need friends more than others do, but living on our own, not seeing or being in contact with the outside world, would bring an end to human kind.

Friends and friendships are very important to all people, even to those who find it hard to admit, and what social skills we do not have naturally, we can develop.

In the past year, I have had many opportunities to talk and write about my successes. When I examined each of them, I realized that being a very social creature, loving people, understanding the way they function and using my good social skills were real assets to me.

Social skills – Nature or Nurture?
I have not always been a very friendly person. Not that I did not like company, but until the age of 16, I did not really understand the social rules I needed to live by. I had no friends, I got into frequent conflicts with the ones I did hang around with and I was lonely and miserable. My parents had no friends either, so I could not learn from them the right things to say and do around other people.

Then, I stopped reacting without thinking about the impact it has on my relationships and I learned that friendly people are happy people and that social skills can be learned.

There are many parents out there who spend much of their time with their children trying to get them to do certain things, like homework or chores, or to teach them how to do things “right”, like spelling words correct or spreading peanut butter without making a big mess. If you ever see these parents in action, there is one thing that jumps at you – they are stressed and almost everything their kids do makes them jump.

And that is no way to live. It is not good for the parents and it is not good for the kids.

What happens in these situations is that the parents try to control their children. In fact, they try to control the fine details of what their children do, say and sometimes even feel. They tell themselves and anyone else who will listen how important it is to get all the answers on every assignment correctly. That is how they justify the hours of grilling their kids over homework. They explain the long-term impact of passing a basketball using the scientifically proven motion on their kids’ sporting future. That is how they justify the yelling from the sidelines and the intensive drilling at home.

But how important are these things really?

Who are they really important to?

And what are the effects of this controlling behavior on the children, the parents and their relationships for the rest of their lives?

If you have a school-aged child, even in Prep (or whatever you call the year before First Grade), you probably already know all about Literacy and Numeracy. Education systems seem to be so focused on teaching kids to read, write and work with numbers they cut Music classes, Art teaching positions and other “non-essential” subjects and put enormous pressure on children with standardized literacy and numeracy tests.

In Australia, there is now something called NAPLAN – National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy, officially described like this: “Every year, all students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are assessed on the same days using national tests in Reading, Writing, Language Conventions (Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation) and Numeracy”.

This means that absolutely NOTHING else matters to most of the teachers and parents of students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. After having quite a bit of fun in Prep and Years 1 and 2, the poor kids in Year 3 are taught things by the book, tested every week, deprived of play time, music, art, sport and extracurricular activities and subjected to constant pressure to perform. State Education ministers go nuts from it, so Department of Education executives go nuts from it, so principals go nuts from it, so teachers go nuts from it, so students go nuts from it.

The same thing happens all over again 2, 4 and 6 years later.

And that is really bad.

Because learning should be fun and because all that stress actually blocks learning.

As with most things in parenting, prevention is a better approach than putting out fires. Prevention is done when you are calm, cool and collecting, while putting out fires is always when things are heated and you and your kid are both emotional and confused. Teaching your kids techniques that will help them make good decisions quickly will make them more independent and ensure they will be able to fulfill their own needs. In return, this will reduce your parenting burden and make you more confident they can manage once they leave home.

Here are some more things you can do on a regular basis when you are relaxed that will help you send a message of respect to your kids and strengthen their “choice muscle”.

Some kids are afraid that because they cannot see a way out, they are stuck. We all get stuck when we do see no option that will get us out of a painful situation or get us to a desired situation.

That is OK, because thinking of options is a skill that needs to be taught. Ask your child, “What’s the worst that can happen?” or “What can go wrong?” or “Tell me the craziest solution you can think of”. It is important to think of options and while I suggest coming up with crazy things, I would like to emphasize you should aim for solutions, not problems. If you focus on endless possible problems, you are going to find them. Looking for many problems is a dangerous zone that may create more fear than help.