Tips for Parenting a teenager with respectful parenting

Work on our emotional wounds

Adolescence is a time of transition for both parents and teenagers. Indeed, a teenager is a young person who is going to leave… and who is preparing for it!

The adolescence of our children can be an opportunity to work on our adolescence. It is important to be aware of the wounds we have suffered and to give them meaning to have more peaceful family relationships.

Parents of teenagers are sent back to their adolescence and revisit, consciously or not, their adolescence. How the parents treated themselves by their parents in adolescence will color their relationship with their teenagers today. However, if we did not receive everything we needed in adolescence, today we can give it to ourselves as adults.

Several ways to heal our history:

We write to ourselves a letter to the teenager that we were to tame our own emotions and reconnect with the emotions and thoughts of teenagers;

Talking with our parents (the teenager's grandparents) about our repressed emotions.

If we haven't healed the wounds of our past, we cannot have a sufficient quality of presence towards our children and teenagers because we risk losing out in the face of reactions that we consider inappropriate.

Dealing with feelings of worthlessness and helplessness

Being confronted with teenagers who are good with their friends, and who seem to find happiness apart from their parents can be painful for parents who then feel useless, and helpless.

A kind of control slips away from these parents and this loss of control generates anxiety in them. This worry can turn into stress and parents will use different strategies to deal with it:

increase control over teens;

make them bear the anxieties and fears that belong to their parents.

The adolescence of our children marks the time to revisit and reorient our own life, to find meaning in it outside of parenthood, and to gain emotional and relational intelligence.

Finally, there is a parallel search for meaning and identity: the adolescent and the parent each ask themselves who they are.

Acquire tools for channeling anger and stress

A stressed parent is more likely to have disproportionate and potentially violent reactions (screams, punishments, physical gestures, etc.). Therefore, advises you to equip yourself with an emotional management tool:

become aware of the sensations and emotions experienced (“I am under stress and if I say something, it will blow up” -> need a break to “recover” your brain)
demonstrate self-empathy by recognizing needs and saying “yes” to yourself (“yes, that’s right, I need…and I would like…”)
know techniques to channel anger and stress (drink a glass of water, walk, look at greenery, blow, etc.)
fill one's emotional reservoir through pleasant activities, contact with loved ones...
find support and discussion groups

Continue to be the aircraft carrier the child-turned-teen needs

Use the term “aircraft carrier” to designate the attitudes that support the emotional development of children and adolescents: giving affection, filling the tank, providing a rear base, and being there for them and with them.

The time spent by his parents with the teenager makes him feel that he is interesting and important, that he is worthy of being accepted and loved. This can happen by:

be available,
to listen,
give signs of attention and expressions of love,
give tenderness and touch (or at least a smile, a loving attitude if the teenager does not want to be touched),
doing things side by side while being “dazzled” by the beauty of teenage life,
spending time together (playing board games, doing sports or shopping, etc.).

Teens may reject parents who pretend, control or want contact in front of friends. But they can let themselves go to receive and give tenderness in a calm moment, conducive to exchanges.

However, we need to heal inside to be able to be the adults that adolescents need. It is indeed difficult to connect to the love that one has for one's child/adolescent when one is insecure inside.

Use the power of listening (a source of non-abusive power)

Teens need to be listened to, not solutions. Learning to welcome the good and the bad with the same attention, and the same emotional stability is a useful resource for parents of teenagers. This emotional stability makes it possible to be in the relationship and the recognition rather than in the over-reaction, in the criticism, or the punishment.

You must listen to teenagers think and to guide them in their reflection (in particular by using the reformulation of ideas), to let teenagers change their minds, go back, explore new options, and formulate hypotheses.

Teenagers only lock themselves in what they claim if the adults around them try to change their minds at all costs, show themselves horrified, or criticize their tastes and their choices. Adolescence is a period of exploration and the more teenagers can explore quietly, the less they will need to stick to their positions (clothing tastes naturally change from one fashion to another, as do musical tastes ).

When we no longer seek to control teenagers while remaining available and animated by the power of love, then the teenager will be able to begin to open up and trust.

The less threatening one is, the more one can become a resource for the adolescent.

The importance of social food

Teenagers need adults around them, and grandparents can be important resources.

The Rich Life