Ep 90: What's Your Teen Thinking?

Asif Patel

24 min

Parents' Classroom

Description

<a href="https://talkingtoteens.com/whats-your-teen-thinking/">Click for full show notes, exercises, and parenting scripts from this episode </a> Sometimes, talking to your teen feels like arguing with a brick wall. You want to help them, but they’re not listening, they’re angry with you, and worse: they just shrugged and said, “whatever.” And it’s hard not to feel disrespected in these tough situations. As the adult, you want to regain control and set them straight, but if every teen listened when their parents demanded respect, well: we certainly wouldn’t be here today! These inevitable conflicts often arise from two equally strong forces: a teen’s desire to create their own identity, and their desperation for approval-- yours and their peers’. Whether it be obsessively fixating on social media, tagging along on a risky event due to FOMO (fear of missing out) or engaging with mature content, teens are trying to foster independence and belonging, even when it leaves us scratching our heads. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what their motives are, and it’d sure be a whole lot easier if we knew just what they were thinking. But because we’ll probably never truly know, and spying doesn’t exactly foster a healthy parent/teen relationships, parents must remember that their job is not to be their teen’s life coach: it’s to empower them to healthily navigate their independence. And that means controlling our impulses, hosting neutral spaces for communication, and above all, trusting our teens: something journalist, author, and this week’s guest, Tanith Carey, champions in her book <a href="https://amzn.to/2MTnXIj">What’s My Teenager Thinking?: Practical Child Psychology for Modern Parents</a>. Between bullying, vaping, lying, boredom, and more, Tanith covers strategies for managing and responding to these tough situations. When I asked her about a parent’s role in alleged bullying, Tanith believes that parents are

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