Teen brain strain
By the time your child is a teen you’ve already done the work to create well-rounded humans. But now it’s time to roll with the emotional punches while you wait for the logical adult to emerge, writes Nathan Wallis.
Ithink I’ve finally worked out the top tips for getting the best from your teen, now my youngest is 22 and it’s too late to actually apply it in practice. Before it’s too late for you too, I’m going to give you the cheat sheet here for the most common errors and pitfalls we parents make (with the best possible intentions, of course), and how to avoid them, with a little bit of what to do instead. I learnt the hard way. Hopefully this makes it easy for you.
Tip 1:
Stop trying to fix your teen’s problems. Stop offering suggestions, strategies and solutions. I know that sounds bizarre, but in your relentless pursuit of making your child as happy as they can be (because I know this is what drives you to want to help), 99 per cent of the time your teen will respond with the statement “you don’t listen to me”. This happens all the time. And they’re kind of right. Well, from their world view anyway.
The trick is to remember that 90 per cent of a teenager’s world view or experience is based in the emotional or “feeling” brain, it’s just the reality of how they are wired in adolescence, if you like. So, if you go straight to offering solutions and fixing the problem (the logical brain) without first speaking aloud to the emotion your teen is feeling, you just ignored 90 per cent of their world view, so of course they don’t feel heard or listened to.
I know you did recognise and register their emotions at the time, but we parents typically do this in a microsecond, then leap straight to problem-solving, so it just comes across as nagging. Unless we are conscious of this, it will disengage the teen from talking and sharing because they don’t feel “listened to”.
Essentially if you want them to listen to your logical frontal cortex, then you’re going to have to listen to their illogical and emotional limbic system first.
Our grandparents were right, children do as you do, not as you say. So if you want your teen to be a good listener, then you have to model that by being one yourself. This is deceptively simple to do and put into practice in reality.
It essentially just means recognising aloud the emotion that is most present in what they said. “It sounds like that made you really angry”, before you offer any problemsolving or logical solutions. Easy.
Teenagers are, by and large, not logical creatures most of the time, but emotional. We’ve known that for thousands of years, really. We didn’t need brain scans and neuroscientific research to work that out. Just living with one teenager makes that abundantly clear.
So any strategy to improve compliance or receptiveness from your teen will need to include the emotional brain. In fact, I would do a two-to-one ratio: for every one minute you want them to listen to your logical brain, you need to have done two minutes reflecting back their emotion, without offering corrections or solutions.
The real key to compliant or receptive teens is quality communication – a two-way street. By practising that one principle in your communication with your teen, you are achieving quality communication.
Remember when you were a teen and, like most other teens, you shut down talking to your parents, but then everyone went to Sally’s mum’s place and spilled their guts to Sally’s mum, and told her everything? What was Sally’s mum doing that the other parents weren’t? Basically, the above: talking to emotion twice as much, and certainly before any problem-solving. Try it, it’s easy and life changing.
Tip 2: Don’t try to fix adolescence. Relax. How teens act at 15 is not a reflection of how they will act as an adult, or of their work ethic or total character value. In fact, being an adult is all about having your logical- and emotion-controlling brain wired up, so it’s really unfair to look at the 15-year-old when its logical brain is largely shut for renovations, and think that’s who they’re going to be as an adult.
Who they were at 10 or 11 is generally a more accurate picture of who they will be as an adult, because the logical brain (while not fully grown, obviously), has typically not yet shut for renovations.
You have the first 1000 days of their life to build their brain, then you have until about 11 to influence their character and values, and after that you just have to live with them. So don’t make it hard on yourself by worrying about largely unnecessary concerns such as your teen sleeping longer than usual, being moody, disorganised, untidy, and a bit self-obsessed.
I’m not saying give up on those things entirely, but just understand it is who your teenager is 10 per cent of the time. When they are at their best and operating the logical brain, that is really who they will be as an adult, and that’s the part of the brain you need to be giving attention to for it to grow.
Focus on that, rather than problems that nature will fix, such as sleeping too long or lack of communication skills. Don’t think of the teen years as being something to conquer, but rather a wave that you need to surf until the sea calms and you again see the body of water you know and love.
You have the first thousand days of their life to build their brain, then you have until about 11 to influence their character and values, and after that you just have to live with them.