Are you struggling to get your teen to follow your direction? Is your child flat-out ignoring you? This can be really frustrating, especially when you take into consideration all you’ve invested in their upbringing and wellbeing. Teenagers usually do whatever they feel like doing, not necessarily what you want or ask them to do.
Be Fair to Your Teen
The truth is, teenagers are much more responsive to parents or teachers that they feel are fair. Teenagers will not respond kindly to adults or people of authority that they do not feel are fair. One of the best ways to make your teen to act more responsive is to ensure that you are perceived by them as just and fair. By outlining clear expectations and implementing easily understood rules, your teen will slowly start to see you as a more fair person who deserves to be respected.
Motivate Your Teen With Effective Consequences
Consequences are one of the best ways to motivate anyone; do you think there would be law and order in any society if there weren’t some consequences for breaking the law? Probably not. Effective consequences are consequences that hold enough weight to entice compliance. In the case of your teen you are going to need to isolate some things that they hold dearly or consider crucial to their lives, in order to really motivate them.
Some examples of things that you can take away from your teen in order to encourage compliance:
These are all things that have real meaning for teens, and if you take them away as punishment your teen will be highly motivated to correct their behavior or to simply not make mistakes in the first place. These are effective consequences because they give you the results you want by really motivating your teen.
Open the Lines of Communication
At some point your darling child morphed into a less lovely version of themselves, commonly referred to as a teenager. Chances are this felt like it almost happened overnight and you’re probably still mourning the loss of your sweet child. Things can get a bit awkward as they push boundaries for independence all while trying to figure themselves out. Most teens isolate themselves a little from family while focusing their energy into their social groups. This is natural, but it can really impair communication between parent and child as there is not as much bonding going on anymore.
As a parent you’ll need to find a good balance between giving your child enough space and freedom to grow, but by being present enough to maintain a good relationship. It’s really important that your child still talks to you about their problems and concerns, even if it seems like they are old enough to deal with them on their own. A child who feels comfortable communicating with their parent is much more likely to be responsive to parental direction, as they will value their parents opinion and guidance.
Parenting teens is difficult, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Have you found anything that has dramatically improved how responsive your child is to parental direction? If so, please share in the comments below – we’d love to hear your secrets!
Jade Robinson has more than 18 years of experience working with Teens and Adolescents. Using his experience, he has developed a system (called Home Contract) that allows parents to easily set up new boundaries and rules with their teens. It is an ideal and effective way to improve a particular habit by implementing a home based behavior contract. More details at HomeContract.Org