Learn the two simple steps to help you respond calmly and effectively when faced with disrespectful behaviour by your teenager.
One of the biggest problems when teenagers behave badly is that the kids themselves have no real perception of the damage they are doing to their relationship with their parents and possibly with the rest of the family. To have someone in your home respond unpredictably and with rudeness, contempt and power-seeking behaviours over some period of time can feel devastating.
Mothers, especially, often describe that they feel “destroyed” by the aggression and contempt from their offspring. They feel their affection and motivation ebbing away. It seems a far cry from those early years when your small children showed you so much unconditional love.
But remember these key things:
- In our culture, these behaviours are in the normal range for teenagers (unfortunately).
- If you operate the techniques described to help your child along their development track, manage themselves independently, stay in step with the real world, and find agency and confidence, you’ll have laid good groundwork.
- Cool parental response techniques can make a real difference.
These aim to:
- Minimise (and even reverse) the damage
- Help the teen to travel on a much better track
- Help you to feel that you have your parental authority back once more
- Feel relaxed in your own home
- Help you feel like yourself again
- Help you feel “I’ve got this”
How to begin?
Remember that these types of behaviours are happening in hundreds of houses in your suburb! They are not an emergency and you have got this. Therefore do not feel hurt.
Put it this way: You wouldn’t feel emotionally hurt if your 18-month-old came up and took a swipe at you or if your three-year-old said, “I wanted the ice-cream! I hate you, Mummy/Daddy!”
Do not take these behaviours to heart when they occur. It is essential that you remain calm and in emotional “neutral” when you respond to these behaviours, which are the less-nice parts of a developmental phase.
Why? Because that is what will begin to save the day.
Tackling rudeness
You may need to use the support of your partner or some strong self-talk to deal with the hurt feelings that arise from episodes of “teen behaviour”. But you need to do it. Otherwise, you’ll be responding from a highly emotional place—and a rather disabled one.
Step 1: Rules
The first thing to do is to explain the rules for your house to your child at a “neutral” time, i.e., when there is no arguing going on.
It might go like this: “Jamie, I want to be clearer about what the rules are at home. That is: In our house we don’t yell at each other; we don’t use insults, we don’t disrespect or use put- downs. Just so you know, there will be consequences if that does happen.”
Don’t expect much of a reaction. But when your teen does break a rule, you can go to step 2.
Step 2: Responding
Here are three important methods for responding to your youths’ bad behaviours: They are the first of our Behaviour Support Principles.
- You don’t have to respond in the moment. You can wait for hours and sometimes days.
- You don’t have to provide a consistent (i.e., predictable) response.
- You must be fair at all times.
Here’s a funny thing. Teens who are rude, offensive, refuse tasks, etc. are built like boomerangs. Within hours, they are almost bound to come and ask/demand something from you. Those times can be a great time to respond.
This is where your power to discipline really lies. You should never be vindictive, flippant or “smart”, but what you can do is reflect what would happen in any other real relationship. That is, with respectfulness. Get your teenager to live in the real world.
Sometimes parents may:
- Follow/yell/try to shout it out through a locked door—but then most likely . . .
- Give in to the later demand—albeit with some sulking or a giant lecture.
A better response style gives you time to recover from your feelings and lets you wait until the correct time presents itself. Then you briefly and calmly explain. But you do not enter an argument and you do not back down. Just state your decision and then decline to be drawn further. The teenager needs to see that the impact is real—and that feelings are not bargained away.
Let’s be clear: This is not how equal adults would behave towards each other. But you are a parent and you are doing relationship education—and you are combining this with teaching consequences to actions in your home.
What if they don’t come back and ask for something? No problem. Just wait till the next day and calmly explain about the behaviours. Then choose what you feel is a fair withdrawal of one of your services. (For example: “You were really rude to me earlier/yesterday. Not just that, pretty disrespectful, too. That is hurtful, you know? So, no. I won’t be taking you. Sorry. Another time.”)
Appropriate consequences
If you feel you are stumped about suitable consequences, here is another useful thing to remember: While teenagers are great at power behaviours and throwing around insults, they are maybe not such independent people after all. They need you for more than they care to realise.
Have a think about it. You probably provide:
- A comfortable room
- Nice dinners (not just “food”)
- Transport to and from school
- Transport/equipment/fees for their sports activities
- Money for parties/outings
- TV
- Money for gifts for their friends
- Occasional takeaways
- Trips to the shops and movies
- More devices than you can poke a stick at
- Extra clothes
- Help with their leisure activities
- A lot of driving around
- Welcoming their friends to your home
- Help with their homework and projects
- Advocacy to their teachers
- General help, advice and assistance
- Allowing trips and sleepovers
There’s a lot more room in all of those for appropriate consequences, than just the same old “grounding” and “taking your screens away”.
If parents do resort to repeatedly using grounding and the removal of devices, teens usually respond with a combination of these lovely things:
- Sullenness
- Boredom
- Indifference
- Having something to complain to their friends about, which reinforces an attitude of negativity towards you
- A feeling that they shouldn’t have to co-operate with you because you are so mean and unfair
- A secret feeling that their parents are “dumb” for being so un-imaginative
Replace those with something that is fair but more imaginative and real, and the platform for those negativities instantly vanishes.
Read next: Mood swings and puberty—and 4 simple ways to cope
Extracted from The Well-Behaved Teenager and Other Myths by Dr Jari Evertsz.
