Parenting Adolescents and Teens with Understanding and Support

"My kid thinks he knows everything!"

"My parents don't understand me."

"Why won't my teen listen to me?"

The adolescent and teen years often come with lots of frustration for both kids and parents. Communications can become strained, attitudes can become negative, and relationships can become damaged.

My kids are 18yo and 15yo right now. I'm by no means an expert on this, but I've learned much over the last few years and want to share it with you. Hopefully, this will help to ease your own journey through these important years.

Topics in this article:

• What's Happening in the Brain: Pruning and Individuation

• Risk-Taking and Novelty

• Intense Emotions

• Importance of Friends

• Maintaining Strong Relationships with Your Teens

What's Happening in the Brain: Pruning and Individuation

Understanding what is happening in the brain during adolescence can go a long way towards being able to co-exist peacefully with your adolescent. The are tremendous changes happening in the adolescent brain, beginning around age ~10-13 years old.

The processes of pruning and individuation can make it where your child's behavior is much different than it was at younger ages. Your adolescent cannot control or put a stop to these processes, as they are a natural part of developing into an adult.

Learning about these changes and sharing them with your teen and the rest of the family can be very helpful and supportive. Of course, there can still be plenty of misunderstandings and emotional times, but knowing more about brain development has helped us approach this more from a point of strength.

Brain Pruning in Adolescence

The adolescent brain is pruning out old connections that are no longer needed, re-wiring things, and making new connections. This may sound technical, but it is really important to understanding why adolescents behave the way they do.

You can think of it like this: the brain is a construction zone and there is a big detour around the rational parts of the brain where the child would actually consider what is being said or done before doing it. At times, the child literally cannot access certain parts of the brain, so the child cannot properly think about what he/she is going to say or do before doing it.

This is why adolescents and teens can seem so impulsive and contradictory. They will tend to talk back more, they will talk and act before they think, and they may even seem mean or unpredictable. The rational part of their brain isn't well connected, so they are much more reactive.

This video does a good job of explaining the purpose of the pruning that is happening in the adolescent brain.

Individuation of Self

Adolescents are also going through the process of individuation, meaning they are learning who they are as individuals in the context of family and society. Instead of being a child who is mostly dependent on parents, the teen is learning how to become independent.

During individuation, as the teen seeks to better understand who he/she is, it can feel tremendously difficult to admit any wrong-doing or to admit not knowing something. To do so would feel like admitting that the teen is stupid, that his/her core self is a bad person. So, even though it can be frustrating 😜, it is actually natural for your teen to act like he/she knows everything and never does anything wrong.

Risk-Taking and Novelty

Teens naturally want to try new things and they are highly motivated to seek out new experiences. According to Dr Daniel Siegel, who is an expert on the teenage brain,

"There’s a neurotransmitter called dopamine that connects the brainstem, the limbic area, and the cortex—and one of its jobs is to make us feel good when we get a reward.

"Compared to a kid or an adult, the baseline levels of dopamine in an adolescent are lower. But the release amounts are higher—and novelty is one of the major things that can trigger dopamine release. This means new things feel really, really good to a teenager. This is brilliant. Nature has created a system that drives us to seek change and novelty, a push for the unfamiliar and even the uncertain, which is what a teen must do if they’re ever going to get out of the house.

Concurrently, the teen brain underestimates risks while overestimating rewards. This is really important to know! Even though it is natural for teens to seek out new experiences, as parents this can be stressful because our teens may seem reckless at times.

Teens already know about risk, so it's not particularly effective to keep telling teens "be careful" or to keep talking about how things could go wrong. With my two teens, I have instead focused on:

• making sure my kids know that their brains are going to downplay any risks,

• encouraging my kids to pay attention to their intuition, such as by taking a moment to connect with their inner guide to determine whether a particular activity is going to be okay or will push too far beyond their limits, and

• facilitating ways for my kids to have new experiences, take some risks, and also learn their limits.

For us, some purposeful ways to facilitate new experiences, risk-taking, and learning limits have been:

• exploring natural environments such as forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains

• camping and survival skills

• parkour class

• rollerblading, ice skating, and riding bikes and scooters

• family trips to new places
  

Intense Emotions

Teens feel emotions more intensely. According to Dr Daniel Siegel,

"The limbic area of our nervous system works closely with the brainstem and the body to create emotion—and in the adolescent brain, we see that those structures exert much more influence on higher-level reasoning from upper regions of the teen brain than in children or adults...

"The downside of this increased emotionality is that teens can become more easily irritated, upset, and moody—and they can have a relationship with themselves that’s confusing. These intense subcortical influences can seem to come from nowhere. As one adolescent said to me when he heard I was writing this book, 'You’ve gotta tell the adolescent, and especially the adult reading that book, that adolescents will feel one way one minute, another way the next. Tell the adults to back off! Just let us feel whatever we feel at the time.'

'"That’s a good tip. If an adult jumps on a teen and tries to give him a consequence just for being emotional, they’ll just push the teen away. Their brain is just doing what it is designed to do: to be more emotional."

Teens' intense emotions can be hard to handle! I've had to learn a lot about how to maintain my own calm instead of reacting to my teens' feelings. It has involved plenty of mistakes 😝😝😝 and lots of practice, but it does get easier over time. It's just one more way in which parenting teaches us how to be more mature ourselves. And yes, it is painful at times, but hang in there. This too shall pass.

Constitutional homeopathic treatment can be a big help in re-balancing teens' emotional states, such that the bad moods will happen less often and less dramatically. Constitutional homeopathic treatment is as much an art as a science, so it needs to be undertaken with an experienced, classically-trained homeopath in order to be effective. For girls, though, there may be a few shortcuts to dealing with the hormone-driven, cyclical emotions. There is information about two homeopathic remedies for girls in puberty here: Two Homeopathic Puberty Remedies for Girls

Importance of Friends

During the teen years, there is a big shift from being attached primarily to one's parents towards being more attached to peers. This is a normal and natural part of developing into adulthood. Peers are who your kids will rely on once they leave home, so it is a natural survival instinct for them to have a strong need to develop close peer relationships during the teen years.

This can feel hard for parents. We've spent so many years devoting much of our time to the kids, and then they suddenly would rather spend time with their friends. I get it. 🤗 But it is natural and right that the kids pull away at this time.

Some ways I have found to work with this change instead of against it are:

• Curate your kids' friends to make sure their friends have good character. Remember that your kids will tend to become like those they spend the most time with, so this is very important!

• For homeschoolers, it's important to facilitate opportunities for the kids to make friends and spend time with their friends. So, I organize group activities for local homeschoolers and make sure my kids have plenty of outside-the-home classes/activities where they will be able to connect with their peers. My kids also joined a Youth Group about a year ago, and that has been a great way for them to meet more teens and develop strong friendships with principled kids.

• My husband and I aim to make our home a welcoming place for our kids' friends. The kids can all hang out over here. I also started a Liberty-and-Leadership club for teens, which includes a bookclub, social time, adventures such as hiking, etc.

Maintaining Strong Relationships with Your Teens

Even though they will naturally focus more on their friends during the teen years, this is still an important time to make sure that your relationship with your kids is strong. When trouble arises, our kids need to know we are still here to help.

As parents, our teens may not actually come to us with their problems, but if we maintain close relationships we can detect when things are going wrong and be ready to guide our teens as much as they will allow us to.

Some ways I have found to work well for maintaining and strengthening my relationship with my teens are:

• Slow down and be there. I can easily get so busy that I rarely take the time to pause and check in with my teens, especially with our full schedules, but this is a mistake. I need to make it a priority to carve out time when I can be with my teens throughout the weeks and months.

• Bedtime discussions are key. And yes, this can translate into us staying up later than intended at times. Nonetheless, those moments when everyone is winding down have proven to be the times that I can most reliably connect with my teens and learn how they're doing, give guidance on problems they are facing, and be a shoulder to cry on. This can be hard because I'm tired at the end of the day, but it's worth it. I aim for bedtime discussions to happen at least a few times weekly, sometimes by just sitting on the couch reading (trying not to fall asleep 🤣) until I see a moment when we can connect, inviting a teen come have a little backrub or footrub, or wandering into their room to connect while they're getting ready for bed.

• Be a supportive friend instead of lecturing. Certainly, there are times when my teens need guidance or a course correction, but I try to just give a little perspective and then move on instead of belaboring the point.

• Lighten up and have fun together with activities such as camping, hiking, games, silly videos and movies, adventures, and yummy treats.

• If you have a teen boy, remember that boys make noise. 😜 It's gonna happen. Decide to be okay with this and go with the flow (within reason).

• Let go of who your child used to be and support him/her in becoming an adult. It has helped me to keep reminding myself that the goal during these years is to move towards independence, to give them the chance to figure things out, to fall and get back up again as they learn how to deal with life challenges, friend problems, disappointments, etc.

I hope this all helps you support your kids and family during this important life transition. With my daughter being 18 now, she's pretty much done with the most tumultuous parts of adolescence. My son is in the thick of it now at age 15, so the challenges are here and we're working through it all one day at a time.

If you want to read more about the brain changes happening in adolescence, the book Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain by Daniel Siegel MD may be helpful. The Wonder of Boys and The Wonder of Girls by Michael Gurian are excellent resources for understanding the differences between boys and girls.

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