I recently saw a master at work. I watched Natalie, a fifteen-year-old, verbally take down her dad in an impressive victory.
I was having dinner with Glenn at his home. Natalie popped into the dining room to tell her dad that she was going out for a little while with a friend who was picking her up.
He said, “Wait a minute, you’re on restriction. You can’t go anywhere.”
Natalie launched into several different ways to look at the situation: her dad had made exceptions before, her friend was depressed and needed her, she had learned her lesson already, and the restriction was unfair to begin with. Natalie used all the charm and personality a daughter has at her disposal with a dad.
Glenn, clearly out of his league, said, “Okay, I guess. Don’t be gone past 10:00 p.m.” And Natalie skipped out.
A few minutes later, Glenn said, “Well, she got me, didn’t she?”
I said, “Looks like it.”
If you are like most parents, this scenario sounds all too familiar. The good news is that it doesn’t have to play out like this. Here are some keys to keep you on track when you begin to establish limits with your teen.
Accept Resistance as Normal
Most teens react with manipulation, arguments, anger, or defiance when their parents set limits with them. So the first thing you can do is accept that your teen will resist your efforts. Your teen wants total freedom, and you are standing in the way of that desire.
He will most likely use many strategies to derail your efforts to build character and responsibility through structure and consequences. Sometimes he might resist a rule or requirement you have. Other times, he might protest the consequence: “It’s not fair that my curfew is 11 p.m.” or “It’s not fair that you grounded me for a week, when I missed my curfew by just a few minutes.” Either way, be prepared to deal with your teen’s attempts to derail you.
These aren’t deliberate strategies, mind you. I don’t think Natalie (or your teen) could explain what she did. It’s more accurate to say that she instinctively manipulated her dad in order to reestablish all the choices and freedoms she wanted.
If setting limits and establishing consequences are new to you, you may encounter even more intense resistance. Your adolescent is unused to this world; restrictions, rules, and structures are getting in the way of what he wants. So move gradually at first. Have compassion on your teen. Change is never easy, and suddenly requiring him to live in a new way is a lot to ask of your teen.
Keep in mind that his resistance is a mix of good and bad. Manipulation isn’t good, but the need to challenge and question you is. It prepares your teen to think for himself and to own his own values, feelings, and opinions. Life will test him on these matters. Better for your teen to figure out who he is and what he believes while he is still with you.
So love your teen, stay connected to him, and support that wrestling process.
Do Your Homework
Second, make sure your rule and your consequence are reasonable and appropriate. For example, before you set a curfew, think it through. Talk to sound-thinking people in your community whom you trust and who know kids. Come up with an age-appropriate time to be home on weekend nights. Do the same with the consequence. Figure out what is an appropriate penalty for curfew violation, using good sense and good people. Do your homework and don’t be arbitrary or react. Your teen already has those capacities! Be the adult.
Involve Your Teen in the Rules and Consequences
When you are crafting your house rules, bring your adolescent into the process. Ask for her input and opinion on the rules and consequences. After all, it is her life. Let her participate.
Her involvement also mitigates against her blaming you for blindsiding her with unfair rules and consequences that don’t take her feelings into consideration. She may not agree with all the rules and consequences, but she will know you didn’t surprise her; she will know you took her input.
Be willing to negotiate on matters of preference and style, and stand firm on matters of principle. For example, suppose your daughter wants to wear a certain dress to the prom. While you shouldn’t negotiate on matters such as modesty, you can make room for a style that is different from your tastes and that allows her to develop her identity as separate from you. Just giving teens space for safe differences will often resolve much of the resistance.
While negotiation is good when it keeps the teen involved, don’t negotiate with your teen about ways to put off the consequences. Teens will try to do this. I remember one time in particular when one of my sons didn’t get his chores and homework done before a scheduled boat outing with another family. I had told him that if he didn’t finish on time, he would miss the event. When he missed the deadline, I told him, “Sorry, you’re not going.”
Several hours later, he asked me, “Can I have a different consequence?”
I said, “Sometimes I do negotiate. But the fact that you said this tells me that this consequence might be a pretty good one.” So I told him no. In the following weeks, he had a better work ethic.
Contain, Don’t Escalate, Your Teen’s Reaction
Teens often lash out in anger when they are given requirements and consequences. It becomes a temper tantrum: “I hate you! You are the worst parent in the world! Grounding me for coming in just a little bit late is so unfair!”
Such a reaction makes many parents think their teen is a three-year-old again. The resistance to confrontation and truth can be extreme.
While your gut-level reaction might be to escalate to the same level as your kid, or to back off, neither is the best response. The first forces your teen into a power struggle with you, and the second conveys that the anger will keep you from setting limits. Instead, contain your adolescent’s feelings.
What does this word mean? It refers to your ability to hear and understand your child’s strong emotions from your own adult viewpoint. When you contain your child’s feelings, you are “emotionally digesting” your teen’s raw, strong feelings, so that they are more modulated, less intense, and more understandable.
To help you understand this concept, let’s look at how mothers contain their young child’s feelings. This is one of the most important tasks of a mother with her child. The young child has extremely strong, negative emotions, such as loneliness, fear, and rage, and he doesn’t know what to do with them. They are so intense that in the child’s mind, they get stronger and stronger, and he feels out of control. That’s why a child often will escalate beyond all reason and have a meltdown. He experiences his own feelings as a confusing and scary thing, beyond himself. He doesn’t have the capacity to calm himself, soothe his emotions, or talk sense to himself.
So what the child cannot do for himself, his mother does for him, until he learns the ability from her. The mother does not leave her child alone with those negative emotions, nor does she force him to stop. Instead, she stays present with his unhappiness and often holds him, quietly soothing the child until he feels better. This enables him to experience his own negative feelings safely since they have been, in a sense, “digested” by his mom.
Can you see the parallel here with your teen? His world is full of abrupt developmental changes, hormones, and feelings he doesn’t understand. Those feelings can easily escalate and get out of control. But if you, as the adult, can help contain him, you will help your teen feel his own feelings, and not react to his own fears.
Containing is something you do inside yourself, in “being with” your teen. It is not what you say as much as how present you are. You are allowing yourself to experience your teen’s wrath, fury, and disappointment in you. This is no small task. It takes work. Containing involves maintaining eye contact, being warm, and not being overwhelmed, defensive, or disrupted by your teen’s emotion. It tells your teen, “Your anger and frustration are real, but our relationship is larger than those feelings. They don’t scare me away, and they don’t have to scare you either.” This helps the teen feel more stable inside and more receptive to your input later.
This doesn’t mean, however, that you should allow your teen to abuse or injure you. If things do escalate and don’t seem to be getting resolved, you may need to spend time away from him so that things aren’t so volatile, then try again later.
Listen Empathically
While containing is more about your presence with your teen and her negative emotions, empathic listening involves your feelings and words toward her. Empathic listening is the ability to hear and understand what your teen is saying from her own perspective and emotions rather than from yours. Empathy allows you to connect with her, join with her experience, and let her know that you understand how she feels, as much as possible.
We all need empathy. It is one of the greatest gifts we can give each other. It bridges gaps between people and helps them know they are not alone. For example, Jesus himself felt deep empathy for the suffering of others: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”23
To listen empathically:
| 1. | Put your own experience on the back burner. That is, suspend your opinions and feelings to make room for you to understand your teen’s experience. |
| 2. | Start with grace. Before you reach a conclusion about rightness or wrongness, be compassionate and understanding. |
| 3. | Ask yourself, “How would I feel in her situation?” Often, it helps to look at the problem in the way your teen looks at it. |
| 4. | Listen for feelings below the facts. That is, look for sadness, hurt, rejection, frustration, and other negative feelings that accompany the story. |
Though your adolescent will probably deny it, she is floundering like a lost sheep. She needs your empathy and your care. It’s not hard to have empathy for someone who is hurt, sad, or grieving. Nor is it too difficult to feel empathy for someone who is upset with a third party. But the real work of empathy is to have compassion on your teen when she is not hurt but enraged, and when you are the object of her rage. That requires some fortitude and work. How can you feel bad for someone who hates you?
Here is the answer: let your teen have her pain and anger, and don’t personalize it. Put your experience temporarily on the back burner, and let yourself be empathic from within her world, not yours. If you practice this technique, you will find that your teen will often soften and respond better to your limits and consequences.
For example, you might say something like, “Yes, I understand that you are very angry at me right now for grounding you, and you think I’m unfair. I know you are upset and don’t feel you are being treated right. Being grounded is going to be hard for you, and your friends are very important to you. I know this isn’t easy at all for you. I do get that.”
Your empathic listening is helping your teen feel understood so that she can, at some point, see that the real problem is not a mean parent but her own behavior. The more empathetically you connect with her, the less she is able to see you as harsh and unloving. This helps her open her eyes to the reality that she caused the consequence and can do something about it in the future.
Be Charm-Proof
Natalie’s dad was a humble guy, and he admitted he was putty in his daughter’s formidable hands. He said, “There’s this little smile she gives me, and I just melt.”
I saw the smile, and while I didn’t have years of life with Natalie, I understood what it must be like for Natalie’s dad. He felt love, warmth, connection, and protection toward his girl, and there is nothing wrong with that.
But something else was happening too. Both father and daughter were unknowingly engaging in a dance — the charm dance. This dance isn’t a gender issue between dads and daughters and between moms and sons. It is also common between dads and sons and between moms and daughters. For a period of time, the parent will only be able to see the good, the vulnerable, and the innocent in the child, and will suspend any knowledge and experience of the negative and end up enabling, rescuing, or giving up limits for the teen.
What is going on? Most of the time, parents who allow their kids to charm them have a need that they are allowing the teen to meet. These parents may be lonely and need someone who is warm and kind. Or they may have lost their own sense of childhood, and the teen represents that innocence. Or they may be sad and need someone they can make happy so that they will feel happy. As a result, the parents’ needs keep them from being direct and holding limits, because they fear their distant and angry teen will withhold what they need.
This dance can be devastating. I have seen teens who are addicts get extra chances, support, and money from their moms and dads with a certain look and smile. I have seen disrespectful kids who were yelling horrible things at their parents turn on the charm and walk away without any consequence. It looks innocent, but it not only derails the parent, it ultimately derails the teen’s future.
If you and your teen engage in the charm dance, work on your own baggage. Find healthy ways to get your needs met rather than going to your teen to meet them. Free your child of the task of taking care of your heart. This will help you to require him to take responsibility for his choices. It will also help your teen give up being a charming manipulator of other people.
Charm will ultimately fail your teen, and it will bring him in contact with the wrong elements. Love, honesty, and responsibility will bring him much greater benefits. As the Bible says, “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a [person] who fears the LORD is to be praised.”24 Love your teen enough to be invulnerable to charm but highly responsive to character. This will be a blessing to him.
Keep the Limit
It may seem counterintuitive to be soft, loving, and caring while holding a strict line. But that is the best thing you can do for your teen. Experience has no substitute, and your adolescent needs to go through the grounding, extra chores, or loss of privileges.
Why is this? Because learning, growth, and maturity involve not only getting information into our heads, but also getting experience under our belts. This is true in all phases of life. A medical student has to do a residency. An aspiring businessperson has to be an apprentice. And a teen who needs to learn that actions have consequences needs to experience those consequences.
Here’s a small example of what can happen when parents start to hold the limit. When I drive our kids somewhere, the one sitting shotgun (front seat, passenger side) generally wants to play the stereo. My rule is that the kids have to ask me first. I want our sons to be polite and respectful of other people’s things. If they don’t ask permission, they can’t touch the stereo for sixty seconds, and then they can ask again. The minute is the consequence.
When I first started this rule, my kids would impulsively grab the stereo and start working it. I would say, “Okay, the minute starts now.” They would says things like, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, okay? I was thinking about something else! This is a great CD, and I want my friends in the backseat to listen to it.” (Actually, the friends couldn’t care less.) And on and on.
At first, I used to say, “Okay, but just this time.” But then I noticed that the stereo grabbing stayed a problem, and I had to keep warning. So finally I just said, “Sorry, you know the deal. And I don’t want this argument to make it two minutes, okay?” And they would tolerate the sixty-second eternity. So far these days stereo grabbing is presently more an exception than a rule.
So if your teen is trying to get out of being grounded for breaking a specific rule, simply say, “While I know you’re really upset with me, you are still grounded for a week. Start canceling plans if you’ve made them, and it’s probably best if you start figuring out what you’re going to do with your time here.” Keep the limit.
Beware the Compliant Teen
Sometimes a parent will say to me, “One of my kids is a real challenge. But the other one is a good kid, and that makes things easier.” I will generally respond with something like, “I can understand how much work the challenging kid is. It’s good that you’ve got one who isn’t in some crisis. But I recommend that you find out if your teen is choosing to be responsible for healthy reasons.”
I am not saying obedience and compliance are bad. The teen who has good structure, self-control, and a high sense of responsibility is on his way to a successful life. But if the “good” kid never pushes against the limits, never questions, and is more concerned and anxious about pleasing you than about knowing what he thinks and feels, he may need your help to draw out his real self. When he agrees with what you are saying, ask, “Are you sure you really think everything I am saying is true? I want to know how you really feel, not just what you think I want you to say. Do I make it difficult sometimes for you to have a different opinion?” This gentle encouragement can help your teen safely express what he really feels and thinks.
A Living Warning
My friend Susan asked me to have lunch with her husband, Jeremy. She said he had been having trouble in his career and could use some advice. We met, and I asked him about his job problems. Jeremy gave me a long list of the many different positions he had held in several industries. I said, “That’s a lot of different kinds of work. Why didn’t any of them work out for you?”
“Too many rules. I just don’t like rules.”
“I know, rules are a pain. But I don’t know any good jobs with no rules.”
“I think I’ll find one that will fit me.”
Later, Susan filled in the picture for me. She had known Jeremy since they were young, and she said that she had seen him talk himself out of all sorts of consequences and responsibilities with his parents. His parents had allowed Jeremy to derail them, and now Susan was reaping what they had sowed.
Keep Jeremy in mind when your teen tries to derail you from holding the line. Stay loving, fair, and focused. You don’t want your child hopping from job to job, or relationship to relationship, because he can’t tolerate frustration, rules, reality, or problems. Your teen desperately needs the safety of a loving structure. Give him the gift of a parent who won’t be derailed.