Parenting Teens: An entirely different ball game

The meat: Parenting teens is difficult. Their brains are in flux and their attitudes seem to stink. Here are the new facts and a few tools that will make your job easier and more rewarding.

Well, it’s mother’s day. Hooray for moms the world over. Thanks for putting up with us, deadbeat dads, abusive husbands, insane children… we don’t deserve you, really.

So here it is again: Thanks, Mom.

Remember that time we fought over a case of beer on the front lawn, because I was only 18 and you were only trying to uphold the law? In a rage, I snatched it from you and smashed it on the walkway to our home. What a lethal combination: a mom drawing a line and male adolescent hormones!

If you’re a parent of teenagers, you are probably familiar with behaviour similar, if not as extreme, to this. Actually, the culprit is increasingly thought not to be hormonal so much as it is mental. Apparently, the human brain continues to grow throughout adolescence, and the result is that adolescents are more susceptible than their parents to long term damage caused by violence, binge drinking and drug use. What’s dangerous about this is that we learn much of our behaviours (smoking, drinking, drugs, violence) from the adults around us.

Here’s an explanation from an article at South Coast Today:

This year in the scientific journal Nature, researchers presented a series of time-lapse images depicting brain growth from age three to 15. The images showed a tangle of nerve cells sprouting in the part of the brain that sits above the eyes, then a period of "pruning" after puberty, when about half of the new fibers are cut away to create an efficient network of circuits.

All this action happens in a part of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for what neuroscientists call the "executive functions." Those functions are practically a laundry list of the qualities adolescents often lack -- goal-setting, priority-setting, planning, organization and impulse inhibition.

Scientists also found that adolescents, or at least adolescent rats, suffer more profound long term effects from everything from smoking to drinking to exposure to violence.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina recently decided to test the sensitivity of the adolescent brain to binge drinking by subjecting rats to an alcohol bender. Four times a day for four days, they gave both adolescent and adult rats 10 grams of alcohol per kilogram of body weight. After the rats had sobered up, the researchers looked for brain damage and found more in adolescent rats compared to adults.

Without going into the science of it, we can safely assume that this new information might lead us to new approaches of parenting. For example, if we’re falling into a negative routine with our teen kids, having the same arguments, and keep feeling that no one’s winning because resolution never occurs (and this is normal), it’s time to look more carefully at the way we’re communicating with our kids. As parents, we set the stage for our child’s development, not the other way around. When we don’t do our homework, chances are we’re learning by trial and error, and that can take a long time. And who wants to mess up that many children?

An excellent article from Focus Adolescent Services gives the best advice on parenting adolescents that I’ve ever seen. Here’s an excerpt, with a link:

There are three major areas that are crucial to the parent-adolescent relationship -- connection, monitoring, and psychological autonomy. First, a sense of connection between a teenager and parent provides a backdrop against which all other interaction takes place. If the parent-child connection is consistent, positive, and characterized by warmth, kindness, love, and stability, children are more likely to flourish socially. Adolescents who describe their relationship with their parents as warm, kind, and consistent are more likely to initiate social interaction with other adolescents and with other adults. They are more likely to respond to others positively and with greater empathy. They are more likely to be self-confident in their relationships with others, and to be more cooperative with others. Also, teens with these kinds of positive relationships with their parents on the whole struggle less with depression, and have higher self-esteem. Relationships characterized by kindness and devoid of unkind words or acts appear to be important to healthy adolescent development.

Read the rest of this great tool here.

PS. Check out this amazing video of an autistic teen basketball star!