How Parents Can Avoid Arguing with Teenagers

Parents of teenagers find themselves frequently arguing with their teen. Jared’s mother, Susan, thought she was being clear and firm when she stated, “You need to be home by 10:00.” Her teenage son was already visibly upset. “Why? No one else has to be home by 10:00,” he snorted.

Susan remained calm. “Because it’s a school night,” she explained.

From there the conversation deteriorated. Jared yelled, “I hate you. I wish I had Trevor’s parents. They let him stay out as long as he wants.”

Susan couldn’t help herself and returned, “I don’t care what Trevor’s parents do, I’m the mother and as long as you live in this house you will follow my rules.”

Where did this conversation go wrong? The parent tried to remain calm, clear and direct. The teenage son reacted as many teenagers would in that situation. But somehow there was no emotional connection, no intentional effort to find a way to teach the teen to become more responsible and respectful.

In her book, “Parenting the Teenage Brain,” Professor Sheryl Feinstein points out that parents can expect and even predict that teenagers will be argumentative and perhaps even disrespectful. Understanding what is happening inside the teenage brain can help explain the sometimes uneven or inappropriate reactions of teenagers. Changes taking place in the brain during the teen years increase the likelihood of arguments between teens and parents in two ways. First, the teenager’s increased mental processing demands explanations and reasons for decisions that were just accepted at younger ages. Second, the emotional part of the brain (the limbic system) is in charge during the teenage years, so tears and yelling many times prevail over calmness.

The thinking part of the brain (pre-frontal cortex) is under construction for most of the teenage years. When a parent asks a teen, “What were you thinking?” as it turns out, he or she wasn’t thinking at all! The human brain is not properly equipped during the teen years for problem-solving and logic. The brain is expanding so rapidly during this time, that the connections inside the cortex are incomplete and still forming. In his book, “Yes, Your Teen is Crazy,” Dr. Michael Bradley states that adolescents are temporarily brain-damaged. Brain scans of teenagers indicate that at that age, the human brain looks similar to brain scans of damaged adult brains.

These explanations of teenage brain development do not excuse irresponsible or disrespectful behavior. Parents can be challenged by how much typical teenage attitude should be tolerated, what issues are really worth fighting about, and what kind of discipline is effective. Some level of arguing and challenge by teens is normal. These conflicts can involve minor issues like chores or style of dress, or major issues like sex and drugs. In teen girls, menstrual cycles are associated with increased conflict. The combination of brain development and estrogen levels many times leaves teenage girls moving back and forth between elation and edginess on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, many parents are in constant conflict with their teen. Fights occur more frequently and for longer periods of time. Normal emotional healing rituals of apology and forgiveness may seem especially difficult or even impossible with teens. A poor parent-teen relationship puts the teen at risk for unhealthy behavior or self-medication through alcohol or drugs.

There is hope for parents during the teenage years. Parents can benefit from understanding the value of not arguing with a teen. Stay calm. Teenagers are not as mentally or emotionally mature as adults and the difference is apparent when it comes to arguing. Teens are almost compelled at that age to continue and finish a fight. When an argument arises, a parent can calmly and clearly state his or her views and then just stop. Let your teenager have the last word and walk away.

Active listening can also help connect with a teenager whose thinking brain is still under construction. Active listening is the ability to accept what a teenager is saying, while not necessarily agreeing with him or her. Giving proper time and attention to a teen through active listening will allow him or her to fully process information emotionally before considering logical ways to react. Allowing a teen to fully express emotion to a parent without fear of judgement will help reduce arguments and can help the brain grow and mature with calmness and safe emotional connection.

While the teenage brain is under construction, a parent’s support and influence can help to wire the teen’s cortex to be more responsible and respectful. Parents are still the most influential force in an adolescent’s life. Knowing how to interact and communicate with a teenager who’s brain is experiencing such major development can help parents be more effective and help strengthen the parent-teen relationship.

The Power of Family Relationships

Building a positive and healthy relationship between parent and child is one that requires work and effort to make it strong and successful. Parenting is a tough and exhausting job, and maintaining close relationships and open communication helps to ensure parents and their children stay connected through all ages and stages of development.

The importance of strong, healthy bonds between parent and child cannot be overstated, because these bonds serve as the foundation upon which all other life relationships are formed. If a child doesn’t learn how to connect emotionally with a parent or other caregiver, that child will probably encounter difficulty in connecting to people in all sorts of relationships for the rest of his or her life.

Temperament plays a significant part in a child’s efforts to reach out to other people or responding to others efforts at connection. It’s helpful for parents to understand the balance of how temperament affects emotional bonding and efforts to impact emotional connection with healthy authoritative parenting. Consciously or not, parents teach their children about relationships through interaction and example.

Teaching children about the value of healthy relationships will help them as the move into the middle school and high school years. At this age, when it comes to the complex tasks of negotiating peer relationships (friendships, cliques, dating, etc.), children will draw from what they’ve been taught to try to negotiate and survive. Not knowing how to emotionally connect may cause difficulties, ranging from fleeting feelings of sadness and/or alienation to teen depression.

Understanding Anger

Anger is a learned response – children watch very closely at the way parents handle anger. In addition, anger usually masks other emotions, which can further complicate how a child may interpret witnessing anger.

It’s okay to become angry. Anger is an inevitable emotion, and must be expressed (hopefully in healthy ways), otherwise the emotion will build-up and eventually be expressed in aggressive or passive-aggressive ways. New scientific information on brain development provides parents with a special opportunity to understand how anger is processed in the brain and how to teach children to understand and manage anger in healthy ways.

Scientists have recently found using brain scans of live brains during highly emotional times, like when expressing anger, that there are amazing new insights into what’s happening in a child’s head during an angry exchange. Children can be taught at a very early age what’s happening inside them when they get angry, how to understand it and manage it more effectively.

Repeated exposure to anger as a child has long-term impact. Most chronically angry adults were exposed to excessive amounts of destructive anger in their childhoods. Role-modeling how to express anger in healthy ways is very important for parents. A child’s memory bank and the interpretations of those memories will be full of information about how the adults closest to them handle anger.

It’s important for parents to learn to remain calm and find additional healthy ways to express anger.

Spanking Affects Brain Development

Recent research on human brain development has shown that spanking and other corporal punishment will have a significant adverse affect on the development of a child’s brain and brain function. Whenever a child experiences fear and stress, especially when combined with high emotional confusion or emotional separation from a parent or other caregiver, that child becomes biologically and neuro-chemically alarmed and on high alert.

The human brain consists of four distinct layers, the brain stem, mid-brain, limbic system, and the cortex. The brain stem is responsible for the most primitive functions of the body like breathing, body temperature regulation, and blood pressure. The midbrain, also called diencephalon, is a bit more complex, but still mostly reflexive, and is where a person operates when he or she is in a state of alarm. This is the instinctive “fight or flight” area of the brain and is a non-thinking and non-feeling place. The limbic system is the area responsible for experiencing and expressing emotions. The cortex, especially the pre-frontal cortex, is responsible for thinking, problem-solving, showing judgement and a conscience.

Two other key parts of the brain are the hippocampus, which stores memories, and the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system and determines which part of the brain is activated in a given situation. The hippocampus and amygdala work together to determine which parts of the brain are in charge. At any given moment, one of the three upper levels (midbrain, limbic system or cortex) is in charge based on the decisions of the amygdala and hippocampus.

The brain produces powerful chemicals called hormones. Normal development sees the brain release healthy doses of hormones to help a child learn resilience. During times of fear, however, stress hormones can flood the brain, causing anxiety and panic in the child, meaning he or she is less capable of thinking. During an unhealthy “hormone dump,” a child will become hypersensitive and overly-reactive until the hormones dissipate, which may take an hour or as long as a day. Because a child’s brain is constantly being wired, high states of alarm can “over-wire” a child’s midbrain, making it denser and more dominant than it should be.

During these episodes of fear, the hippocampus stores memories for the purpose of protecting and preparing the child for future incidences. For the rest of the child’s life, the memories stored in the hippocampus can trigger the same responses that activates the reflexive midbrain.

Whenever a child is highly fearful or alarmed because a parent or other caregiver is inflicting physical pain (like spanking) combined with unhealthy and out of control emotion, his or her brain development is being adversely impacted. A child with a brain that has been developed in healthy ways can function relatively smoothly, allowing the child calmness to think, emotionally connect, pay attention and grow intellectually.

Withholding discipline is not the answer. Finding healthy ways of effective discipline (limit setting, healthy consequences, making amends, etc.) will help develop a child’s brain in healthy fashion.