2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
The topic of relationships and mutual understanding with children is very relevant and gains special significance during the adolescent crisis.
Why? Yes, because if before the transitional age communication in a family with children was open and confidential, then when during a crisis a teenager begins to behave aggressively, unpredictably and emotionally, this becomes an unpleasant surprise for parents, and the reaction from their side should be appropriate.
If, before the age of 12, the relationship between parents and a child was already emotionally cold and strained, then it will not be possible to avoid conflicts and estrangement in the next 3-4 years at all.
How can you maintain or re-create a good relationship with your teenager?
I'll start in order. When children come to my trainings for teenagers, I always ask them the question: "What problems would each of you like to solve during the training?" And the children take turns talking about what exactly they want to learn and what exactly they are concerned about right now. In most cases, teenagers come to trainings after learning about the event from their parents. When parents call me to sign up a child for a class, I always ask them the age, gender, name of the child and why or why they are sending the child to the training. Thus, at the time of the lesson, I have two requests: from the parents and from the teenager himself.
In most cases, parents are concerned about:
1. Falling performance of the child;
2. His aggressiveness;
3. Internet addiction.
In most cases, teenagers want to deal with:
- Building successful communication with peers;
- Own desires and goals;
- Problems with the opposite sex.
It is easy to see that the problems of the parents who sent their children to training do not overlap with the problems that worry the children themselves, that is, the parents worry about the child in their own way, and the child worries about themselves in their own way. These experiences are two different planes that may never meet.
For example, a specific situation: a child does not have friends in the classroom, he cannot establish contacts with peers, his declining academic performance (has already reached 2 points in basic subjects) does not bother him insofar as he is worried about his status in the classroom, about how how to get peer recognition. He worries that he is a "lonely loser". The constant demands of parents to pay more attention to their studies cause aggression and resistance in the adolescent. And the Internet has become for him the place where he can, metaphorically speaking, “relax”, because on the Internet there is no need to experience stress from how he looks and what someone needs to say. "You don't have to feel lonely there, you can just sit and not think about anything, like whatever you like," the guy says. His parents, in turn, are becoming more and more aggressive towards the child every month, since for them the problem is seen in the context of poor grades and the lost prospect of entering those universities that were planned. Scandals in the family became more frequent, the son began to develop health problems (heart, stomach), there is no mutual understanding between the son and the parents.
So, as we can see, the experiences of parents and adolescents are too different. Adults want children to be obedient, study well and not surf the Internet. Children want adults to "stay out" in their affairs, to give them money and freedom.
It seems that a conflict of interest cannot be avoided. How to be?
It may sound trite, but to solve such a global problem, you just need to MEET. How is that, you ask? On the one hand, it is simple, on the other, it is difficult. Not resisting, not using power, not wanting to do it in spite of, not taking hostility in advance to LISTEN to the desires, interests, dreams, and maybe the demands of each other. SEE at the same time the eyes, facial expressions, gestures. FEEL your child or parent. GIVE FEEDBACK to everything you heard and saw, express your opinion calmly and HEAR your opinion in response. That is, to enter into a dialogue so that the planes that I spoke about above could intersect. To highlight common priorities, develop a GENERAL goal and strategy, rules for communication in the family. It can be very difficult to do this on your own, especially when the relationship is already tense. For these purposes, special training workshops have been created for children and parents, and joint paired family psychological consultations are being conducted.
Parents and children who cannot find a common language for dialogue need to change previous stereotypes of behavior, become more flexible in relationships, that is:
- Parents to stop using exclusively authoritarian position to influence and persuade the child and learn to give the child the opportunity to make their own choice;
- A teenager should stop blaming others (parents, peers, teachers) and responsibility for everything that happens to him - bad grades, inability to communicate, unwillingness to go to sports clubs, etc. After all, freedom and growing up consists in the fact that you yourself have to bear responsibility for your own choices and perfect and imperfect actions.
So, relationship - this is an exchange of thoughts, actions, plans, this is the ability to give and receive, and not only to "stick with horns" and insist on one's own.
Good relationship - it is always creativity and the art of communication.
A good relationship with a teenager - this is a daily experiment, on which the further life of two people who love or hate each other - a growing child and a parent, largely depends.
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