How to Get Along Better With Your Teenager
Want to get along better with your teenager? Then you’d be wise to follow the following advice from Lifehacker:
- Don’t act cool. Don’t dress like your kids, dance to their favorite music, try to use their slang terms, or try to gossip about their friends or drama at school.
- Keep their secrets. If your teenage child confides something in you, you need to keep it to yourself. You might think it’s so cute that Emma has a crush, but when you gush about it on the phone to your sister or your best friend, it will sound like you’re making light of something that is sacred to her.
- Don’t compare them to their friends. Asking kids why they can’t be more like a friend doesn’t magically motivate them to study harder or change their attitude at home. All it does, Greenberg says, is make them feel inadequate and turn them against that friend, whom they now see as a competitor. Focus instead on celebrating your own kid’s strengths.
- Stop interrupting. You, too, have been a teenager and you know what they are going through! Except no, you don’t, because being a teenager now is much different than being a pre-smartphone-era teenager. And interrupting them doesn’t make them listen to you more closely anyway; it makes them tune you out.
- Don’t be critical about little things. Sure, you have to set some limits on what they can or cannot wear. But whenever possible, let go of stuff like wardrobe and hair style. You might think that outfit doesn’t even remotely match or they look so much better with their hair pulled back, but keep it to yourself.
