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WTF Dad!!???

I thought I misheard him. But after the second wave of shock, I realized that he was dead serious.

“Honestly, Eddie. I do not care what my son is struggling with when he is with me, he needs to act like he has his stuff together.”

I was sitting in my first family therapy session with Tom and his family. They called me earlier that day and things were so bad that I asked them to come into my office for an emergency session.

My heart broke when I heard Tom’s thoughts about his 16-year-old son, Sam. He was adopted two years ago. Previous to his adoption Sam spent most of his life in group homes. He went through a stint of homelessness on the streets of Brooklyn, New York with his brother when he was only 11 years old. He was abandoned by his mother while barely given the chance to grieve the unexpected death of his father.

As I listened to his father, my teeth were clenched in anger, not just because of the lack of awareness of Sam’s struggles, but also because of the lack of care. Sam was physically shriveling up and breaking down in tears in the seat beside me.

Yeah….this session did not end well for this dad.

Just trying to “Get It Right”

This story is an extreme example of a parent damaging their teenager by turning a blind eye to the struggles his teenage son is facing.

Let me ask the question. How often do we lead with our urgency for rightness while ignoring that our teen is emotionally shriveling up in a corner?

The biggest tragedy in parenting a teenager is giving priority to making sure that they “get it right” while ignoring the fact that they are fighting the battle of their lives. Their battle is for identity.

For our young adults, the entire world is ahead of them. They can literally be and do whatever they want. The only thing that separates their childhood from their adulthood is nailing down the “role” they play within the world they live in.

For example, they have to battle with roles like:

• Am I a failable hero or a misunderstood villain?

• Am I a leader or the glue that keeps things together?

• Will I fit in or be a trendsetter?

• Will I be my parents or be better or worse?

For us, these battles seem objectively meaningless. In other words, they are small issues. In the context of their entire lives, these battles are here today and gone tomorrow.

But, in the eyes of our teens, they are life or death.

The 1 thing that keeps you from understanding your teens

As we raise our teens it can feel as if there is a divide. Some things divide us and our teens.

On one side we stand with our vision of who they can be, who they are and our confidence that if they can just “get it right” they will be ok.

On the other side, they stand feeling misunderstood, unheard and worn out from a daily fight to know their fit.

The gap that divides us is AWARENESS.

Yes, they lack awareness of the validity of our concerns, but we also lack awareness of what is meaningful to them.

How do we bridge the gap? How do we see them, understand them and direct them towards the values we want them to have?

It is going to take some work and patience.

Here are four guidelines to direct your teen and help them change destructive behavior.

4 Steps to directing their path

Step 1: Slow down and pay attention

Step 2: Learn the story

Step 3: Learn the triggers

Step 4: Create lasting habits

Note that the majority of the steps to direct behavior has nothing to do with action. Changing behavior has more to do with awareness and learning. In the following steps, the action (Step 4) only comes after understanding the context and triggers. Essentially, we are working to become more dependent on what we see as opposed to being reactive to how we feel.

Step 1: Slow down and pay attention

Let us start with catching a breath and slowing down.

Rewind….

The year is 1997. This slick new artist called Usher hit the scene with his hit single, “You make me wanna.” You sang that song in the shower daydreaming about the day you would have a relationship that would make you wanna leave the one you’re with… You remember how the song stuck in your head for the whole day?

But also consider what else was happening in your life. You had a group of people that you more or less identified with. Each individual in your crew brought a specific edge to who you were. Because of your one super dramatic friend, you were a bit more dramatic and because of your nerd friend, you were very conscious of your academic performance. You were also deeply pressured by those outside of your core group. What you wore, how you spoke and even the plans for the future were based on the world that surrounded you.

How about your parents? Chances are the rhythm of your social life was much louder than the old-fashioned nagging opinions of your parents.

Fast Forward….

Tada!!!

That is what your teens are experiencing as we speak.

Here is our challenge:

How can we allow our frustration with our teenagers to be buffered by our own experiences when we were teenagers?

How can we acknowledge that the seemingly negative aspects of our teen’s behavior are actually a part of their normal development?

This is our task, but it also acts as an obstacle.

It is our task and we have to see some of their struggles as normal because we also went through it.

This can also be an obstacle because we think about how poorly we went through it, or how we messed up and automatically assign our mistakes as a possible outcome for their lives.

Often we unconsciously draw a sense of urgency from our past experiences and, as a result, we push our teens harder.

Gut check:

The reason we tend to be so hard on our teenagers is due to 2 things.

1. We see too much of ourselves in them
2. We feel like we are running out of time to teach them the way they should go

As parents of teens, we often think of the big lessons we learned, and that would have changed everything about our lives. We say, “If I worked harder in school, I would be so much further.” Or, “If I stop wasting so much time doing [fill in the blank], I would be in a much better place.”

We feel that if we could just get them to learn one specific lesson then it will literally change their lives. We have to be careful how much we allow our experiences to assign fear to their future.

They are not us, and they are not facing the same struggles we faced.

They also have resources that you did not have – an older and wiser version of yourself.

Here is the thing, we cannot change behavior by simply changing their decisions. We have to get at their habits and their hearts. We cannot get their hearts if we do not understand their story and we cannot change their habits if we cannot see their triggers.

Crossing the bridge [your turn]

Action Items:

1. Slow down
2. Accept their behavior as a normal part of their development
3.  Take back the urgency to get it right
4. Disarm the fear of generational mistakes
5. Commit to learning the story
6. Commit to seeing the triggers

What’s next?

In the next article I will address Step #2: Learn the Story and Step #3: Learn the Triggers. I will discuss why our teens behave the way they do. They think everything is possible + their brain is going crazy. I will also take a look at why they battle us and draw closer to their friends and the internet.

50 Second Summary Video