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Yesterday’s cute little girl no longer obeys, acts contrary to her parents, is impudent and sometimes behaves completely inappropriately? Congratulations, your baby is growing! And you, along with him, will have to go through a difficult transitional age. The expert tells how to behave if a teenager is rude to you.
“Literally in the spring, everything was still fine, dear daughter, we always got along great. She obeyed her parents. And after the summer, they changed the child — either he slams the door in front of his nose, then, in response to the usual request to wash the dishes, he freaks out and is rude. Where does such rudeness come from and how to deal with it? — The mother of 12-year-old Dina brought her daughter to me. A request was read between the lines: “Fix my child!”.
What should parents do in such a situation?
Understand the «scale of the disaster»
If the parents at the reception complain to me that the teenager is rude, I find out how this behavior manifests itself in other social situations. Can a child be rude to a salesman, a teacher, a doctor, a psychologist — any adult who surrounds him?
If rudeness extends to more than one family situation, this may well be a signal: a teenager is not coping with something that is happening to him. This may be a call for help.
If, which happens much more often, a child is rude to parents or one of them, first you need to find out the scope of this rudeness. There are different family situations — someone considers it acceptable to swear at each other in a friendly way, and somewhere parents are outraged that in their own apartment a teenager demands to knock on his door before entering.
Learn to recognize warning signals
In standard situations, rudeness indicates that the parent missed the less intense warnings from the child. Warnings that boundaries have been violated, that an invasion of a teenager’s personal space has been made.
In almost all situations, the child is rude to stop the parent or hurt him in response to the pain caused to him. And before resorting to a cardinal measure — rudeness — the child, as a rule, warns more correctly.
Here parents should ask themselves the question: is it possible that I missed the first signals of my child that I am violating his boundaries?
Change the way you communicate with your child
Adolescence is a very difficult period for both parents and adolescents themselves. Adults need to reorganize — the older the child, the less instructions, demands, punishments, orders work with him. And the more often you need to negotiate with him, convince, enter into a dialogue, explain your position to him, hear his position.
While the child was small, the processes of its regulation were controlled by the parents. Therefore, orders, instructions sounded so often, prohibitions worked. At puberty, self-control passes into the hands of the teenager himself.
Yes, he still has few skills, emotions are jumping due to hormones, and it is difficult for a young man to cope with overwhelming feelings. Parents definitely need to make allowances for the fact that it is difficult for a teenager, his experiences are very intense, the skill of self-regulation is just beginning to form, personal boundaries and a sense of one’s own space are constantly in the process of restructuring …
Stay steady
Understanding what is happening to the child gives the adult psychological stability. And then he can, on the one hand, show condescension, and on the other, firmness, showing that it is not customary to communicate in such a boorish form in our family. It is important to let the teenager understand that this is not the way to express your protest.
Taking care of yourself during this difficult period is very important for parents, they need to maintain balance and adequacy, which is not always easy. It often happens that parents themselves begin to go to psychotherapy. And then changes in their sense of self and behavior, adjusting the format of communication with a teenager help to improve the family situation.