Mommies’ forums are full of hectic messages today. Teenage children start experimenting with their appearance, frightening their parents. How to be? Give them freedom or discourage them by all possible means?
The mother community seems to know what to do and how to do it. Here, for example, writes Irina, 38 years old, mother of a 14-year-old daughter: “She had an obsession with getting herself a tattoo. Moreover, this is not a momentary desire, but a well-thought-out idea that has been gaining strength for almost a year. How to protect her from stupidity? .. “
Advice from experienced mothers immediately appears: “Suggest to wait a bit. Remind something that she liked a year or two ago, but now is puzzling. Explain that the pattern she chooses now will be the same. If he becomes older, let him, if he doesn’t change his mind, but for now let him choose the drawing. “
Effective and correct. But not everyone can tell this, and not always. In addition, situations are different, children are also different, and the reactions of parents can completely ruin everything.
Perhaps it is easier to relate to experiments with hair. Today they paint them bright green or purple, tomorrow they want to be red, and in a week they are ready to shave their hair off to zero. Hair – not ears, as they say, will grow back.
Why do our teenagers even have a desire to change their appearance and how to properly respond to such outbursts? Let us turn to an expert with these questions.
Appearance is the information that a person presents to society, to other people as a kind of, so to speak, “business card”. Therefore, if a teenager starts experimenting with his appearance, for example, with hairstyles and hair color or with tattoos and piercings, this is always an attempt to declare and convey information about himself to the outside world. On the one hand, these are steps towards separating oneself from parents, towards independence, at least through an independent choice of appearance and image. On the other hand, it is also a step towards a new community, towards a social group. After all, a certain style in appearance becomes fashionable after a particular subculture has become popular.
As for experiments with the body – piercings and tattoos, the situation here is more complicated than with conventional blue or green hair. Firstly, unlike hair dye, the very process of getting a tattoo or piercing is associated with pain, and getting rid of it is not meant, it’s like a “choice forever”. That is, it is not only fashion here. There are elements of a kind of cult here: you need to make a sacrifice in order to go through a kind of “initiation”. Secondly, certain symbols are chosen as tattoos, which in one way or another are the message: “I belong to a certain group of people.”
A tattoo on the body is always a message specifically about the designation of oneself, which shares a certain ideology and value system.
The historical basis of tattoos and piercings is also very ambiguous: this is the branding of slaves, this is a prison subculture, these are signs of professional affiliation, and belonging to a tribal clan … Often psychologists who work with adolescents or young people who have tattoos or piercings , note the common thing for such adolescents: this is rejection and rejection of themselves and their bodies. Subconscious rejection of oneself can be expressed in diseases (especially those requiring surgeries, after which scars remain), in traumatism, and, as an option, in a conscious change in one’s body, including through pain. Quite often, such adolescents may well adapt socially. And the psychological trauma that once made me mark my body can be healed. With regard to the motivation of children to get pierced, tattoo or change hair color – it is important for parents to find out, first of all for themselves, what kind of need the child is trying to satisfy in this way. Need for attention? Overcoming fear? In the promotion of some idea?
There is an opinion that nothing can be prohibited and prohibitions never work at all. And therefore, it is necessary to conduct explanatory conversations with the child, and if it does not help, just put up with it. But this position, in my opinion, discredits the parental role. For example, a child should be prohibited from skipping school because he has to graduate from school, and this is not discussed. Bans do not work without discriminating between what is good and what is not. In any case, only by talking and understanding your child, you can help him see the world much wider than the framework of the subculture in which he is now. And perhaps then the teenager will have more options for self-expression.