Your daughter / son has grown quickly and has stepped into puberty. You never thought it would be that difficult, didn’t you? Those slamming doors, meaningless stubbornness, trying to show up in every situation, trying to say I’m here, acne wars, long hours spent in front of the mirror, increased curiosity to the opposite sex due to 18 times increased sex hormone secretion, black and white thinking, omnipotent states, difficulty of living with an angry creature that seems to care about everyone else but you, authority issues, identity crisis, and more. Good luck for you already. But there is no despair. If they are teenagers, we are adults too, and as the iyimserpsikoloji.com team, we have a lot to say about it.
If you’d like, let’s start with this:
Teenager’s problems are not only their problems, and their family attitudes most definitely have a share.
After all, the family is a system that operates with cyclical causality, and every word and behavior in this system touches somewhere, affects something, so it has a result.
Overprotective helicopter parents, authoritarian parents who do not give right to speak and space for the child, overly liberal / indifferent parents who are far from being a model, injured parents who transfer the cost of their trauma to the child through intergenerational transmission, with or without awareness, overly competitive – narcissistic – neurotic parents who force their own dreams into their child etc. Many negative parent models involuntarily or unknowingly play a role in the rise of pathological behaviors in teenagers.
The ability of abstract thinking develops in adolescents from the age of 11-12 and from now on, she/he tends to think on the basis of her/his own mind and moral norms.
Until those years, our child, who knew our truth as the real truth, now wants to be someone else, to be independent, to be herself/himself. Conflict is inevitable if we, as parents, persist in not abandoning our old positions and do not see the change our child lives through. Doors gets slammed angrily. Let’s take Erich Fromm to our conversation at this point: “The parents who love their child the most, Fromm says, are the ones who lead her/him towards independence and prepares the ground for her/his independence. Halil Cibran makes a similar wonderful saying: “They are your children, but they do not belong to you.”
Since the frontal lobe of the brain, which is related to logical thinking and reasoning, is not yet fully developed in the teenagers (this lasts until around 25-26 years of age), they are inclined to think in black and white duality. For them, there are good and bad, there are absolute right and certain wrongs. He/She is not yet open to all possibilities and cannot predict. Some part of the conflict is caused by this. Teenager is rigid, is not flexible at all. Due to our country is full of adult-looking teenagers, flexibility is not a common feature of our nation. And this means eternal conflict.
Teenagers are omnipotent. Absolute powerful I mean. She/He thinks he can afford everything. She/He gets into the car and does not fasten his belt, when you ask, she/he says “nothing will happen to me”. Because she/he believes so. She/he does not know her/his strength and weakness, she/he does not know her/his limits. She/he doesn’t like rules. How won’t you have conflicts, will you?
The hardest part of times of teens is the period of identity crisis. We all asked ourselves at that age, who am I, and we got our answers and continued on our way. But this period, when the backbone of the character is formed, when independence is tried to be gained and answers are sought to fundamental questions is definitely painful. And those crazy acnes. So the conflict is inevitable. Enjoy it.
As we tried to explain so far conflict is inevitable and natural. So what about solutions. For sure there are more solutions than problems. First of all, we can start by respecting our child’s self-integrity, desire for independence (of course by practising a certain amount of control), and existence. We can improve our communication language and strength of empathy. And there are many more solutions. Life offers endless possibilities for those who want to understand, develop and transform.
We, as the iyimserpsikoloji.com team, are eager to bring these opportunities to you. We love both you and our teenagers …