Parenting columinst Ian Munro shares some advice on how to deal with adolescent children when the hormones kick in.
Eldest is driving his parents crazy. To, us, his grandparents, he’s a great boy. His teachers love his enthusiasm for learning. His friends’ parents like having him around.
"You should all just try living with him and experience one of his tantrums, then."
He’s on the cusp of adolescence and those hormones are staring to kick in. It’s the time when youngsters start to realise that they aren’t going to be spending the rest of their lives living with their parents and when they begin to attack the apron strings with great vigour. It’s inevitable and, if it doesn’t happen, you potentially have a problem - they may never want to leave home!
It’s a time when parents do start feeling that they’re losing management control. As 2-year-olds yell and scream and throw tantrums as they try to come to terms with their world and the limits parents start imposing, so children in their early teens can yell and scream and throw tantrums as they try to come to terms with their new "world order". And perhaps their parents feel like throwing a tantrum, too, because their world order is also changing.
Yet underneath all this there’s still a very strong need for support and acknowledgment of worth from parents. I’ve checked this out in my chats with Eldest. You ignore this at your peril. While the world might start revolving around the peer group, Mum and Dad still provide certain limits, security and a safe place to come home to lick the inevitable wounds.
Those working with young people are very familiar with ongoing conflict situations where all parties are "throwing tantrums" and no-one is listening to anyone else. The parents are trying desperately to hang on and the teen is trying desperately to break free.
This is an important time to start working alongside your youngster, to help them pick themselves up and learn from their mistakes and to provide guidance and boundaries that reflect both their growing maturity and their residual immaturity.
You’ll need to offer positive praise and acknowledgement, still maintain some pretty firm limits, including non-acceptance of rude behaviour, and consistently apply consequences. As I reminded his parents, if Eldest can manage to behave well at school and at his friends’ homes, he knows what’s expected of him.
It’s a time for them to create some situations where one of them spends a bit more one-to-one time with him doing something they both enjoy, where they can acknowledge that he’ll soon be an adult-in-training rather than a kid. In doing this, they’re starting to model the new relationship they will have with him. And when he blows, at least it’s safer he blows at home than anywhere else.
