Stop Negotiating with Your Teen by Janet Sasson Edgette

Author:Janet Sasson Edgette [Edgette, Janet Sasson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101602201
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2002-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

In Mack’s situation, the response I suggested allows Greg to hear not just more complaints about his bad behavior but also his father’s interest in having had more contact that evening and a better resolution to the problem. Without becoming solicitous or too accommodating with his son, Mack has made the problem their problem and not just Greg’s problem. However, the problem is still framed as one for which Greg has full accountability.

6

HELPING KIDS SAVE FACE

Betty and Arthur couldn’t understand why their eighteen-year-old son was continuing to skip so many of his senior high school classes and disregard the majority of his assignments. It didn’t make any sense—Kyle was intelligent, sociable, and industrious. On his own, he’d spend hours designing and completing projects in his makeshift workshop in the garage. But let his science teacher assign a similar project, and Kyle wasn’t interested. He’d let the deadline come and go without a second thought.

“It’s not logical!” Kyle’s dad exclaimed in my office during their first visit. “He’ll stay up all hours for some project of his own and sometimes even pass on going out with friends for the sake of finishing some part of it. But let Betty and me threaten to ground him from going out for not completing one of his science or language projects, and we have hell to pay from him all weekend long. It’s ridiculous.”

Well, it doesn’t make sense, but there is another type of logic operating here. I call it emotional logic. Emotional logic is a combination of a person’s beliefs, attitudes, and life experiences that are filtered through his personality, and it has an enormous effect on how that person will react to the events in his life. Emotional logic is what has us say no when we really want to say yes, what has us indulge an impulsive decision rather than stay patient, and what has us stubbornly persist with something even though we know it doesn’t work. We do these things for what we think at the time are good reasons, even if they aren’t smart reasons. Sometimes, we’d rather be right than smart.

So it is with teenagers. Sometimes—many times—teenagers will make an unwitting choice to be right (at least in their own mind) rather than admit to what would feel like defeat or overdependence or overcompliance. So they make bad choices and live with them, while everyone else stands around scratching their heads, wondering about the illogic of it all. It’s their way of saving face.

Parents of adolescents often feel stumped by an invisible but apparent rigidity in their child’s thinking. It feels to them as if their teen is being stubborn, argumentative, immature, or belligerent. The teen only knows that he or she doesn’t want to or can’t do something that everyone wants them to do.

Conflicts between parents and teens arise from the inevitable clash of perceptions and “logical” assumptions. These conflicts are hard to resolve at the manifest level. The good news, however, is that teenagers will often

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