THE AUDIO PODCAST IS AVAILABLE HERE:  LISTEN

Today we’re going to talk about what to do when teens won’t show us respect and how to handle things when anger and other emotions are involved in our parenting situations. 

You’re the Worst Parent in the World!
Has your teen or tween told you yet that you’re the worst parent in the world?  Many times?  Or are you lucky enough to say “not yet”?  Well, don’t be surprised if that once adorable toddler or elementary child who doted on your every word turns into some sort of swamp monster and turns on you. 

Sometimes they blow up over an issue that, from your point of view, is small –you didn’t buy the right flavor of yogurt, you showed up 2 minutes late picking them up from practice, you nagged them too many times about cleaning up their room or maybe that you wore the wrong color shirt.  When they lash out at you like that, you just want to lash out at them, right?  Tell them they don’t appreciate the million other things you’ve done for them recently!  It’s not fair that you’re the target and they’re treating you like dirt!  We feel they don’t show us any respect and we can’t get them to no matter what we do.

Respect is something we tell our kids is earned, not given.  If you treat someone with respect then you’ll deserve respect is the old adage.  Well, that works for normal people but we’re talking about a teenager or tween with only half a brain.  What?  Half a brain?  Yep, half a brain. 

There are two issues with our kids' brains that are going on when they are acting disrespectful.

The first is when kids move toward puberty their brains sluff off half their brain cells.  Yep, half!  That’s where my “half a brain” comment comes in.  The brain has been collecting lots of information for the first 12 years or so of a child’s life and biologically they need to make room in their brains to create new neurological pathways that will take them into adulthood and beyond.  So, during puberty the body sluffs off brain cells.  Many of us have heard comments that the teenage brain doesn’t stop forming until the mid to late 20s.  This is the science of what is behind that comment.

The next part of the brain to understand is something that affects us at all ages. It’s when emotion takes over our brains and activates our “fight-or-flight” response.  If we’re angry, yelling, or crying a part of our brain called the amygdala takes over and gets all the blood flow, deactivating the part of the brain where decision making happens called our prefrontal cortex.  If you have a teen this means that they can be hit with a double brain whammy at once – half a brain and fight-or-flight mode so you’d better watch out!

So, let’s get back to what we first started with in this podcast – lack of respect. 

If your teen lashes out, not only is their fight and flight activated causing their thinking brain to shut down but now you know that they don’t have all that many brain cells in the first place.   Does your house ever sound like this?

•  “Why were you so late picking me up?! You are so thoughtless!  You know I have to study for my test tomorrow.”
• “Dad, you never let me do anything fun with my friends!  Leave me alone!”
• “Mom, you never understand anything I say!  My friends are just fine, it’s YOU who aren’t treating me right!”
• “No! I don’t want to get off electronics now!  I’m playing with my friends so shut up and get out of my room!”
  
  

Wow… that’s a whole ton of lack of respect, isn’t in? 

The two most common reactions we as parents have to that bad attitude look something like this:

Reaction 1 – We try to remain calm and reason with them using our thinking brain. 

• “Yes, I was late but things will be just fine.”
• “I do too let you do fun things all the time.  What about the time I let you… (fill in the blanks…)”
• “We have a family rule about electronics and you signed a contract which you’re violating it right now.  We need you to hold up your end of the contract.”
• The complication:  we might have a thinking brain but our kids don’t.  Hmm..

Reaction 2 – The second possible reaction is where we get emotional and activate our flight-and-flight response and start battling with them.

• “I do too treat you right!  You just sit there on your lazy butt and don’t help out around the house at all.  Why should I let you play computer all day and night!  You have to help out around the house or I’m going to never let you play on the computer again!”
• “You are always talking back to me!  Go to your room but hand over that cell phone first.  It’s going away for a week!”
• “You have to do it my way because I said so and I’m the parent!”
• The complication here:  yep, neither party of has a thinking brain!  Uh oh!  A huge problem!
  
  

Reaction 3  - I want to offer a third alternative where both parent and teen have a thinking brain.  Yes!  It’s possible for that to happen.  How?  You have to WAIT.  You have to let all the emotion pass. Even though they are throwing all sorts of mean insults at you, you need to just take it at the time.  Don’t react and don’t engage and defend yourself. There’s no good brain activity going on so don’t feed the monster. 

Try some of these phrases in a really soft and loving voice:

•  “Mom you are so stupid.” Gets a response of “I know….” In a really calm voice.
• “Dad, why are you always picking on me?!” gets a response of “That’s soooo sad…”
• Some parents might get flack for saying those things so they  might even need to just grunt or use “hmmm” as their reaction to disrespect.  
• If you’re really good at staying calm during all of this you might even get: “Why do you keep saying that!” Don’t take the bait and try to defend yourself, just take it. 
• Feel free to say something like: “I talk to kids who are calm.  We’ll talk later.”  And then leave the room.
  ​

You’re going to continue to wait until the emotion passes; with some situations this could be an hour and with some teens it could be days. 

Now, once your teen has calmed down you need to find an opportunity to talk.  Sometimes you can just cuddle up to them when they’re on the couch or at bedtime while other times you need to create a situation where you and your teen have what I call “Special Time” that’s away from other family members and distractions; maybe a walk, a hike or a drive in the car.  For some of you who are worried that your teen might blow up on you when you start having a discussion, I’d even recommend going to a sit-down restaurant since most of us behave better in public places. Whatever you need to do, you need to follow up so that the disrespect doesn’t linger and become a normal state of affairs in your home.

Keep in mind that when you get this special time, you want to talk and not lecture.  You are going to use love and empathy to communicate your unconditional love to your child.  They need to know that even when they are hurting and at their worst that you still love them and want to help them.  Using phrases like:

• “I could tell you were really upset.  Can we talk about it?” will help.  Then have a discussion and see if you can brainstorm how to avoid such outbursts in the future. 
• As part of this discussion you want to make sure you tell them: “It really hurt my feelings when you called me bad names.  You know how much I love you and in our family we treat each other with respect.”   
• Then you get to allow your child to make up the feeling of ill-will they created by coming up with some sort of way for them to pay you back, creating positive energy in your home again.
  • “It’ll really help if you make dinner tomorrow night with me to help put some positive energy into our relationship again.”
  • Or, you might ask them to do a special project around the house or even have them do a special cleaning of their room. 
  • They need to know that their behavior of treating you badly has a loving consequence.  If you want, you can even give them a few choices to make it easier for them to restore your relationship to a more healthy state. 

I often times have parents tell me that when they wait and let emotions calm down the teen will even apologize on their own.  Why?  Because their thinking brain came back online and even they could tell that they were out of control.   
 
You need to be sure that when they apologize that there still will be a consequence to restore your relationship.  If you are loving and calm the teen will understand and they will most likely willingly do whatever task you agree on.  A simple “I’m sorry” from them is just a bit too short and too easy. 

Some of you might say that your teen won’t take the time or effort to restore the relationship.  If that’s the case then there’s more going on and you should reach out to me for further coaching or get some other counselor involved, things usually don’t get better on their own.

I have one last thought especially for those of you who have younger kids.  This emotional behavior where the fight-and-flight response is activated happens at all ages so feel free to experiment on your 2-year old or 8-year old.  With them, when they have a tantrum or blow up, you wait until the emotion passes just like with teens .  It’s usually a lot easier with younger kids and their recovery time can be as short as a few minutes. 
The encouragement I want to give you is that it’s really effective to practice these skills when they’re young so that when they get into their teen years you can more easily pull off waiting during emotional and disrespectful outbursts until their thinking brain returns. 
​
I hope you enjoyed hearing some ideas about how to bring respect back into balance in your household and how knowing a bit about brain science can help you create healthier and happier family relationships. 

THE AUDIO PODCAST IS AVAILABLE HERE:  LISTEN

​·        Welcome to Parenting Decoded, a podcast for practical approaches to parenting.  I’m Mary Eschen and thanks for listening in.  I’m so excited that you’re listening to my first podcast ever.  I’m hoping that I can help you decode the deep mysteries of parenting.  I plan to tackle the most common parenting situations and give you really practical ideas that you can grasp and implement today and do it in a loving and empathetic manner. 

In my work for the past 8 years as a parent educator and coach I’ve found that a lot of cycles for healthy family life are used up with miscommunication, frustration and anger.  My view is the long-term one, helping you to see that what you do today will impact your adult child in the future.  I want to help you create respectful, responsible and independent adults.

With that said… let’s get started to create happier and healthier families!

Today I want to spend time talking about One of the biggest challenges where I live in the Silicon Valley,  Helicopter Parenting.   It’s become such a common term in our vocabulary that it’s even a verb – “to helicopter”.  We are pressured into hovering over kids trying to make everything perfect because we believe this will help them succeed in life and we don’t want to take any chances of our kids screwing that up.      

HOVERING - Some parents literally hover – over dinner to make sure their kids eat a nutritious meal, over homework to make sure it is done or all the answers are correct, or by going online to check grades and assignments. 

NAGGING - Other helicopter parents might use nagging as a way to “help” – “have you packed you homework in your backpack”, “I see your  homework is still on the table, it needs to go in your backpack”, “Let’s get in the car, do you have your homework?” all the way to “I dropped your homework off with your teacher since it never got in your backpack.” Some parents might do this with a loving attitude but lots of us are very, very frustrated that our kid just ignored us each time we tried to nag them to get their homework in the right place.  It’s enough to drive us crazy, isn’t it?

WHY PARENTS HELICOPTER?

WHY - The first thing to consider is the question of WHY a parent would helicopter.  I live in the Silicon Valley where my husband and I have raised our two boys.  It’s a very academically competitive environment and it seems helicoptering is the default style of parenting here.  All these Helicopter parents are wonderful, amazing parents who are trying to see that their kids are happy, that they have everything they need, that there are no bumps in the road for them or if there are bumps then those loving parents will minimize the bumps so their kids can move forward and not be thrown off course. 

I learn best with real life examples so I’m going to talk about some helicopter situations and why a parent might behave this way:

o    Scenario #1.  This is when the parent drops off a lunchbox to school when a child has forgotten it.  The child was reminded several times and it didn’t get done but the parent goes out of their way anyway.  Why would a parent do this?

The answer I get from parents is that they don’t want their child to be hungry, that they want them to eat a healthy lunch and unless they drop it off these things won’t happen.  Some parents think their child would starve!  Ha! 

o   Scenario #2 the helicopter parent wakes up their kid every morning by repeatedly coming into their room to make sure they get out of bed, that kid just doesn’t want to wake up!  You some days have to physically drag them out of bed since they keep going back to sleep.  The child takes forever to get out of bed and often times your entire family starts off their day frustrated and angry.  Why does the parent keep doing this day after day?

Parents feel that the kid can’t possibly take care of getting out of bed on time.  They need watching over because they would sleep right through an alarm and be late for school.

o   Scenario #3 - Now let’s move along to an older child and a helicopter parent who logs on to the school website to closely monitor assignments, grades and attendance.  Why would they do that?

​Parents feel if they don’t look at what’s online then their child won’t plan their assignments correctly, that they might have forgotten to turn in papers or even that a teacher recorded a grade incorrectly and it will impact their future in academics.  They need to make sure that doesn’t happen at all costs and those electronic school systems are a way of double checking. 

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE HELICOPTER – now let’s take those same examples – the lunchbox forgetting, the not waking up on time and the academic monitoring and see what the impact is on our kids

o   The lunchbox  
A kid learns that they don’t have to remember a lunchbox, that it’s really their parent’s job.  If they get to school without their lunch, they can blame the parent.  They can keep playing electronics or Legos or whatever in the morning and ignore when mom or dad politely asked them to pack their lunch in their backpack.  They have been given permission to tune out mom and dad since there’s nothing bad that happens, their lunch always magically appears.  Why should they bother packing their lunch?  Nagging isn’t all that bad, they got to keep doing something fun that they liked.

o   Waking up
The child learns they don’t have to be responsible for getting up, their parents will make sure via nagging or whatever to get them out of bed “on time”.  You know what?  They can even blame the parent for not doing their job of waking them up if they’re late to school.  “It’s my mom’s fault, she slept through her alarm and didn’t wake me up.”

o   Grade/Assignment checking
The child doesn’t bother taking a look at their own assignments, if they miss one they blame the parent for not telling them.  The child doesn’t worry or plan their studies since it is the parent who “owns” the schedule for when things need to be done. They basically get to check out of the planning.  Even if they are willing to do the work, they just wait to be told when and what to do. 

LETTING GO – I happen to know a lot about issues with helicopter parenting.  I’m a recovering helicopter parent.  I was just trying to be helpful and loving but in reality, I was robbing my son of the opportunity to learn for himself and take control of his life. 

One example that comes to mind is when he had trouble with reading in middle school.  He just hated to read so he’d keep putting it off, he’d do his other homework just fine but that reading… boy… it was hard.   He wasn’t a slacker student; he just didn’t want to read.  I finally realized that when I “helped” to set a reading plan with him or even sometimes read the book with him that I wasn’t teaching him anything, he was only learning to rely on me to help make a plan. 

So, one time I decided to put my helicoptering aside and let the responsibility be his, not mine.   My role was to give love and empathy in the event that he got behind.  Well, in no time my empathy was utilized.  “Oh, that’s so sad.  I hate it when I have to read a lot of pages in one night and have a book report due too.”  “Can I fix you a snack?”  In the end I think he had piled up about 200 pages to read in one night which was, of course, impossible.  Well, that was a rough night and I don’t think he ever finished reading that book but when he came home the next day loaded down with his next book assignment (his school was really in to reading lots of books one after the other) I was able to have a discussion with him about ideas about what HE could do to smooth things out in the future. 

I didn’t tell him what to do, we just thought about ideas about what to do and in the end, he decided to use a basic math equation -- # of pages divided by the number of days he had left to read a book.  For his first book that was 25 pages a day.  He looked at that number and was amazed at how reasonable that sounded.  It was so cool to see him realize that with a bit of his own planning that he could conquer what seemed like an impossible and hated task.  Reading was no longer hard for him and when he missed a day, he could recalculate the pages or just read double to catch up, it was doable. 

He was so happy and confident that even today as a senior in college he uses that same simple math calculation to help plan all types of work that he has to accomplish.  All because way back in middle school I let him own his own homework and he was able to learn how to pace his work.  And me, well, I just sit back as a very happy recovering helicopter mom knowing that I’ve helped to raise a responsible adult. 

Bottomline, we Helicopters think we are “helping” our kids but more than likely we are interfering with the development of our child’s sense of responsibility and their ability to solve problems on their own. 

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
I want to talk a little more about two unintended consequences of helicoptering that I’ve noticed in my time as a parenting coach – one is the impact on self-confidence and the other is how we create lazy kids:

o   SELF CONFIDENCE– when we constantly do things for our kids they often start believing they can’t do things themselves. This shows up in their hearts… they aren’t “smart” enough or “organized” enough or whatever. And they believe it!  In the case of a parent who is always checking on assignments and knowing when tests and assignments are due, they basically let their child know that they can’t do it.  If the parent isn’t there they will FAIL.  This robs their self-confidence and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy that they really can’t do it without mom or dad. Take the kid who makes their parent pack their sports equipment because the kid has learned that they’ll forget something and it will be a disaster so they don’t that responsibility since they’ll just screw it up and everyone will be mad and disappointed so mom and dad better keep packing that sports bag, they can do it so much better.
o   LAZY, ENTITLED KIDS – The other side effect of helicoptering is that we can create lazy, unmotivated kids.  Who wants one of those?!  Have you ever thought or even said that your kid is lazy?  That your child does not seem to care about their work?  Do you have the feeling that you are raising an entitled couch potato instead of an adult?  Helicoptering can give kids power over us.  We run around panicked doing things to cover up for our kids not wanting to do those same things.  When we start covering for them when they are young the problem just grows and grows. 

§  Take studying, for example.  If they won’t study on their own, parents force them to do the studying, they sit next to them to make sure they stay focused, they drag them through the work, planning assignments, correcting papers, hiring tutors.  Their child learns that mom or dad will keep everything on time and in order.  There will be some yelling and lots of nagging but, hey, they get to pass on being responsible, so it’s worth it.

§  How about kids who don’t do their chores?  They tell their parents they are too busy doing homework.  Those helicopter parents fall for that line all the time thus creating entitled kids who feel that there’s no need to contribute to the family, just to their own selfish educational pursuits.

How to overcome being a helicopter:
Let them fail
Let them learn what happens when they forget stuff, that the next time they’ll have an opportunity to remember what was missing
Let them know what a bad grade feels like and that they can study harder and recover
Let them not finish their homework and talk to the teacher about it
Let them not get to school on time and go to the office to get a late slip
Let them not practice their sport and tell their coach why
Let them forget their lunch and figure out how to mooch from their friends or ask folks in the cafeteria 

o   The secret is to Give them EMPATHY so they can get back up and try again!

Love will go far when you allow them to fail and they learn you will love them unconditionally.  If you yell at them, lecture them and reprimand them as they fail then they become panicked and brittle, will break instead of bend.  Comments like “Well,  if you had packed your lunch like I told you to this wouldn’t have happened.  I don’t have time to run to school every other day because you were too lazy to get your lunch into your backpack.  This really makes me angry.”

You want them to know that they can get themselves back up after they’ve fallen down, that they are resilient and that you’re on their side, not running the show but an encouraging spectator and coach who loves them beyond measure. Try saying something like this in a CALM, LOVING voice: “Wow, that must have been a hard to not have your lunch today.  Your snack was in there too.  What do you think you can do to make sure you pack it tomorrow? “

Is your child "sensitive"?  Do they cry at the drop of a hat?  When they can't find their shoes, do they yell and scream?  When they lose at sports do they have a tantrum?  How about when their sibling says something mean to them, do they go to anger in a second?  It's enough to drive us out of our skin some days, isn't it?  It's hard to slow down and figure out what's going on when the kids are pushing our buttons left and right!

Yes, all those situations really are enough to push our buttons.  How can you empathize with a kid who is screaming and yelling when they do it DAY AFTER DAY???  This isn't a one time thing, is it?  It happens ALL THE TIME!  You start cringing when your day opens up with your challenging child whining and complaining.  It makes you want to pull the covers over your head.  I agree that this is all too much for us to handle some days but I want to encourage you to persist... it's really, really important that you learn to use EMPATHY and learn to use it well.  In the long run, empathy will save your family from all sorts of trauma as your kids grow.  It's hard to believe but, it's true.

What can you do?  
1 - BREATHE AMD CHILL -Take a breath and chill out. Calming yourself down is SUPER important.  If your brain is activated into an emotional state you are shutting down the only way weapon you have in your tool box -- your brain.   Sometimes you will need to get yourself to a "safe" place where you can chill out.  You can ask your spouse to take over for a minute, take a walk around the block or, if that's not an option, then just shut yourself in the bathroom.  Yes, your kids will be pounding at the door to get to you but the wait will be worth if for them if the result is a calm mommy or daddy.   

2 - ACTIVATE YOUR BRAIN - Here's the part where, once calm, you might be able to take a bigger view of the picture of what's going on.  Little kids don't have many skills in their little toolboxes -- whining, crying, kicking, yelling, screaming.  Older kids can throw in skills like guilt and shame -- "You're the WORST mom!" or "Dad, you're so mean. I don't love you!" and even, "None of my friends like you, you have such bad taste!".  We need to THINK where those thoughts and feelings are coming from instead of reacting to the emotion they are producing. 

• Why is my 3 year old peeing in the corner when they are already potty trained?  Could it be that we just had a new baby and they are seeking attention from us? Or maybe I've been traveling or working so much they don't get to see me and the only time they get my attention is when they're misbehaving?
• Why is my 2nd grader getting pulled out of recess for aggressive behavior? Could it be that they're feeling powerless with their friends or they feel they have to win a game at any cost?  They might have a raging fire of anger building every time they go to school and it comes out on the playground. Have I missed this?  
• Why is my tween yelling at me when all I did was clean their room?  Could it be they thought I violated their space? That I threw out something that I didn't know was precious to them?
• Why is my teen not talking to me when clearly they violated our policy of no driving in cars with other high schoolers who don't have a year of driving under their belt?  I took away their phone for a week and now they won't even talk to me they are so angry.  Could it be they think I just ripped their lifeline from them?

3 - START EMPATHETIC RESPONSES - Lots of times our response as a parent is to TELL our kids what to do.  "Stop crying, you didn't fall down that hard."  "Your friends will let you play, just get back out there."  "Winning isn't everything, you really need to not get so upset about losing why don't you go to your room to settle down?" "It was your fault you broke our family rules.  Why do you do that all the time?"   We are basically invalidating their feelings by telling them what they should feel.  Empathy allows us to see their point of view and allow them permission to be sad or mad or whatever in the moment.  It's ok that they wanted to win the game. It's natural to be angry that some kid on the team played badly and cost them the game.  That is SUPER SAD!  Our job is to agree and do what's called "reflective listening": "Yes, wow, that was really too bad that the team lost. You sure are sad. "  Just let them cry or vent without you getting involved in the emotion.  Just LOVE THEM through it.  Do the "Yes, that's sad." routine over and over again to help the emotion pass.  Sometimes it can be days for that to happen but the child knowing that you love them unconditionally is what we're after.  They can be little monsters but, we love them.  They can tell and scream but, we love them.  We just keep loving them over and over again. That teen who doesn't have their phone can know from you that it's really hard to be without a phone if you say it lovingly and mean it with empathy in your voice. 

4 - AFTER THE EMOTION - once you have loved your child unconditionally through whatever the crisis was then and only then would you work to figure out a solution to the triggers that set off their emotion.  You would BRAINSTORM to figure out the why and what caused them to go ballistic.  When that toddler pees in the corner, you'd give them love at the time and have them clean up the mess in a calm and loving manner.  Then, later that day, you'd ask what was up with that.  At that young age they probably won't be able to tell you much but I would certainly recommend spending some one on one time with that child so that they feel unconditionally loved, not shamed for peeing in the corner.  Look on it as a learning experience for your child to learn to clean up messes.  

That teen who feels you've ruined their life for taking away their phone needs to know that you love them and won't yell back during times of disrespect, that you love them too much to engage in a yelling match.  But, after the issue has settled down you are welcome to circle back to let them know that you love them too much to let them treat people badly and they need to make that up to you.  The older the child, the longer this time between emotion and repair can take.