Teens Search in Dangerous Places for Safe People to Talk to.
Teens are absolutely OVERWHELMED. They are bombarded with messages about who they should be, what they should do and how they should look. They discover that talking about their experience helps them to make sense of it and brings a little relief, but finding people who won't judge them is the difficult part. They are in a constant search for people who they can process their thoughts and feelings with who won't judge them or tell others what they shared. In an attempt to find those people, teens often turn to strangers online. In the best case scenario, the person on the other end of that first message is also a teen searching for the same thing, but there are worst case scenarios that we do our best to help our teens avoid. As parents, we CAN be a safe person our teen chooses to talk to, but we've likely been trying to help our teens from OUR perspective, rather than from THEIR perspective. Many times parents don't realize that we have to change our parenting habits if we want to have a close relationship with our teen.
To have a close relationship with our teen, one where they choose to tell us things, we must have a reputation for being a safe person to talk to. What do teens consider a safe person?
From a teen's perspective, a SAFE person is someone who:
Suspends their own thoughts, opinions and judgments
Accepts how I’m feeling and doesn’t try to change it
Fosters connection, not correction
Empathizes with my emotional experience
Let's break this down a bit.
A SAFE person is someone who suspends their own thoughts, opinions and judgments.
This is one of the hardest things for all human beings to do, not just parents. We want to be helpful and we think we know the answer to their problem. Our problem-solving minds start evaluating based on OUR experiences as soon as the other person starts talking. The problem with this is: 1. We stopped listening and started forming our eloquent response 2. Our eloquent response is rarely helpful and actually serves to disconnect us from our teen rather than connect us. 3. It robs our teen of practicing their developing critical thinking and decision-making skills that they are going to need to have honed by the time they leave our home!
1. We cannot adequately attune to the needs of another human being if we are forming a response in our minds before they have even finished sharing. If you have trouble with this, you are not alone. As Americans, we are not good listeners. We just wait for our chance to be heard. If you choose to work on one thing, work on active listening skills. It will change all of your relationships for the better!
2. No matter how brilliant our advice is, our wisdom is rarely accepted by our own teenager. Why? Teenagers are in the absolutely normal developmental stage of individuation. They are trying to figure out how THEY handle problems and make decisions based on what they understand about life, not how WE would handle the situation if we were in their shoes. 9 times out of 10, teens already know the advice their parent is going to give them, and there is nothing they dread more than a lecture. If you are one to give your unsolicited opinion or advice when your teen shares something with you, you have likely already been branded as UNSAFE by your teen and they will look elsewhere for someone to talk to.
3. The main reason our teen isn't interested in our advice is because of their recent brain development! They used to accept what we said as being truth when they were younger because they lacked the ability to question it. Meaning, children don't have the ability to think in complex terms about abstract ideas. Young children drive their parents nuts with the "why" question, but they accept their parents' answers as fact. As children progress through the teen years, their brain has developed new abilities to think in shades of gray, rather than black and white. This means they are critically thinking about their own decisions. This is a GOOD thing! Teenagers need to be able to practice this new ability. When our babies learn to walk for the first time, we often allow them the freedom (within reason) to practice their new skill. We patiently walk at a snail's pace allowing our toddler to get some much needed practice in with those wobbly, underdeveloped legs. In the same way, our teen needs to practice using their wobbly, under--developed decision-making skills if they are going to be able to make strong decisions when they are out of our house.
A SAFE person is someone who accepts how I am feeling and doesn't try to change it.
This one can often feel impossible to many parents, but it's what actually makes us a SAFE person to our teen if we can do it. The reality is that as parents, our emotional state is often strongly affected by the emotional state of our teen. It is almost as if their moods are contagious. Sometimes we feel like we aren't doing our job as parents if we don't "make it better" for our kids when they are hurting. Unfortunately, we become so emotionally uncomfortable by our teens emotions, that we often try to change the way they feel, and it only pushes them away. If you haven't already, read the previous blog post on the 8 Unhelpful Responses That Push Teens Away.
A SAFE person is someone who fosters connection, not correction.
This is a habit many parents have left over from years of course-correcting their child. Children seem to accept correction from adults as being a fact of life, but teens become resentful of it. Their greatest developmental task as an adolescent is individuation. This is where they get to prove to themselves and to the world, that they are worthy of the respect adults get. When a parent corrects their behavior or questions their decisions, it is like being told they are not worthy of the respect they long for and it can crush their belief in themselves. If a teen is doing drugs or is making reckless decisions, certainly those behaviors need to be curbed for the teen's safety and corrective measures need to be put into place. We must choose our battles very carefully once our children become teens. If we try to correct in areas that they need to develop self-sufficiency in by the time they leave for college, our corrections will not only deflate their confidence in their ability to make decisions, but will also create resentment and distance between us and them.
A SAFE person is someone who empathizes with my emotional experience.
Empathy is putting ourselves in someone else's shoes and trying to understand what life may be life from THEIR perspective. It is showing them that we care so much about them, that we want to know what they are feeling and we actually want to be with them in their experience. It is profoundly connecting. Sometimes empathy can be tricky to understand if it hasn't been modeled for us by our own parents. Here is a short video illustrating an excerpt from the world-famous Ted Talk given by researcher Brene Brown regarding responding to vulnerability with empathy.
If we want to prevent our teens from searching for a SAFE person in dangerous places, we have to practice being SAFE people in the way we respond and interact with them. It is not easy to adjust to the developmental needs of a teenager. If we are able to see them as adults-in-training and understand that their actions of pushing us away are indeed a sign of their normal human development: the need to individuate, and not as a sign that we went wrong somewhere and raised unappreciative, entitled jerks, we may be more willing and able to meet the new needs that have emerged in this stage of life and maintain connection. If we are able to maintain connection, our teens will be able to process the stresses of adolescence and know they are not alone.
