Changing your teen's behavior may be a family issue

Your teen slams the door after arriving home from school.

It’s been one minute and you can already feel their attitude seeping into the room. You try to communicate and you get a cold reply. You think, “At least this time they acknowledged my existence, right?” You feel frustrated and confused, and communicating with your teen feels like a full-time job. 

You want the best for them, but at this point, you’ve lost all patience and your bandwidth for coming up with new approaches is waning. You wonder, “Why isn’t my teen responding to me appropriately?” 

It is obvious that my teen isn’t complying, so now what? 

While it can be easy to shrug off your teen’s behavior as something that “just happens” or “hormones” or “a phase” the truth is that your teen’s behavior is a family issue. The root of their behavior is familial not only in the way it affects every single family member but also because your teen’s reaction is a composite of your own behavior. You can't necessarily change the way your teen is behaving directly, but you can take how you are contributing to it into consideration. Are you allowing them to be who they are? Are you being controlling? Are you listening generously? Do you hear them out and allow them to have a voice? Are you busy, absent, and disengaged?

Let’s break that down a bit.

As parents, if we aren’t analyzing our own behaviors and understanding how we could be affecting our teens, we could be missing a huge piece of the teen behavioral puzzle. If we want our teen to not use their phone at the dinner table, have we considered our own phone use and what it directly communicates to them? This logic can be applied to many of our behaviors when we see parts of our teen’s behaviors that we don’t find appropriate.

As parents if we don’t take a look at how we are talking to our family and analyze our own behaviors, we could be missing the piece of our lives that is inspiring our teen’s bad behavior. Remember, respect is a two way street. If you find your teen isn’t listening, it is important to understand when you aren’t fully listening to your teen.

If you’ve done your work analyzing your own behavior and you still aren’t getting through to your teen, you have a lot of different options. Family therapy being one of them.

Family therapy is a viable option to resolve communication issues and conflicts in the family. Having a third party mediating the conversation can be incredibly beneficial, and a therapist can help find the patterns that we can’t see ourselves. Also, sometimes teens find it easier to talk to a third party. The bottom line is that changing your teen’s behavior is a family issue and it will take the attention of each of you to make a meaningful change.

Seeking support through family therapy isn’t a mark of failure. It is a sign each person in your family cares enough to grow as an individual and a family. It is a mark of deep caring.

Your family is comprised of the people who understand you the most, but they also can be the ones that know how to get under your skin. If you are out of ideas about how to repair your family dynamic and you’re done with the struggle, contact us for a free consultation. 

We want to help your family heal and recover. Ease is only one email away.