Teenage is that one period of your life when you are convinced of your absolute rightness. As you age, you realize or are made to realize, how little you know and how wrong you have been. But in those glorious teenage years, it is always the others, and mostly your parents, who are wrong.
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” – Mark Twain.
Let’s admit it, teenagers have it rough. It’s a stressful phase in life. They start to grow distant from their parents, whom they relied on for guidance up to this point. Instead, they find themselves more and more dependent on friends for validation, for fashion advice, for everything. And that gap between teenagers and parents grows insurmountable. Parents suddenly go from being the center of their universe to being ancient, boring, outdated, and clueless. You want to protect them during this tough time, but they are not open to your help.
And so the teenager is thrown, fairly rudderless, into the world of a young adult. It is a pressure cooker of parental expectations, self-expectations, peer pressure, body image issues, and a need for external validation. It’s a tough time for both the teen and the parent. But there are a few things you can do as a parent, to help your teen, yourself and your family navigate these challenging years.
Parental expectation
Academic pressures start to mount, driven by parents, or teenagers themselves, or a combination of both. Everywhere teens turn, they have to face the multi-headed monster of board exams, competitive exams, and clarity about their future career, even if they haven’t decided exactly what it is going to be. If they are focused on cracking competitive exams, they get cut off from social life altogether. They have to drop everything else they are interested in, such as sports or arts or dance and music and give themselves over to cracking that exam.
What can parents do?
Equip them: One neglected aspect of academic pressure is that we cram them with information, but we do nothing to help them with retention, nothing to help increase their concentration. Give them tools such as Sudarshan Kriya, the breathing technique taught in the Art of Living Programs, which will help increase attention and retention capacity while reducing mental stress. Throwing them into such a rigorous course of study with nothing to aid them is not being fair to them. Providing them with the right tools for this can make these years of preparation less stressful and more productive.
Give them space for failure without withdrawing your love: The most important factor in instilling self-esteem in your teenagers and giving them space for creativity and perhaps failure. Do not impose your ideas on them. Instead, share your vision with them, and persuade them if their vision is wrong. Don’t withdraw your love for small things. When they are assured of your love and support, they will be able to make better decisions for their future. In fact, they will be able to focus better even on the present, for a relaxed mind is the key to concentration.
“Bringing up a teenager is like riding a horse. You cannot leave it too loose; you cannot hold it too tight. So you have to know exactly how much pressure you have to give to the child. If you give more than that, it will not be good, they will rebel or they will go crazy. But with no pressure at all, they will do nothing. Tomorrow they will blame you for not disciplining them. So we need to find that fine balance; we need to walk the tightrope.” – Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Need for validation
Do you remember how extreme your feelings were in your teenage? Thanks to those nebulous things called hormones, everything feels exaggerated. Small disagreements with family members turn into big arguments. Even daily events and discussions can feel dramatic to a teenager. When they try to talk to parents, they feel judged, criticized, or unheard. If they try to sort it out for themselves, those very hormones will make the world seem even darker. Social media can also be misleading, making them believe that the lives they see online have more value than their own. Only the support system of friends gets them through this testing time. And they turn to friends for everything from life advice to experiments with the new and unknown world of adulthood.
What can parents do?
Teenagers want to be heard without being judged. That’s why they find it easier to talk to their friends than their family.
“There is an old saying in Sanskrit: ‘When your son or daughter turns sixteen, behave with them like a friend. Don’t be their teachers. Don’t tell them what they should do, what they shouldn’t be doing; but share their difficulties. A friend is one who is on your level. A friend understands you, moves with you, with your emotions, with your difficulties. So if you behave as a friend to them and not as a parent, they open up to you.” – Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Be a part of their world. Learn their language, their aspirations, their fads, fashions, and apps. It might sound painful, but listen to some of their music, or just look up the latest hit song. Can you imagine how surprised your teenager will be if you drop a reference to that in your next conversation? It need not be a constant effort on your part, but it will help you to understand the world your teen lives in. And you can finally start building that bridge to overcome the communication gap between you and your teenager.
Peer pressure and trying new things
Teenage is when you start building your own identity, trying to come up with your own sense of style and sense of being. You’re defining who you are. And parents may or may not agree with that definition. You might wonder what happened to your sweet little boy or girl. But this is part of the road from childhood to adulthood.
The peer pressure to ‘fit in’ takes its own toll. With their friends and peers, they experiment with new ideas, forbidden acts, and rebel without a cause. Maybe their friends are not acceptable, their style seems inappropriate, and their actions are questionable. They go through a painful growth phase, physically and emotionally. Coming to terms with how their body looks during puberty can take time and patience.
The good news is that the age of experimentation is short. Once they understand the style that suits them, they won’t experiment with fashion. Once they figure out the path they want to take, they will stick to it.
What can parents do?
Make friends with the friends of your teenagers: Your teens won’t listen to you directly. But you can influence them through their friends. Make your house welcoming for the friends of your teens. Become a good uncle or aunty to them. That way, you can have a network of parents who are able to influence each other’s children and guide them towards what is right.
As they start to discover and assert their own individual self, it is bound to cause some emotions between the mother, the father, and the teen. There are times when you will have to simply swallow the anger of your child; times when you have no choice but to set the boundaries they cannot cross; and times when you can reach out and bond with each other. It is not always easy to have a good relationship with your grown-up adult children, but the foundation laid in childhood and teenage can certainly pave the way.
Look for a children and teens program here.
The article is authored by Ms. Vennela Nandury, an Edupreneur, a SKY instructor, and an associate director for The Art of Living Children and Teens.
