Tips for Parents and Adolescents During Adolescent Development

Are there "secrets" of good communication with teens? While adolescence can be a trying period for both child and parent, the home should not become a battleground if both parents and young people make special efforts to understand one another. View the following guidelines for additional help when dealing with family communication.

What Parents Can Do

As a parent, you can make communication between you and your teenager much smoother. Try the tips listed below:

• Give your undivided attention when your children want to talk. Don't read, watch television or busy yourself with other tasks.
• Listen calmly and concentrate on hearing and understanding your children's point of view.
• Speak to your children as courteously and pleasantly as you would to a stranger. Your tone of voice can set the tone of a conversation.
• Understand your children's feelings — even if you don't always approve of their behavior. Try not to make judgments. Keep the door open on any subject. Be an "askable" parent.
• Avoid belittling and humiliating your children and laughing at what may seem to you to be naïve or foolish questions and statements.
• Encourage your children to "test" new ideas in conversation by not judging their ideas and opinions, but instead by listening and then offering your own views as plainly and honestly as possible. Love and mutual respect can coexist with differing points of view.
• Help your children build self-confidence by encouraging their participation in activities of their choice (not yours).
• Make an effort to commend your children frequently and appropriately. Too often, we take the good things for granted and focus on the bad, but everyone needs to be appreciated.
• Encourage your children to participate in family decision making and to work out family concerns together with you. Understand that your children need to challenge your opinions and your ways of doing things to achieve the separation from you that's essential for their own adult identity.

What Adolescents Can Do

Adolescents can also make parent-child conversation easier. Try these helpful tips the next time you want to talk to your parent:

• Avoid looking at your parents as the enemy. Chances are that they love you and have your best interests in mind, even if you don't necessarily agree with their way of showing that.
• Try to understand that your parents are human beings, with their own insecurities, needs and feelings.
• Listen to your parents with an open mind, and try to see situations from their point of view.
• Share your feelings with your parents so that they can understand you better.
• Live up to your responsibilities at home and in school so that your parents will be more inclined to grant you the kind of independence you want and need.
• Bolster your criticisms of family, school and government with suggestions for practical improvements.
• Be as courteous and considerate to your own parents as you would be to the parents of your friends.