Improve your relationship with your teenager

Raising a teenager is a challenge that many people find daunting.

Umhlanga based clinical psychologist Joanne Goss said the influence of the relationship between adolescent and parent is vital in ensuring the healthy emotional well-being of the teenager.

Goss said the relationship is often delicate because the adolescent commonly experiences conflicts between wanting to please their parents and gain their approval (which often means following parents’ ideas, values and beliefs) but also wanting to do things their own way which probably entails following beliefs and ideas and participating in activities which are very different from those of their parents.

This struggle often causes distress in the relationship and results in many challenges for the adolescent and parent together.

“I always encourage parents to ‘enter into the world of their teen’,” said Goss. She explains that this strategy involves actively trying to understand life from the teenager’s perspective.

Telling the teenager what to do or how to do it or imposing ideas and opinion without first trying to understand what the adolescent thinks and feels is a common cause of damage to the parent-teen relationship.

Goss added that the sense of both parties being heard and understood arising from simple engagement often increases feelings of self-esteem and self-worth.

“Parents are encouraged to engage with their adolescent by participating in activities which the adolescent enjoys. I often recommend doing a Pintrest board with your teen, asking them to teach you a new card game or watching and talking about a favourite YouTube video,” said Goss.

Goss said she found in her work that activities which have an element of structure (or at least start out that way) to be more useful in relationship-building than those that are completely structured or unstructured.

She added that parents more than likely need to enter their own adolescent self to engage with their adolescent.

So cut them some slack, and try to remember what it felt like when you were a teenager.