Ep 52: Get Your Teen to Think

Dr. Jennifer Salerno shares communication tactics that you can
put into practice today to start reshaping your relationship with
your teen. As founder of the non-profit Possibilities for Change,
Jennifer knows a thing or two about impacting the lives of teens!


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Full show notes


At some point as a parent, you’ve gone into your child’s room and
stumbled across something that left you shocked. You never know
when you’re going to have conversations about risky behaviors
with your child, you just don’t want it to be too late. But it
can be hard to get through to your teen, especially when they’re
fighting tooth and nail to gain their independence. Luckily,
there are ways to reconnect with an aloof teen!


With some easy-to-follow tips for improving parent-teen
relationships, you can make a lasting positive impact on your
child’s decision making, even when you’re not around. That’s the
topic of today’s episode, “Get Your Teen to Think.”


I spoke with Dr. Jennifer Salerno to gather some tips for
improving parent-teen relationships in her book, Teen Speak: A
Guide to Understanding and Communicating with Teens. Her
organization, Possibilities for Change, trains medical
professionals on how to speak effectively with their teenage
patients. After working intimately with adolescents and
colleagues to refine the program, her research has resulted in
the RAAPS risk screening system, which has tips for improving
parent-teen relationships and is used by medical professions all
over the country to mitigate risky behaviors among teens.


RAAPS operates primarily through two core elements:
UnderstandingReflection

Dr. Salerno’s method of communication pairs medical research with
these two easy-to-use concepts, which is why RAAPS is so
applicable to teens at home. Here’s how her tips for improving
parent-teen relationships work:


Understanding


The first step is strengthening your understanding of one
another. Understanding is more than just acknowledging what your
teen is saying when they come to you with a problem. It’s when
you comprehend the deeper meaning of their experiences and why
they feel the way they do. According to Dr. Salerno, practicing
and demonstrating understanding is how you can initiate these
tips for improving parent-teen relationships.


Let’s say your teen is harboring a negative attitude. You ask
them what’s wrong, and they respond with, “I hate being short!”
Initially, your parental instincts might tell you to help them
maintain a positive attitude or encourage them to forget about
trivial problems. But blatant positive reinforcement and avoiding
negativity don’t really address what is causing their
unhappiness. To implement the first of many tips for improving
parent-teen relationships, you’ll need to investigate why this is
a problem, why it’s important to them, and what it says about the
bigger picture of what your teen is going through.


You can practice understanding your teen by stating that whatever
is troubling them is in fact a worthwhile problem. Then,
consciously take the time to step out of your perspective on the
matter and start thinking about this issue from your teen’s point
of view. This alerts your readiness to listen and prepares you
for understanding with an empathetic approach to communication.


Understanding helps you effectively communicate by making your
child feel heard. When teens don’t feel like they’re being heard,
even in trivial conversations, they can start to feel isolated.
Reaffirming your teen’s external problems and burgeoning a
consistent understanding of their core struggles are key steps to
improve your relationship. Kids that experience the kind of
solidarity produced by understanding are more likely to open up
to you about what’s really troubling them


As a parent, you want your teen to feel solidarity with you about
their troubles so you can start at a more intimate level the next
time you talk. Soon, you’ll start to notice the big picture, or
patterns of your child’s more consistent insecurities and
concerns. This can alert you to the causes of potential
distressed behavior if these problems further develop.


Reflection


So how can you build off this deeper understanding of your child
to further mitigate risky behavior? Dr. Salerno’s tips for
improving parent-teen relationships encourage us to help your
child think through situations. This is the essence of
reflection; using serious thought and consideration to plan and
problem-solve.


Reflection functions in communication by allowing you and your
teen to exchange ideas together. Once you’ve dug deeper into the
“being short” problem, you might learn that it’s actually about
your teen not being able to join the basketball team and hang out
with their friends. Now you can both try to figure out a
solution. Maybe you can invite their friends over this weekend or
find some other way to have fun outside of practice. This is how
you can get your teen to routinely think through their issues
before resorting to erratic reactions.


In order to apply Dr. Salerno’s principles of understanding and
reflection, it’s important to establish some ground rules before
you engage your teen. This is one of my favorite tips for
improving parent-teen relationships because it’s definitive and
can help you and your teen develop respect for one another.
First, recognize that it is completely normal for your teen to
dramatize their conflicts. Meaning, this is just a phase of
cognitive development. When met with patience, you can employ
understanding and reflection in an effective manner.


If your teen exclaims that they’ve just gone through a messy
breakup and that they’ll never show their face in school again,
you can practice understanding by filtering through the drama and
thinking through what this situation means to your teen.
Demonstrate that you’re trying to comprehend their statement by
repeating back to them what they just said. “This person broke up
with you, you’re upset, and you don’t want to show your face in
school again.” Not only does this help you process the
information, but it acts as a second voice for your teen to hear
the situation outside their head.


According to Dr. Salerno’s tips for improving parent-teen
relationships, responding with unexpected observations about the
situation can deescalate high drama situations by having your
teen reflect on the consequences of their thinking, you might
want to respond with something like, “Okay! You’ll have to drop
out then and start working on your GED.” This response isn’t
punitive, but rather seriously engages what your teen is saying.
An unexpected statement like this provides your teen with
forethought about their actions. If your teen never goes to
school again because of this break up, they will have to find
alternative means of staying educated and working on their career
in a new setting.


By taking your teen’s ideas seriously, you’re able to highlight
discrepancies in their reasoning and get them to collaborate with
you about solutions. In regard to more serious situations like
drug use, sex, and drunk driving, the method remains the same:
start by understanding your teen and then help them reflecting on
the outcome of their decisions. Over time, applying these tips
for improving parent-teen relationships will deter risky behavior
whe...