Many teenagers go through periods of moodiness and rebellion. To parents, acts of defiance are disrespectful, rude, and contentious. To teenagers, it’s about becoming a separate individual from their parents. Understanding why teens do what they do, and giving them the freedom to explore different roles, beliefs, expressions, and behaviors prepares them for the transition from childhood to an adult.
Teen rebellion doesn’t necessarily mean your child won’t grow up to benefit society, but it does mean that from your teenager’s perspective, he feels caught in a struggle to create his own style. Sometimes bad choices prevail – choices that differ from your own. Mistakes are inevitable. However, the desire for independence and the failures that tag along with it help teens learn and grow.
Understanding Teenagers – Focus on Who Your Teen Is
Do you feel worried because your teenager is going in a different direction than you’d like him too? Does he display selfishness or a need for instant gratification? Is he spiteful, vengeful, irresponsible, or immature? While some teenagers do reach a point where they are totally out of control, most rebelliousness and strange behaviors only appear problematic from a parent’s point of view.
To teens, there is a reason for what they do. Taking the time to discover that reason and using what you learn to help your child work through his issues, will result in a more appropriate response to the stresses in his life. Understanding teenagers takes time and effort. It requires parents to set aside their initial knee-jerk reaction long enough to find the motivating factor at the heart of the child’s behavior. It requires parents to seek enlightenment before automatic correction, to look beyond what the child says and does to what is actually happening in his life.
In the book Positive Discipline for Teenagers: Empowering Your Teen and Yourself Through Kind and Firm Parenting, authors Jane Nelson and Lynn Lott recommend that “Instead of trying to mold your teen to fit your perception of how he or she should be, focus on who your teen is.” The goal is to let go of who you want your child to become, accept him as he is, and let him find and experience his own way through understanding his needs, rather than attempting to impose your ideas upon him.
Rebellion is Often a Fight for Independence
The teen phase sits between childhood and adulthood. It’s a transitional process where the child breaks free from the confinement and parental-controlled lifestyle of a child to emerge as an independent adult. This step brings responsibility, self discipline, and individuality. What teens need most during the transitional period is understanding, but they also need support. When parents don’t accept the process or appreciate their teenager’s individuality, rebellion often results like:
- not wanting to be with, or go anywhere with family
- listening to music their parents hate
- wearing colors their parents don’t like
- wearing clothing their parents don’t approve of
- not wanting to clean their room
- not wanting to take a shower every day
- sneaking out to be with friends their parents dislike
- adopting a moral code, or code of ethics opposite to their parents
- performing strange behaviors like dying their hair bright blue
Rebellion can be mild, or it can take on a more delinquent flair. It can be passive-aggressive, or more physically and/or emotionally abusive. However, most of these actions strike out and attack “what parents value most,” Nelson says. Whatever is most important to you – whether that is work values, morals, or religious beliefs – teens will fight against it.
Testing the Boundaries
In the foreword of the book What’s Happening to My Teen?: Uncovering the Sources of Rebellion, author Jim Burns lightly discusses the experimental phase that sits between childhood and becoming an adult. According to Burns, for a teenager to find their beliefs and values they must dump some of what they’ve been taught. For parents, that can be frightening and painful. However, Burns cautions parents not to overreact when this happens, because getting rid of everything you are is how a teen finds his self.
While boundaries and consistent discipline are still needed during this transitional period (not permissiveness), watching and allowing your teen to experiment with different values, beliefs, and ideas gives him the space to learn and grow. Most teenagers do circle back around, after testing the boundaries and learning what works and what doesn’t for them, but parents also have to prepare for the possibility their children won’t return. The teen may find and like a different path better.
Teen Rebellion is a Sign of Change
When teen rebellion begins, parents can know their child is beginning to transcend into an independent adult. They can either fight the change by imposing their beliefs and attitudes upon their child, and thereby lengthen or escalate the rebellion, or they can seek to understand their teenager’s needs – what is motivating and driving the strange and adverse behavior. Most of the time, helping your teen work through his issues, rather than your own, will lessen the need to rebel.
However, regardless of your child’s choices, mistakes, and resulting beliefs, ethics, and values, always make sure you appreciate their uniqueness. The goal isn’t to form them into a cookie-cutter replication of you. The goal is to help your teenager become an independent, successful adult.
Sources
Gregston, Mark, What’s Happening to My Teen?: Uncovering the Sources of Rebellion, Harvest House Publishers, June 2009.
Los Angeles Times, Ned Parker, “An Iraqi Girl’s Thinly Veiled Teenage Rebellion,” December 14, 2010.
Nelson, Jane, Ed.D., and Lynn Lott, M.A., Positive Discipline for Teenagers: Empowering Your Teen and Yourself Through Kind and Firm Parenting, Prima Publishing, April 2000.
Psychology Today, Lisa Baron, “Understanding Adolescents,” December 3, 2008.
Vickie Ewell - Vickie has worked with autistic individuals for 9 years. She has celiac disease and specializes in gfcf living.
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