Who's pulling whose strings?!

I always caution parents new to this method that, when they start to change what they're doing and saying, things may - and probably will - get worse before they get better.

There's a perfectly logical reason for this: As a parent begins to change, the child or teen will often escalate their acting-out behaviour in an attempt to get the parent back under control.

Huh?! Yes, you heard that right.

Shortly after I joined the parent group, I stopped yelling, screaming, nagging and threatening in response to what my teens were doing. Bewildered and confused, two of them went to my Dad's and said, "Grandpa, you have to do something about Mom. She's completely out of control!"

A reasonable human being might think they'd have been relieved. But teens, like everyone else, like predictability, even when they don't like the form it takes.

My teens had come to rely on certain responses: when they fought, I would interfer and yell; when they left a mess in the kitchen, I would nag; when they skipped classes, I would lecture; when they came home late, I would threaten. They knew what to expect - and they liked the predictability. The unpleasantness of it all was just the cost of doing business with me.

The following excerpt from Alyson Schafer's new book Honey, I Wrecked the Kids beautifully illustrates what's going on in this dance with our teens. When I read this to the parents in the parent group a few weeks ago, there was a quick and dramatic shift in some of their thinking.

"Donna sits on the side of the sandbox to keep an eye on Owen while he plays because he keeps trying to put the sand in his mouth. 'Yucky,' Mommy says each time. 'Not in the mouth, Owen. Yucky - sand is for the sandbox. Put it down. Not for eating,' and so on.

"Owen is learning that every time he lifts his sand-filled fist to his mouth, his mother starts talking like a windup doll. Instead of learning not to eat sand, he is learning how to make Mommy talk! Mom could instead say nothing, let Owen experience a mouthful of sand, and he would quickly realize that it is indeed 'yucky.'" (p. 79)

So who's controlling whom here?!

Maybe the nagging, yelling, lecturing and reminding that we're so committed to are teaching our teens something other than what we intended!