Parenting your son or daughter during adolescence can feel unfamiliar. Some days it feels like, suddenly, your child cares more about their friends than about their family. They don’t do the things around the house you ask them to do. They don’t seem to prioritize what you would like them to. And they often forget your reminders.
It’s no wonder teens get labeled with words like “irresponsible,” “rebellious,” “entitled,” or “lazy,” right?
What in the world is going on?!
As a professional counselor, youth pastor, and mom of 2 adolescents, I find teens to be some of my favorite people to work with. Despite the bad rap teens often get, I’m here to tell you that they can easily become some of your favorite people, too! It’s a lot easier to care well for the adolescents in your life when you understand where they are coming from with their new, sometimes confusing behavior.
Why Teenagers Act the Way They Do
Let’s take a quick tour of the teenage brain. The whole thing is a construction site. There is so much going on in there, more than almost any other time in a person’s life. This is a really great time in life for developing skills, ideas, and creativity. Teens have so much potential!
Brains develop from the “bottom up,” meaning the instincts we have for protection and reaction develop first, beginning in early childhood. The very last thing to develop in the human brain is the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for mitigating risk, planning, and making decisions — and it won’t finish developing until around the age of 25.
The challenges of raising teens — and much of the reason teens get a bad reputation — have to do with their brain development. The emotional centers of a teen’s brain are among the first to develop. That means your teen’s emotional reactions can show up fast and hot, well before the reasoning part of their brain gets a say. The part of the brain that controls executive function and decision-making won’t be fully developed until your teen is in their twenties. It is literally as if they are driving a car without brakes!
The Gas Pedal and the Smoke Alarm
It’s not just that your teen’s brain has no brakes yet. The accelerator is already fully installed and pressed to the floor, while the brakes are still being built, piece by piece, in a project that won’t be finished until your kid is closer to 25 than to 15.
That accelerator has a name. It’s the reward system in your teen’s brain, and it is revved up during adolescence in a way it will never quite be again. A text notification, a joke that lands with friends, a risky idea that sounds thrilling at 11 pm — all of it hits harder for your teen than it would for you. It’s not weakness. It’s biology working exactly as designed, just not on the timeline you’d prefer.
That fast, hot emotional reaction I mentioned comes from a part of the brain called the amygdala, and it works a lot like a smoke alarm. It goes off immediately and loudly, long before the part of the brain that could calmly ask, “Is this actually a fire?” gets a chance to weigh in. Your teen’s smoke alarm is more sensitive than yours, and it’s wired straight into the gas pedal. So when your son or daughter yells, “You never let me do anything!” over a completely reasonable curfew, it isn’t really about the curfew. That’s just the alarm going off before the reasoning part of their brain even gets a say.
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Inside an Overwhelmed Teen Brain
Your kid who doesn’t remember what you asked them to do, despite many requests, isn’t necessarily being lazy or inconsiderate. Their brain is doing a lot of work, in addition to school, sports, music, and tasks at home. They may need help with systems for completing tasks, and they will definitely need a lot of understanding during these years. Being a teenager is exhausting!
I hear some of you saying, “But Sarah, my kid takes everything out on me. I am so tired, and I don’t know what to do anymore!”
I hear you.
Some of us end up feeling like human pincushions while our teens navigate adolescence. And then there are those of us who wonder why our child suddenly stopped talking to us. It’s an emotionally challenging time for everyone involved.
So why does it feel like your kid has zero brakes and a foot slammed on the gas? It’s because that’s almost exactly happening biologically under the hood. Once you start seeing their behavior as development rather than defiance, it gets a lot harder to take personally.
4 Key Mindset Shifts for Parenting Adolescents
Here are a few things I want you to know as you navigate this season:
- Not everything directed at you is personal. Just like when you are “up to here” with life stress and end up snapping at someone you love, your child may not always feel in control of their emotions.
- Name it to tame it. The more your child can name their feelings, the more the intense ones can be tamed. Some kids don’t know what they’re feeling, and that lack of knowledge only adds to feelings of frustration.
- Model emotional regulation. We are not born into the world knowing how to regulate. In order for our teens to learn how to regulate, they have to have it demonstrated for them. The better you can regulate your own emotions (that is, feel them, but then be able to be in control of what to do with them), the better your kids will be able to learn through your modeling.
- Be their safe space. As the adults in our kids’ lives, being the safe space in our kids’ lives requires us to do the work that allows us to be just that. We may need our own counseling, counseling with our kid, and to learn to be in tune with our own emotions, to name a few ways we can nurture ourselves as the safe spaces in our kids’ lives.
Finding Hope in the Construction Phase
I said it at the start, and I meant it: teens are some of my favorite people. What feels like chaos in your house right now isn’t a character flaw, in you or in them. It’s construction. It’s loud, it’s messy, there’s dust everywhere, and some days it feels like nothing is getting built at all.
But something is being built. And what gets built — the person your kid is becoming — is worth every bit of the mess.
Written by Sarah Koller, MA, LPC
If you’re in a season where you could use some help with this, whether that’s counseling for your teen, family sessions, or just someone alongside you as things get hard, I’d be honored to be that person. We aren’t meant to do this alone, and you might be surprised how much lighter the work feels with company.
