How to really love your teen by D. Ross Campbell, MD is a wonderful insightful read for raising teenagers.

Below are some of my favorite excerpts and teachings from the book: 

Guiding a child through the teenage years is a complex venture.

Think of teenagers as “children in transition”.  They are not young adults. Their emotional needs are those of children. Many people in authority over teenagers overlook their childlike needs for feeling love and acceptance, for being taken care of, and for knowing that someone really cares for them. Far too many teenagers today feel that no one really cares about them. 

 

In the book there is an example of Debbie, who was “happy and content during her earlier years”. She was a complacent child who made few demands on her parents, teachers, or others. So no one suspected that she did not feel genuinely loved and accepted by her parents. She didn’t have the precious and crucial feeling of being completely and unconditionally loved and accepted. 

 

Teenagers are the most vulnerable persons in our society, and their deepest need is love.

 

Two of the most frightening results of this apathy are depression and revolt against authority. 

 

The home is stronger than any other influence in determining how happy, secure, and stable teenagers are. The home has the deepest influence. 

 

The most important relationship in the home is the marriage bond, which takes primacy even over the parent-child relationship. The security of a teenager and the quality of the parent-child bonding largely depend on the quality of the marital bond. 

 

Every teenager needs parents whose marital relationship is one of stability, respect, love, and good communication. 

 

I learned to cope with inner pain rather than to run from it. Over the years I have been able to face problems that produce emotional pain. 

 

Parents complain to teenage children about how lonely, depressed, unhappy, or misused they are. This is not parenting. A parent fulfills the emotional needs of a child or a teenager. 

 

As parents, we must not use our children or teenagers as counselors, shoulders to cry on, emotional supports, or colleagues. We cannot ask them to make us feel better. 

 

As parents, our first responsibility is to make our children feel genuinely loved. Our second responsibility is to be authority figures for our children and to lovingly discipline them. 

 

The basic foundation for a solid relationship with your teenager is unconditional love. 

 

If you love your teenager only when he or she pleases you (conditional love) and convey your love only during those times, your teenager will not feel genuinely loved. This, in turn, will make a teenager feel insecure, damage self-esteem, and actually prevent the teenager from developing more mature behavior. 

 

Do you know what is the most important question on your teenager’s mind? A teenager is continually  asking “Do you love me?” Teenagers ask the question primarily through their behavior rather than with words. 

 

One of the main reasons most parents do not know how to convey their love to their teenagers is because teenagers, like younger children, are behaviorally oriented. Adults are primarily verbally oriented. 

 

Your teenager sees your love by what you say and do. But what you do carries more weight. Your teenager is far more affected by your actions than by your words. 

 

Think of teenagers as mirrors. They generally reflect rather than initiate love.

 

Both a teenager and a 2 year old have drives for independence and both have emotional tanks. Each will strive for independence, using the energy from the emotional tank. When the emotional tank runs dry, the teenager and the 2 year old will do the same thing- return to the parent for a refill so they can again strive for independence. 

 

Teenagers need an ample amount of emotional nurturing if they are to function at their best and grow to be their best. They desperately need full emotional tanks in order to feel the security and self-confidence they must have to cope with peer pressure and other demands of adolescent society. Without this confidence, teenagers tend to succumb to peer pressure and experience difficulty in upholding wholesome, ethical values. 

 

Most parents don’t realize how important it is for their teenagers to be able to come to them to have their emotional tanks refilled. 

 

An emotional overreaction, if too excessive  or frequent, makes it extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, for teenagers to return to parents for emotional refills. Then, if parent-child communication is broken, teenagers may turn to peers for emotional nurturing.  

 

The more a parent loses self-control in a teenagers presence, the less respect a teenager will feel for the parent.

 

Focused attention requires time you would rather do something else. Focused attention means giving teenagers full, undivided attention in such a way that they feel truly loved, know that they are so valuable in their own right that they warrant your watchfulness, appreciation, and uncompromising regard. It makes your teenager feel that he or she is the most important person in the world to you as parents. 

 

Teenagers ought to be made to feel that they are special. Few teenagers feel this way, but, oh, the difference it makes in them when they know they are special. It’s so vital to the development of their self-esteem. It profoundly affects their ability to relate to and to love others. I believe that focused attention is the greatest need a teenager has. 

 

How they view themselves and how they are accepted by the world is determined primarily by the way parents meet this need. 

 

Focused attention is the most powerful means of keeping a teenager’s emotional tank full and investing in a teenager’s future. 

 

This is one of the most devastating mistakes parents make today. As their children enter and progress through adolescence, parents often use their free time in ways that meet their own pleasure needs. Every teenager I’ve ever known interprets this as rejection, feeling that their parents care less and less about them. 

 

Teens will develop strength to stand up against divisive influences from people who have little or no regard for them but who simply want to use them. 

 

One secret to remember is that the psychological defenses of moody teenagers are very high, and it takes time for them to be slowly lowered to where they are able to genuinely communicate and share with you what is really on their minds. The magic word there is…TIME.

 

When a teenager is with his or her father or mother but under no pressure, “just being there”, the defenses will gradually come down, and he or she will begin to talk- superficially at first, and then at more meaningful times. 

 

When you are driving a car with your teenager as a passenger, especially if other teenagers are with you, you somehow lose your own identity and are considered as part of the car, an extension of  the steering wheel. 

 

Teenagers need to feel they have a means of “escape” when revealing meaningful information. They must feel that they are in a position to leave if the parents are not responding properly to their innermost feelings. What they fear most is not disagreement but anger, ridicule, disapproval, or rejection of them on a personal level.  They must feel enough in control so that if they become too uncomfortable, they can remove themselves. 

 

Pieces of Information designed to upset or irritate us- a perfect device to see if we can be trusted with what is really on their minds. If we overreact, especially with anger and criticism, teenagers assume we will react to their important questions the same way. The more self-control and calmness we display, the more open and sharing teenagers will be with us.

 

“Oh, by the way”-Do you know what they usually really mean when a teenager says this in such a situation? A translation is something like this: “ the real reason I’m here and what I really want to talk about is coming up. But first I want to know, are you in a good frame of mind to handle it? Can I trust you with this very delicate personal part of my life? Will you take it and help me or will you use it against me? Can I trust you?”

 

The most common problems that adversely affect an adult’s ability to control anger are depression, fatigue, and anxiety.

 

It’s common for teenagers to be receptacles of parent’s displaced anger. Teenagers often tend to put pressure on us, make us tense, upset, and angry. Excessive and overreactive anger is an enemy of parents seeking to relate to their teenagers. Nothing else cuts off parent adolescent communication the way poorly controlled anger does. 

 

Many parents assume that anger and a teenager is bad or abnormal and that they should not allow their children to express it. One of the most important areas in which a teenager needs training is in how to handle anger. The problem is not the anger itself but how to manage it.

 

Let’s start with what I consider the absolutely worst way to handle anger: passive aggressive behavior. Passive aggressive behavior is an expression of anger that gets back at a person indirectly. It is a refusal to take responsibility for one’s own behavior. Passive aggressive behavior is at the crux of most problems with today’s teenagers. The underlying subconscious motive is to upset the parent. Tragically, if a teenager does not learn to handle anger maturely and grow out of the PA stage by the age of 16 or 17, this trait will harden and become a permanent part of his or her personality. 

 

The subconscious purpose of passive aggressive behavior is to upset the parents. Here is an example, “you can make me go to school, but you can’t make me get good grades”. The passive aggressive child does not do these things consciously or purposefully. Many teenagers do poorly in school because their parents have made themselves unapproachable- either by their own emotional overreaction or by being intolerant and not allowing their teenagers to express negative or unpleasant feelings. I’ve seen teenagers turn their unresolved anger on to themselves to call psychosomatic problems such as headaches. 

 

Appropriate ways to handle the anger can be addressed like this, “I’m proud of the way you handled your anger. You didn’t take it out on your little brother or the dog or throw anything or bring up unrelated facts. You clearly told me what was on your mind regarding this problem. That’s good.” “The only thing that you did wrong, son, was to call me that name. When you’re angry, please just call me ‘Mom”. This is critical. 

 

When your teenager expresses anger directly by verbal means, be glad. The more he uses verbalizations to express his anger, the better it is. Then determine where your teen is functioning on the anger ladder. Determine what ways he is expressing anger appropriately and in what ways he is being inappropriate. It is easy to confuse the verbal expression of anger with disrespect, a stumbling block for most parents. To cope with this dilemma, ask yourself, “ what’s my teenager’s attitude toward me the majority of the time?”  when he or she verbalizes anger- especially anger about a particular item- this is what you want. If your teenager has a disrespectful attitude toward you most the time, this is a different issue altogether. This means there is a serious problem in your relationship. You want to train your teens in the way they should go. First, praise them for appropriate ways they express anger. Then you can talk about one of the inappropriate ways they are using anger (such as name calling)  and ask them to correct it. 

 

 Most adults handle their strong anger in inappropriate ways. They may hurt the people at whom they are angry behind their backs by using passive aggressive behavior and some indirect and immature way. Why? Because no one trained them in the better ways to handle anger. Who failed to train them? Their parents. 

 

If you begin by being somewhat over-restrictive, then you can afford to be positive and grant privileges- you can be the “good guy”.  However, if you begin by being “broad-minded, reasonable, understanding,” allowing your budding teenager too many privileges and too few restrictions, you have only one way to go- toward increased restrictiveness or being the “bad guy”.  Begin in an over-restrictive way so that you may be able to grant more and more privileges. if you give all the privileges initially, you have nothing to work with. You have no way to reward your team for taking increased responsibility. And, worse, you have no means to train your child to be trustworthy and learn the value of being responsible. 

 

All teenagers at some level of consciousness realize they need guidance and control from their parents.

 

He or she must experience consequences for behavior- positive consequences for appropriate, responsible behavior; and negative consequences for inappropriate, irresponsible behavior. These consequences must be consistent and fair, and based on behavior, not on how you are feeling at the time. 

 

If you ever get into a situation where you do not feel comfortable about an upcoming event that your teenager wants to go to- yet you can’t put your finger on the reason why- your best response is to delay. say something like, “ wow, that’s a tough one, honey; let me think it over. 

 

In moderate depression, a depressed teenager acts and talks normally. The content of the teenager’s speech is affected, dwelling primarily on depressing subjects such as death, morbid problems, and crisis. 

 

Specific symptoms of adolescent depression- shortened attention span, daydreaming, poor grades, boredom, somatic depression, and withdrawal. Few things worry me as much as prolonged boredom in an adolescent, especially an early adolescent. Boredom usually manifests itself by teenagers wanting to stay alone in their rooms for increasingly longer periods of time. 

 

A teenager has been moderately to severely depressed to the extent that he can endure it no longer, he will take action in an attempt to alleviate his misery and distress. Boys may attempt to relieve their depressive symptoms by stealing, lying, fighting, driving fast, or through other types of antisocial behavior. Doing something with an air of excitement and danger seems to relieve the pain of depression. Girls frequently act out their depression by sexual promiscuity. 

 

Remember that teenagers are children emotionally and are much more emotional than cognitive. They retain feelings much more readily than facts. Children can remember how they felt in particular situations much more easily than they can remember the details of what went on. 

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