Article by Bob Lancer
(see many more articles at www.boblancer.com)

 How To Win With Your Teen

  PART 2

How you see your teenaged child is not your child's responsibility.  If your vision, idea or concept of your child causes you to feel discouraged, distrustful or disapproving, you are holding onto a disempowering concept.  Your concept disturbs you then, not your child. As long as you feel disturbed, annoyed, betrayed, hurt or disappointed, you handicap your judgment with emotional interference.  You make it impossible to really understand your child and for your child to feel really understood by you. You block your ability to come up with constructive approaches and thus feel increasingly dissatisfied.

Instead of blaming your child for how you see your child, take responsibility for your own thoughts, and for the way those thoughts cause you to feel.  As long as you feel the slightest degree of resentment or disrespect for your child, you keep yourself in that unpleasant negative state.  Blaming your child, holding your child responsible, for your self-imposed inner condition of pain can only deepen the conflict, increase the division and erect wider walls between you. 

How you think about, feel about and respond to your teen produces an impact on you, on your teen and on the relationship between you. Avoid thinking about or analyzing your teen when you feel emotionally upset because your thoughts can only reflect your emotional condition.  In other words, you will only be able to think about your teen in ways that fuel your emotional distress.  When we are unconscious of the impact of our thoughts upon us, we confuse our thoughts about our child with our child.  We then relate with our child as our enemy, causing our child to relate with us as his enemy.

One common mistake we make with our teens is giving them too much responsibility for the quality of our relationship with them.  We make it their responsibility to overcome our barriers and withdrawal.  We wait for them to take the first step to build a new bridge or overcome an ancient divide.  This abdicates our responsibility, which is to provide our child with the essential support of loving involvement. In the absence of a close and loving connection with you, your teen is more likely to make less caring or uncaring choices for herself, to drift off course, which includes letting the two of you drift farther and farther apart.

If you find it impossible to reconnect with your teen following an emotional conflict, concentrate first on self-examination until you see how you are carrying on the conflict within you.  Whatever happened in the past, even five seconds ago, exists only in your mind.  The longer you hold onto the conflict in your mind, the longer you hold onto the emotional disturbance that conflict triggers off in you.  See if you can redirect the energy that flows into your feelings of anger and hurt into feelings of love for your child. Instead of remember the conflict or what your child did that you reacted so painfully to (or what you thought she did), try to remember how much you really love and care about her.  Then return to her and begin building upon your connection again.  Remember: the better your teen feels about his relationship with you, the better he will feel about himself and his life, and the better choices he will feel motivated to make for himself. 

If you found this article helpful, Bob Lancer's full length book, Parenting With Love, Without Anger or Stress will surely be a book you will love.  It presents an in depth look into what causes children to behave as they do, and what you can do in a balanced, loving, conscious way to support the fulfillment of your child's healthy, happy, glorious potential.