Parenting Teens During COVID-19

TIP: Use open questions and explore your child’s thoughts, opinions and emotions in everyday conversations, with an aim to fully understand their point of view without sounding like you’re interviewing or worse, interrogating them. Be relaxed and fully present in the conversation.

Note: Maybe get ready for your children to pick up this excellent habit soon after. As they too start spreading the mutual benefits of unconditional positive regard. A great opportunity for you also to explain how you’re coping with staying in, working at home and home-schooling.

So what could you ask? Here’s a start:

• Why is that important to you?
• Could you explain that further to me?
• What’s upsetting you?
• What have you laughed at most this week?
• How can I help you to cope in this situation better?
• What should I know about how you’re feeling that may help me understand you better?
• How was your day?
• How could we make tomorrow easier?
• I’m curious, what’s your dream career – the thing you’d really love to do when you’re older?
• What are you worried about?
• What small successes have you achieved today?
• Who are you reaching out to for support?
• What are you struggling with?
• Tell me more.
• How’s home-schooling and what would make it better?
• Who and what do you miss?
• What have you learnt from the lockdown about yourself?

Be the parent or role model you wish you’d had as a teenager; their inspiration and guide, the person they learn from, look up to and mutually respect. Help your child to explore who they are to find their own values, not the beliefs imposed on them by others or society. Give them the confidence and skills to strive forward and to be able to truly understand others, like you are trying to do for them. This is a great skill they can take into adulthood and practise with the whole family moving forward. If you want to find out more, we’ll be talking about Unconditional Positive Regards, connection and conversations with children and young people, amongst other topics, in our up and coming parenting webinar series. You can keep track of the webinars here.

Young people have actually told me they want clear boundaries, not rules laid upon them, but mutually agreed boundaries. This is because boundaries help children to understand what’s expected of them and thereby enable them to feel safer. There’s a trick though! Make them believe they came up with the boundary; in fact, make them come up with its consequence too if broken and explore why this important. This helps a child or young person to take ownership of their boundaries and responsibility for them, plus the consequences if they’re broken. In my first class of the term, I’d always get the students to create their own boundaries and consequences before moving into a regular activity, we’d then discuss this around the table, sieve out the silly ones and agree on a final list with everyone present. Maybe, this could work with your family too. I usually prepare a list of pretty imperative boundaries I hope my students come up with though. I don’t impose these mandatory ones, I just slide them in a suggestion every now and then and hope for the best – it hasn’t failed yet.

It’s a powerful thing when a young person takes ownership of their own boundaries. A heavy punishment without an understanding of consequences can hit a child and teenager pretty hard and then the dreaded ‘rebellion’ kicks in. When anyone feels hard done by they don’t usually cope too well, especially not if you’re a teenager dealing with a hormonal overload. On that note, we must mirror what we expect to see in our children and apologise meaningfully when we’re wrong.

People are social creatures who love to be around other people they resonate with, and for children and teenagers, that’s more than likely to be their peers at school. COVID-19 has taken that vital resource and support circle away. It’s just not the same having a conversation with our friends and having a conversation with our parents. A little light encouragement to socialise with friends through online video chat or even to watch a movie through Netflix party, for example, are great ways to keep up that valued social contact. Although, as a teen who couldn’t have cared less about my peers and who loved her own company and being alone, this would have been a horrid recommendation for me so it really depends on what your child thinks will make things better for them in this unusual situation. I would have loved to have watched anything to do with animals and nature, rather than socialising with humans, so a trip to a virtual Zoo like those virtual zoos in the list below would have been a lifeline to me.

Whilst teens around the world are stuck to their screens during the lockdown, they’re at a much higher risk of online abuse and bullying. Young people want to feel that they belong and to be with people that ‘get them’. It can be a risky stage in a teen’s life. Some are drawn to a sense of belonging with a gang or a group of troublemakers. Even the unthinkable, into the hands of adults looking to exploit the young person by giving them a false sense of love.

This confusing period in a teen’s life, when they’re trying to find out ‘who they are’, can be risky. However, as I mentioned briefly before in point 1, we don’t create children: they create themselves through our stability, curiosity, and support. Parents help their children fly and shine. When we have naturally woven, open and honest conversations in our everyday lives these unthinkable situations are less likely. If you’re worried about online safety I’ve provided a UK website in the list below. If this isn’t relevant to your location, try Googling a similar search for your local area, using my suggestions as a little inspiration

If my mum told me to do the dishes, especially before school, that would be my cue to “kick-off”, feeling unjust and absolutely freaking out. Why? Because I was half asleep, I didn’t want to do anything except for my hair and makeup and why couldn’t it wait until I got home? That was my point of view. Mum’s reason, I now see, was to have a nice clean sink for the rest of the day. For me, it was a heavy burden for a sleepy teen. Maybe we could have negotiated instead. I love dusting, polishing and hoovering, I still do to this day. I would have happily done these chores after school. I would have even cleaned the bathroom, anything to avoid the dishes. But no, mum demanded they were done and I still hate washing the dishes today. The first thing I bought for my grown-up home – you guessed it, a dishwasher. When possible, if we’d negotiated the chores to fit in with our availability and the tasks we enjoyed then life may have been a little bit simpler back then. A rota would have helped with the least enjoyable necessities. This is a good watch covering areas such as raising children with unconditional love, self-efficacy and the importance of chores and how they may lead to success, amongst other interesting points: