Family & Fatherhood

Speaking in Teen

8 simple rules for communicating better with your kids

If there’s a teenager in your house, you might have noticed that grown men and 15-year-olds aren’t always in sync. The problem is not just that you’ve got antipodal interests—theirs: instant-messaging friends; yours: roads not taken—but that your minds work differently. Your brain tries to subdue anarchic feelings, while their brains urge the chaos front and center. When you add in the crossing hormonal shifts—theirs surging; yours on the ebb—oddsmakers rank fathers and teens talking right up there with Villanova taking out Georgetown in ’85.

Still, those are the bets worth winning, right? After all, any dolt can dig the company of an 8-year-old who mistakes him for a god. But it takes a man in full to court a sullen 16-year-old who appears indifferent, maybe even disdainful. Once again, I’m wiser now than I was back when my teenagers were still living down the hall. Offered in keen hindsight, here are a few thoughts that might help, whether you’re trying to savor a happy child or to steady a wobbling one.

Keep a rescue rope’s distance Adolescents are on an important mission. In a way, their job is to move out into the jungle on their vision quest—and away from you. So don’t look for too much from them. Don’t be all up in their grille about sharing. One of the few sweet things about being a teenager is feeling pain in private. It’s bad enough when some cheerleader busts your son into a million pieces, but it becomes unbearable if you, Dad, feel like talking about it! Teenagers don’t want you to catch them when they trip. Move back. The kids need a background sense that you’re over there on your side of the river caring about them, but the only way they’ll ever reach out is if you allow them not to.

Lock on In moments when a teenager does reach out, it’s pivotal to focus completely. No shuffling through the mail and listening with one ear. Sure, we’ve got a million things on our multitasking minds, but giving this precious child your full attention is, all by itself, a gesture of respect that will open up things between you.

Flatten your voice Kids are able to read volumes of meaning into every meaningless Dad inflection. When their hypersensitivity meets your way of speaking, it’s a minefield of misunderstanding. Your stylized patois of irony and sarcasm that works so well in a bar with buddies and even delighted your 8-year-old is a mismatch once he’s a teenager. I’m not suggesting that you speak like Mister Rogers—he’ll think you’ve had a stroke—but favor plain over fancy. Be straightforward. Don’t depend on tone. The plainness of a good man is a superb antidote to the confusion
of 16. Be thoughtful, not fast; clear, not clever. Think Gary Cooper.

Resist referring to your youth Over and over, I made the mistake of thinking my kids would be reassured to know that when I was young, I had some of the same feelings they were having. Wrong. It made their feelings seem like a cliché. In general, try not to view their feelings through the prism of their age. Kids, quite rightly, hate being seen as the 12 billionth person to go through a stage of life. They’d rather savor their feelings as though nobody else has ever gone through the gauntlet of adolescence. Fair enough. A helicopter-height perspective on their feelings is insulting, even though you mean to help. If they ask, tell them that, yeah, you kinda remember feelings like that, but don’t offer comfort with “This too shall pass.”

Don’t be so sure The trait that most often comes between fathers and teens
is Dad certainty. We spend the 30 years between our own adolescence and theirs figuring out what exactly it is we know about the world, and then our few hard-earned shreds of wisdom collide with a young mind more interested in its own process than in our conclusions. When my kids were teens and they seemed troubled, I assumed that my steadiness could help them. Wrong. In fact, it was
an insult to their confusion. In a way, the secret to talking to kids is to respect uncertainty, timidity, fear—all the traits that grown men are trained to disdain.
In a storm, our instinct is to be a pillar of strength. But buoys are far more helpful.