An Unexpected Way to Handle a Rebellious Teenager

Do you have a rebellious teenager?  Are you struggling with troubled youth?  Do you have a kid who makes her own destructive way through life, ignoring everything she’s been taught, refusing to abide by any rules, causing chaos in the lives she touches?  Maybe your child sneaks out at night, or doesn’t come home after a school activity, or lies about where they are.  Maybe you’ve gotten a call from a policeman concerning marijuana apparatus found in your child’s car, or their clothes are too low or too high or too tight or just not enough. 

Maybe your child yells and curses and breaks things and threatens you or their siblings.

If you have one (or more) of these children, how do you get them to change their negative behavior?  My response was to become stricter, give countless lectures, install severe consequences, confront, accuse, put down.  It seemed every word I said to them or about them was negative.  It didn’t work.

Can you really change someone else?  According to Michael J. Merchant, the President of Anasazi Foundation, a group that helps troubled youth, there is a way to get someone to change, but it might not be what you expect.

Our natural inclination when our child is making bad choices, he says, is to think we’ve got to keep the pressure up, we’ve got to stay in their face, we’ve got to make sure they see the bad things they are doing wrong.  That was me.  Our heart is at war with them.  And so we stay on them.  We think that if we don’t, we’re going to let them off the hook.

“Well,” says Merchant, “it’s just the opposite of what we think.  It’s actually…our pressure, our withholding our love that lets them off the hook, because then they can just blame us.  They can just say: “Well, my Mom doesn’t care about me anyway.  My dad’s just in my face all the time.  They never trust me.” 

I had a daughter tell me, when I accused her of something she hadn’t done: “If you don't trust me anyway, I might as well go ahead and do it.”

Our rebellious children need  this war of hearts.  It allows them to justify their choices.  They have to explain their choices away—they have to make it okay to make those kind of choices—choices that could be harmful to themselves or their family.  They have to justify it.

I remember when my son and his friends, who were doing drugs at the time, made up a God that wanted them to use drugs, so they’d be enlightened and happy.  They knew it wasn’t true, but it made them feel better about their drug use.

“Too often,” explains Merchant, “we give our little rebels the very justification they need to explain it away. …by us withholding our love, by us bringing to them a heart at war—we simply give them justification.  Then they can blame us.”  It’s the story they can tell themselves to make those kinds of harmful choices all okay, 

However, when we love them anyway, we allow them to stand before their own conscience in the face of someone who actually cares about them.  This love is the best chance that they’ll actually see their lives truthfully.  It’s the best chance they’ll ever change.

“No one can change until they become fully responsible for their life,” says Merchant.  “And no one can become fully responsible for their life when they’re just giving lots of justification.  The best chance somebody will become responsible for their life is in the face of someone who actually loves them and cares about them.”

I recently asked a daughter who had been defiant in her teens but is now a loving and admirable person, what we had done that had helped.  She mentioned a few things, but then said, “The thing that helped the most was that you kept loving me even when I acted out.  If you hadn’t, it might have ended very differently.”

This is where non-judging, non-lecturing, completely loving grandmothers can help.  By just loving them, we can be such a beneficial asset in helping these lost teens.

Of course, there still needs to be natural or logical consequences for their actions.  Without consequences, our teens feel no pressure to change.  On the other hand, if we only give tough love, with harsh consequences, they only obey when they are under our thumb.  They take no responsibility for their actions when we are not around.  But constant love, with natural or reasonable consequences, lets them see themselves as they are, without justification.

It's hard to maintain constant love and high expectations when your’re worried out of your mind or seething with anger.  Sometimes when you feel that way, even normal teen behavior can send you over the edge. You need something that will allow you to draw that deep breath to reassess how to best approach the situation.  You need to fall back in love.  You need a reset button, but perhaps your self-righteousness and your teen’s pride and sense of indignation may be getting in the way of starting over.  

Remember your feelings of overwhelming love the first time you held your baby?  The delighted smile of a toddler when he sees you after you’ve been gone?  The hero worship of your five-year-old?

Seeing the little boy inside of the uncontrollable young man may be just the ticket that will allow you to change the negative pattern of interactions between you that pushes you to your limits.   Prayer helps.  Looking for the good in them rekindles love.

Once we’ve relearned how to love, how do we let them know we love them, when they feel unlovable?  I remember once trying to hug my son, and he ran and hid from me.  What can we do?

We can verbalize it.  We can say I love you, but we can also express interest in them and what they care about, say a cheerful good morning, or great them when they return home with a loving welcome, or blow them a goodnight kiss at bedtime.  I knew a dad who would tell his son, "I love you more than you will ever know, so I'm going to check up on where you are tonight."  

Write a little note and leave it on their bed or slip it into their back pack.

We can demonstrate it.  Touch is powerful.  If they don’t allow hugs, touch their arm as you pass.  Try a back scratch when they’re working on the computer.  Stroke your daughter’s hair. 

 We can be kind, buy some little thing for them, text them something funny, do something that makes their life easier. 

We can do something fun together.  Once we took a daughter, who was at odds with us, white water rafting.  Yes, I did get bounced out of the raft--twice, but I don't think she did it.  It was a time to bond a little.

Of course, these expressions of love must be genuine, not manipulative.  Our children can tell.

“Blame them, struggle with them, have a heart at war towards them, withhold our love from them in an effort to get them to change, and we just give them justification to keep doing the things we don’t want them to do.  

Love them and we change their world,” adds Merchant.  “We give them somebody different to respond to.  There’s a thread tugging on their heart that someone actually cares about them and it makes it really hard for them to do those things they’re doing.  And if they’re doing those things, I want them to feel the full weight of the choices [they are making].”

Feeling loved is the only way they’ll feel that.