Your teen may be addicted to your yelling – Teen Parenting
Teens love attention, of any kind
Are you one of those parents who yell, shouts and gets into loud arguments with your teens? Considering the current situation, I guess many of us fall under this category. I want to share something interesting about this behaviour. Did you know that all the yelling and shouting may be encouraging your teen’s behaviour rather than discouraging them?
For this you need to understand a couple of things about teenagers:
First and most importantly, their brains are under-developed and not mature enough to understand complex emotions
Second, they are constantly looking out for brain stimulation
And third, and this is the most important one, they do not know how to differentiate between good brain stimulation and bad brain stimulation. It is like what we say in the media world — there is nothing like bad publicity or good publicity, everything is simply publicity.
You need to understand something called ‘reinforcement’. Reinforcement is something that makes someone behave in a particular way. It is the core of getting things hardwired in a teenager’s brains. Just everything else, there are positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements. We will discuss this in detail in another video. Let us come back to today’s topic. When you yell or shout at your teenager, they may misconstrue this as Positive reinforcement. Now, why do you think they consider it a positive reinforcement? It is because when you are yelling, they have your undivided attention. Plus they get the feeling that they can manipulate and control your emotions at their level.
This may encourage the same behaviour to happen again and again because it gives them a sub conscious high.
As a parent, you need to decided what you want. Do you want to have the last word in an argument or do you want a child who respects you for your control and strength because you refused to get entangled in a battle of words ripe with emotions?
You child will learn to respect you when you keep your calm and authority by refusing to play at their emotional level.
Do let us know your opinion in the comment section.
Uma Iyer is a Writer and a Permaculturist. When she is not making ads or marketing collateral, she likes to read, obsess about beaches and spend time with her two kids – one human, one furred.
