As children grow, parents must change their role, going from caregivers to counselors. However, getting a teenager to pay attention and listen to your advice sometimes seems like an impossible mission.
Adolescence is a complex stage in which you begin to fight for autonomy and seek more independence, so it is often likely that your children will interpret your recommendations and advice as interference and ignore you.
Science shows how to counsel a teenager with some ideal cards up its sleeve to help desperate parents.
The 3 most common pieces of advice parents give
Psychologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign observed real conversations between 100 adolescents between the ages of 10 and 11 with their mothers about their challenges at school, such as difficulty understanding homework, boredom in class, or problems with time management. They chose that stage and topic precisely because expectations and academic pressure begin to increase at that age.
The researchers wanted to know what parents tell their children about how to manage these stressors and how adolescents respond. After addressing a problem the teens had recently experienced, both mothers and their children took a survey to evaluate the effectiveness of the advice and completed it again the following year, when the teens completed the school year.
These psychologists discovered that mothers tended to encourage their children to actively face challenges. The three most common types of advice were:
- Cognitive reappraisal: Reframing the problem in another way, considering other explanations, or thinking of experiences as learning opportunities.
- Strategizing: Encourage teens to look for solutions, make an action plan, and do concrete things.
- Seeking help: Finding someone who can lend a hand and offer the support they need, such as a teacher, parent, or older sibling.
Most of the teenagers responded like teenagers: they didn’t flinch. They neither accepted nor rejected their mothers’ advice. They turned a deaf ear – or so it seemed. But there is a but…
Your children listen to you, even if it doesn’t seem like it
Taking into account that the vast majority of adolescents rejected or seemed to ignore maternal advice, the researchers found some unexpected results: these adolescents deployed more adaptive coping strategies in high school than those who accepted their mothers’ recommendations at first glance.
How is it possible?
Psychologists explain that “Adolescents go through a stage in which they are maturing and want to make their own decisions. Their immediate response may be resistance or reluctance, but they continue to think about their parents’ advice.”
They may need time to process and evaluate that information. Maybe they need to think things better and reflect on the advice. Or perhaps they did not find it useful at the time, but as a result of the new experiences they had, they reevaluated its relevance.
The most effective and least useful advice for teenagers
Not all advice is equally useful. The researchers found that the advice to seek help was one of the most accepted, but also the one with which adolescents had the least success. Why? Probably because it was simpler advice, so it was not enough to face the more complex challenges that arise when they enter high school.
Of course, it is important to know when it is necessary to ask for help and to have enough humility to ask for it, but if that is the only advice given to children, it is likely that they will not develop their problem-solving and conflict-solving skills, but rather learn to depend more on others, which would hinder their potential.
Instead, the most effective long-term advice was to encourage teens to reframe the problem or take it on as a challenge. These adolescents, even those who initially dismissed the advice, adopted more adaptive coping strategies and did better in school.
Therefore, even if it seems that your child is not listening to you, it is likely that your advice will not fall on deaf ears. However, try to provide them with a rich box of psychological tools that they can use in different situations, don’t just tell them to ask for help.
Source:
Kelly, M. et. Al. (2024) Academic challenges during early adolescence: Mothers’ advice and youth responses to advice. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology; 92: 101648.
