If you are among those parents who know that their teens are tensed about something, but do not know how to take the right type of action, you should consult experts. The problem your young ones may be having may be teen anxiety. If you over-react and be intrusive, your teens may start disliking you. If you do not take timely action, that may also harm themselves. The following tips may be useful.
Watch Your Tendencies
As a parent of the affected teens, you should keep a close watch on how you react. If you follow your instincts and start lecturing or punishing the young ones, that may get you undesirable results. If you ask leading questions in your eagerness to know if the issue is teen anxiety, you may get wrong answers or denials that may confuse you. The problem is that teen anxiety may induce your young children to make wrong decisions. You should therefore be careful while you handle these teens.
Make The Teens Get Close To You
If you are intrusive, your teens may move farther away from you. If you want to make them come closer to you, you should curb your tendencies to be intrusive. This means that you should stop lecturing and start listening to your teens. Teenagers should be allowed to learn from their experiences. They do not like to learn from the experiences of others. So, no amount of lecturing will get you the results you wish to have.
You should not commit the mistake of not approaching your teens also. You should approach them but should not lecture or have hard conversations with them with an intention to impart your experiences into them.
Know Yourself And Act
Adolescents with teen anxiety need guidance but as pointed out earlier, they want to experience things themselves for learning. So, you must assess your tendencies and the impact of your tendencies on the relationship you have with your teens. In short, you should assess and evaluate yourself and if needed, you should be ready to change yourself. One of the changes that is expected of you is to stop lecturing. You should not try to show them that you have a lot of experience and that they can learn from your experiences.
Teenagers can be highly inconsistent and you should never forget this point. You should also know that children can understand the non-verbal clues you give them. So, instead of showing your anxiety and concern for them, it is better to hide your emotions. It is not wrong to make them realize that you love them. But it is not right to show them your wrong emotions. This may back-fire and the problem of teen anxiety in them may worsen.
Your Children Need You
When your children become teenagers, they may spend more time with their friends than with you. They have a fundamental conflict. They are not yet adults though they think that they have grown enough to make decisions. At the same time, they may need your advice, suggestions, love and affection. In fact, they long for your company. You should therefore make it a point to spend quality time with them and induce or motivate them to talk and ventilate their feelings.
Make Them Realize That You Love Them Unconditionally
Your teens should know that you love them fully and unconditionally. It is not that you should agree with whatever decisions they make. You may have your own opinions and when they make wrong decisions, you should correct them also. But you should make sure that you are allowing them to talk and then, point out the pitfalls in their decisions.
Show Respect
Teenagers expect that they should be respected. So, you should not commit the mistake of talking ill about them in front of their friends. Especially, when they have been affected by the problem of teen anxiety, you should carefully handle them and educate and influence them slowly.