Can parents and teenagers avoid communication issue ?

 As a coach, you may be confronted with this issue. Your coachees may also be parents who are tired, worried and often powerless to cope with their teenagers’ unhappiness or explosive reactions.

It’s your job to encourage them to explore the feelings they are experiencing: the loss of their young child (whom they understood so well), sadness at feeling rejected, anger at no longer being respected, feelings of uselessness or powerlessness, fear of the future…

You can help them question what’s really going on in their teenagers’ heads. This will enable them to put certain situations, which could quickly degenerate into conflict, into perspective.

Adolescence is a period of profound change and contradiction

The difficulty is to manage and lead to a variety of pressures:

• recognising and accepting physically their teenage body, while pretending that everything is fine…
• developing a personality or identity as quickly as possible (“to be someone”) while teenagers are still ‘under construction’ internally
• belonging to one or more social groups with frequent changing codes that they have to adapt to.

Encourage parents to become aware of their own educational style

From authoritarian parent to disengaged parent, how do they perceive themselves and what are the consequences on communication with their teenagers?

Develop benevolence and empathy for teenagers

Lastly, as coaches, it’s up to you to help parents develop a mode of communication based on benevolence and empathy.  Their relationship should take both their own needs as well as those of their child into account. Non-Violent Communication is a powerful tool for improving communication between parents and teenagers. The coach can suggest using this approach to support future discussions between parents and their teens.

To coach parents to develop more peaceful communication with their teenager, you’ll find a kit on our online shop dedicated to this issue:

The KIT – Coaching Parents through the Adolescent Years