Helping Parents and Teens Better Communicate

Equip Your Parents (EYP) is a question/answer series designed to help you better equip the parents you work with.

What are parents to do when their teens won't talk to them?
Answered by Karen Dockery, author and veteran youth worker

One of the first things I would say is don't turn it over to youth workers. Don't have the mindset that says, "Well, you just talk to your youth worker and then he can tell me what you said." Teens do need to talk to youth workers, but they also need to talk to their parents. Study after study shows that the one person teenagers most yearn to talk to is not their friends, but their parents. The only reason they stop talking is because they get flamed when they do.

Teens have no idea how to talk about all the new things that are going on. They're struggling with things like, "Why is the anger that I used to feel now rage?" and "Why can I not get girls off of my mind?" They think they're the only ones going through this intensity; they have no clue how to put it into words, so the easiest thing is to back off, but it's not the best thing. We've got to be the adult, be the parent, and show them how to talk about it. We need to say things like, "Son, girls are pretty attractive, aren't they? They're good pieces of God's work." These things are hard to talk about but just head into it.

Your kids don't need a teacher; they don't need a friend; they need a parent. Parents are the people who equip them for life. Parents, think of yourselves as equippers and teachers. Consider how you want to be treated by someone who knows a whole lot more than you know. You don't want those people to treat you as stupid or as a baby, but you want them to respect you. Well, your teen needs to be treated the same way.

There are two rules I encourage parents to follow:

1) The one sentence lecture.
I encourage parents to work on stopping two sentences short when they're talking to their kids. Parents need to work hard on being concise and to the point. This way, their kids will have a hard time accusing them of lecturing.

2) Insist that they tell you three things a day.
At first, kids might think that their parents are wild, and they might even think it's just a game. But, when they come home from school, parents should ask their kids to tell them three things that happened during their day. Some (if not most) kids might try to respond by saying, "I'm bored," or "I don't want to talk about it," or "That's none of your business." However, parents must not allow these three things to count! They must encourage their kids to go a little bit deeper, and then they can use what their kids say to spur on a more intimate conversation.

Don't expect this to be easy. Parents and teens will be frustrated at times with each other. However, as a youth worker, encourage both sides to keep traveling after the first bump they hit, and they will learn how to communicate with one another on a deeper level.