The teen years are challenging. From hormonal shifts to identity development, your teen undergoes a sea of change. During this developmental phase, behavior often takes a detour. Affection gets replaced with bids for independence. Respect gets replaced with eye rolls and pushback. These behaviors can feel like rejection or rudeness. However, there’s a scientific explanation for this personality shift: “the adolescent personality dip.”
According to research, tweens and teens ages 10 to 16 can become more emotionally reactive, less agreeable, and less thoughtful. This behavior isn’t intended to hurt parents or disrespect them; it’s the result of hormonal shifts that influence how your teen thinks, feels, and behaves.
The adolescent personality dip can cause positive qualities like self-discipline, motivation, and orderliness to shift. Personality changes like these can set off alarm bells, especially when your child suddenly feels like a stranger.
These changes can rattle our emotional lives. As parents, we may feel frightened, angry, and anxious.
As a psychologist who supports parents, I know that understanding what’s going on for your teen can help you navigate this transition.
Here are some tips that I recommend.
1. Meet your teen’s behavior with curiosity
It’s easy to ask “why” our teens are pushing back or less interested in spending time with us. These questions can lead us down an anxiety-laden rabbit hole, where we get stuck in a doom loop that only fuels worries instead of reducing them.
Replace your “why” questions with curiosity.
For example, instead of asking, “Why are you acting this way?” Try asking your teen, “What is going on for you today?” If you’re feeling especially worked up by their behavior, take a beat before engaging and ask yourself, “What might be going on for them right now?”
Curiosity can motivate people to make healthier choices and alter their behavior. Curiosity can also help us understand what our teen is going through. Emotion researchers call this “cognitive empathy,” and it allows us to stand in another person’s emotional world, which helps us empathize with their perspective.
2. Honor and name your own emotions
Relationships are a two-way street. Our teen’s behavior can stir up a lot of emotions. In fact, research shows that one of the hardest parts of parenting occurs when our kids psychologically separate from us—a change that begins in adolescence.
As kids pull away, we may feel sad at the loss of their childhoods, sad that they no longer rely on us in the same way, or angry when they violate our boundaries.
Simply honoring our emotions and taking a moment to name them goes a long way. Known as “emotions naming” by researchers, this helps calm the brain’s amygdala, which helps temper intense feelings.
3. Understand the purpose of defenses
The word defense may sound like it comes from a football playbook, so what does it have to do with parenting, let alone raising teens?
In psychology, defenses are the brilliant ways we protect ourselves from feeling unbearable emotions. Often, this is done unknowingly. Therefore, your teen’s eye-rolling, avoidance, surly attitude, pushback, or criticism of you can all be defenses against emotions they are unable to identify, let alone experience.
When we see our teen’s defenses in action, we don’t want to call them out. Instead, we want to let them know that we’re with them if and when they want to talk. Leaving space while being a sturdy presence helps kids feel supported, without feeling smothered.
4. Practice acceptance and self-compassion
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Acceptance can be a hard pill to swallow, especially when we need to accept things we do not want or like.
But acceptance doesn’t mean we “agree” with what’s happening; it’s an acknowledgment of how things are in one particular moment. And moments are always temporary. Acceptance doesn’t mean we need to “like” what our teen is doing, or how we’re feeling.
Exercising self-compassion goes a long way, too. Research shows that self-compassion can improve symptoms of depression and anxiety. Compassion also helps us stay grounded so that we can parent from a place of authenticity rather than reactivity.
Parenting brings challenges at every age. Identifying what’s going on for ourselves and our kids helps us approach tense moments with knowledge, emotional savvy, and resilience.
