Teenage Parent

Becoming a parent is often overwhelming, and it triggers feelings of complete inadequacy and inexperience. This can be true for first-time parents with a newborn as well as for parents whose child has entered adolescence, and all of a sudden a new person is inhabiting your child’s body. 

Family dynamics and the relationship with one’s primary caregivers are incredibly influential in people’s lives. Unquestionably, these are the most influential in the life of an infant. For the first years of a child’s life, her or his external behaviours, as well as their internal world, is modelled by the observation and the interaction with the primary caregivers. Throughout a person’s life, until adolescence, external experiences– school, friendships and romantic relationships also influence the development of identity, including character, personality and tendencies. 

Modelling behaviours 

Most parents do the best they can to parent and model themselves in a positive way for their children. However, often many parents are unaware of their own traumas, defences and childhood adverse experiences. Parenthood has the great power to trigger past emotional wounds. These wounds influence, mostly unconsciously, the style of parenting, from the most basic responses to the child\teenager behaviour to the way that love, anger end emotions, in general, are expressed.

When raising children, the occurrence of negatively charged experiences should be used as warning signals. Parents often react with anger or frustration at specific incidents because the brain is subconsciously protecting them from the feelings of longing, jealousy or humiliation that they felt as children.

By using anger or frustration as signals that we need to investigate our childhood, we can start working towards ditching those negative overreactions and instead empathising with our children. The goal is to grow into considerate and conscious parents, to provide an optimal environment for the child to develop into a mature and functioning person.

This optimal environment is not bounded to a specific family structure, this means that it makes little difference if a child is raised in a nuclear family, or by parents who are separated. In fact, more than 25 % of children in the UK are raised in a single-parent household. 

Research shows that the family structure has little impact on a person emotional development or school performance once socioeconomic background, like household financial situation and parents’ levels of education, are factored in.

If the family structure doesn’t determine an optimal environment, what does? The optional environment is a much more flexible concept that might appear. It simply refers to the quality of the relationship that a child lives and grows up with. The most important of these relationships are with those people that they share their home with, along with a small circle of close relationships. These relationships should be strong, intimate and rewarding, they influence how the children and teens feel about themselves and how they interact with others and are therefore crucial to the their mental and emotional health. This is why, for example, it would be ideal for single parents to maintain a civil relationship with the co-parent. Denigrating, disrespecting and belittling the co-parent in front of their offspring can have a very negative effect on their children. The way one portrays the other, parents impacts the childrens’ view of themselves. After all, the identity of children is tied to both parents, even if one parent is absent. By deprecating the partner-in-parenting, there is an indirect deprecation of a part of the child. 

Of course, it is vital in any living situation to work through conflicts in a healthy way. More than dragging down the atmosphere, unhealthy and unresolved arguments can make a child feel self-conscious, even depressed, one common assumption is that they are the reason for the quarrel. It is important to remember that, despite adolescents possessing critical thinking and reasoning skills, their brain is still not fully developed, in addition, adolescence is a period of great change, on the physical, emotional and functioning plane. 

The modelling of healthy arguments starts by communicating feelings between parents, acknowledging the feelings and working through one issue at a time. The goal should be solving the problem and not winning over the other person. How these difficult situations are modelled in childhood, create the base for the future family dynamic and conflict resolution during adolescence. In a house where screaming and aggressiveness were modelled as the way the parents-teenagers conflicts are resolved is likely also aggressive and heated. 

One universal desire in human beings is to have one’s feelings understood and acknowledged. If a parent denies a child’s feelings, the feelings do not disappear. Children simply learn to suppress them and that is an extremely harmful habit. 

The way parents portray and respond to their children’s view of the world will make the children develop their own way of testing and acknowledging their reality. Letting your teen know that, as parents, we are acknowledging their feelings in a non judgemental way can be enough for them to feel recognised and begin with dealing with these feelings in a generative way.