Eight reasons why you should take teenagers seriously

Teenagers can be sooooo stupid and get themselves and others in trouble with their actions.

But …… teenagers can also be sooooo creative and come up with and implement surprising solutions for themselves and others with their actions.

Sometimes it is just which side you choose to judge the behavior of teenagers.

Do you mainly see the clumsy side or do you mainly see the creative side?

That may be the challenge we face as parents, teachers and counselors.

Let's list why we should take adolescents seriously.

Those teenagers brains

It seems to be the national excuse that many adolescents think they can get away with: Your brain is running wild because you are a teenager and your pre-frontal brain is developing. That is why your so-called executive functions would no longer do so well, so that you can no longer plan properly, you no longer do your homework and play all kinds of rash pranks.

And yes, this is partly correct. After all, the brain, hormones, body and everything about the adolescent is developing and that does not always go smoothly. However, it would be a big mistake to let adolescents get away with this developmental fact as an excuse. That would also mean that they can no longer take responsibility for their actions and that they can be exonerated for insufficient numbers and the mischief they have caused somewhere. Of course that cannot be the intention.

Gaining experience

Everyone knows that you only learn something when you are allowed to practice. By gaining experience you get to know your limits. And possibly even more importantly: By doing things, practicing and experimenting you learn what you can do. And when you gain experience and discover that you can do something, it is a huge boost for self-confidence.

If you stay safely at home with mom and do not explore the world, your world will remain small and you will dare less and less. As soon as a child goes to secondary education, his world literally grows again. And there will be new challenges in

a new village or part of the city where there are new shops and places to hang out and where different people always have something to tell you about and with you. New worlds ask to be discovered and then you do not always know in advance how that will go.

In that respect, it is very convenient that the adolescent brains occasionally do not have a good overview of what is happening and what the possible consequences are.

For example, an adolescent learns a lot and gains new experiences every day, so that self-confidence in his own ability can grow nicely.

Being allowed to learn from experiences

When the adolescents gain their experiences in city and country and sometimes dark places and perhaps do not act as obediently as we are used to, something often goes wrong.

How nice it is that something goes wrong regularly, because you can learn from mistakes. Unfortunately nowadays there seems to be a taboo on errors and we want to prevent our children from walking in seven ditches at all at the same time and if something goes wrong, Dad and usually Mom is on the phone quickly. Schools sometimes become mad when parents want to get rid of an unsatisfactory mark.

We seem to have forgotten that when something goes wrong it is not at all interesting, but that it is so incredibly valuable how to fix something again.

Because here also applies again: When an adolescent himself takes responsibility for stupid actions and makes this right, he has literally and figuratively grown a long way towards adulthood.

Parents' fear

From the foregoing it is already somewhat clear that parents are sometimes unwittingly and unintentionally the greatest enemies of their adolescents.

Parents are terrified that their child will go off the rails and see the danger of alcohol, drugs, sex and bad friends on every street corner.

Because anxious parents tend to exercise control, they run the risk of suffocating their child. On the one hand, due to the fear of parents, adolescents run the risk of being too obedient or of jumping even further out of the band to escape their parents.

The social and societal future

Unfortunately, it seems that school days are all about doing your best to get the highest possible education. We have the massive idea that if teenagers only follow their school properly and get high grades, that they are only then ready for the future that awaits like a spread bed.

What a pity it is that our adolescents and young people are so focused on a possible future that the gaining of experience is jeopardized.

Never again in your life that meantime

You could also call the time between your twelfth and twentieth a kind of interval in which you give the experiment full scope for life. In these years you can find out what your talents are, what you find important, how you want to organize your life a bit and what you want to focus on and who you want to be with.

It seems as if we are stealing adolescents and young people their time to develop by squeezing them into a straitjacket.

Because how much difference is there really with 100 years ago when children had to work at the age of twelve?

It seems as if children have all the time, but in the meantime we keep children small by binding them at home with love, attention and extensive care and on the other hand we expect top performances from them that may give us the feeling that we have succeeded as parents.

Do we give feedback or criticism?

When something goes wrong with adolescents who gain experiences and learn through trial and error and their brains are not always involved, then we adults often have the tendency to come up with fear, criticism, do's and don'ts.

However, this is not the most clever approach because we do not take adolescents seriously and also work against their brains.

Adolescents are already able to make their decisions, even if they are not always the ones we have come up with.

When we give teenagers feed back and ask them about the how and why of their thinking and actions, you are often surprised by the answers. And when we teach adolescents to think more about what they want, what the consequences are and how they want to tackle it, we challenge their brains in the right direction.

This means that it is useful and wise to take adolescents completely seriously, consult ourselves first about our fears and give adolescents confidence and challenge.

In this way we meet the development of adolescents on many fronts and an additional advantage can be that the atmosphere in the house improves considerably.

And those stupid actions?

Take a deep breath, bite your tongue and ask a question and wait ...

Preaching and tying up is always possible. :-)