6 Tips To Improve Your Teenager’s Attitude
The fact that your child manifests a bad attitude during adolescence is quite common. Although this bad behavior will sooner or later end up disappearing once this stage is over, in this article you will discover some tips to manage and improve your adolescent’s attitude.
How to improve the attitude of your teenager?
1. Establish rules together
Family rules help maintain balance at home while fostering self-responsibility and respect, and empathy for others. Also, the fact that all family members participate in the development of the rules makes everyone feel really involved.
For example, if you jointly establish as a family that you should treat and speak to each other with respect, you can resort to this rule if in a discussion your son begins to maintain disrespectful behavior and, thus, remind him that he participated and accepted that family rule.
2. Don’t rate your child negatively
Based on the theories of Social Labeling and the Pygmalion Effect, if a child or adolescent constantly receives qualifications such as “you are lazy”, they will end up assuming that, indeed, they are and will act accordingly.
Try to focus on his behavior and tell your child how he makes you feel : “It bothers me that you behave like this”; “It saddens me that you don’t try hard enough.”
3. Praise your child to reinforce his positive behavior
Obviously, parents cannot ignore their children showing bad behavior. However, if children notice that their parents pay attention to them only when they misbehave, it is very likely that they will repeat this behavior.
Therefore, it is necessary for parents to praise their children with some frequency. By praising your child every time he shows a positive attitude, you are reinforcing him to repeat that good behavior.
4. Listening to their concerns is one way to improve your teen’s attitude.
Downplaying the issues that concern your teenager is a very common mistake today. In general, adolescent problems may seem of little importance to us, and parents may end up trivializing them.
Try to listen to your child when he needs to share his problems and concerns with you, and avoid minimizing their importance or diverting the subject to another matter. On many occasions, simply letting them talk about it and trying to empathize with them can be deeply soothing.
5. Communicate assertively to improve your teen’s attitude
For Professor Preston Ni, knowing how to use assertive communication is crucial when dealing with difficult adolescents. To do this, you must strengthen your position as a parent using skills such as negotiation or how to say “no” diplomatically.
In this way, you will not only reduce resistance and improve your teen’s attitude, but you will also be a fantastic role model of assertive behavior.
6. Share your feelings with your child
On many occasions, a bad attitude comes from the stress and frustration that your child may feel by not knowing how to manage or express them. In the same way that parents want their children to express their emotions and feelings, they also need the same from their parents.
If as a mother you express your emotions to your children, they will trust you more and feel more secure when talking about themselves. And, ultimately, if we don’t teach them to express themselves, how are they going to learn to do it?
In conclusion, during adolescence it is inevitable that your children show deep mood swings and, ultimately, a bad attitude. However, if you use assertive communication, establish family rules and consolidate a relationship of trust with your child, among others, you will be able to cope with this complicated stage of life in the healthiest way.
