A Different Perspective on Teens—and How to Talk to Them

Last updated on: April 5, 2022 at 12:15 am by Shaunti Feldhahn

A Different Perspective on Teens—and How to Talk to Them 2022-04-04T20:01:08-04:00 Shaunti Feldhahn

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Are we looking for the negative because we expect the negative?

Despite the very real issues out there, most of us have also seen the good choices that many teens are making. Which is not always easy in a culture in which it can seem challenging to do the right thing – and is even less easy when teens are far more anxious than ever before. I’ll share some actual data on the trend of good choices in a moment. But here’s the issue to start with: The bad teen behavior tends to be what gets a lot of press—and attention from parents.

This is completely understandable and is certainly needed on a case-by-case basis when an incident or pattern of behavior needs to be addressed. But it can also be all too easy to look for problem behaviors simply because we are highly attuned to the possibility that they are there. In which case we may simply not see or give credit for the good choices.

In other words, we may be missing the good forest because we’re expecting to see the unhealthy trees.

Now, that said, some parents have the opposite problem. We do always need to be wise and aware and not burying our heads in the sand about what our darling do-no-wrong-honor-student might actually be doing wrong!

But just because a student occasionally does something wrong out of a desire for freedom (or out of a fear of losing it), doesn’t mean the wrongdoing defines who they are or who they are becoming. In my research with more than 3,000 teens for For Parents Only and other books, the vast majority of kids want to grow up to be a “good person.”

So here’s the hard but essential question to ask yourself—and your kids: Am I perhaps expecting the negative and thus focusing too much on what they are doing wrong? Am I missing the good?

Because there is a lot of good out there. Before I come back to how to have a conversation with our kids about this, let’s review some new and hopeful research regarding the state of teens overall.

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