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When You and Your Parents Don't See Eye to Eye
How can you improve communication with your parents? For one thing, it helps to understand what they expect of you.
by Becky Sweat
Kelsey is angry with her parents because she thinks they’re too strict. "They get on my case when I’m up late talking on the phone," she says. "They think by 10 p.m. I should be in bed sleeping because it’s a school night. But I just don’t need eight hours of sleep every night. Why can’t my parents understand that?"
Jason hasn’t spoken to his parents in two days. "They’re making my life miserable with an ultraearly curfew," he says. "I can’t even go to 7:30 movie showings because my parents want me home by 9. It’s totally ridiculous."
Kelsey and Jason are hardly the first teens to clash with their parents. You, a teen, are fighting for independence. Your parents are fighting to guide and protect you. They’re acting from a perspective of wisdom, experience, knowledge and understanding, trying to show you the way until you can learn these things on your own.
"In some ways teens and parents almost have mutually exclusive agendas," says Kathleen Galvin, Ph.D., associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. "Parents are probably still focused inward in terms of what’s going on with the family, and most teens are beginning to focus outward, paying a great deal more attention to their peer groups as sources of influence."
As a result, teens clash with their parents about everything from parties and grades to how neat their bedrooms need to be and their choice of friends. But, although you may think your parents are unreasonable when they tell you to get off the phone after you’ve been talking for only three hours, the resulting conversation they have with you about the proper use of the telephone doesn’t have to turn into a big blowup.
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