| The Challenging Teen |
| Thursday, 26 March 2009 08:13 |
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Change is hard work. And change is all about being a teen. Boundaries are tested, conformity is rebelled against. I recently responded to an email about a challenging teen. The question helped me focus on the issues that you might face as you work with and live with your own teens. Question: I have a challenging teen I am working with who says he knows what to do socially to fit in but is not willing to change himself. Then of course he later says how much it bothers him that he has no friends. Thanks for any thoughts on how to work on the social thinking piece. He says I have taught him all he needs to know. Not! My response went something like this: Work with difficult teens on the fact that we ALL have to conform at some point. Conformity is what we do in a society, in a family and with friends. It does not mean we sell our soul or refuse to be ourselves; it does mean we put up with folks and expect them to put up with us in a way that makes us all feel included. It means that we have to work at noticing the subtle things that make others feel decent, trying to meet their needs and not just our own. If we only try to meet our needs, if we insist on being "who we are" and that folks should always accept us, we are then perceived as "selfish." We are also largely unemployable since jobs require us to conform to a point where we can then not conform. What I mean by that is to be truly accepted as an individual we have to fit in so that we can be seen as the individuals we want to be recognized for. So we have to "conform" to a point where people want to include us, and then we create opportunities to demonstrate our individual differences! To stand out for the sake of standing out, without making others feel good about us or themselves, just leads to exclusion and that usually sucks from a psychological point of view © Michelle Garcia Winner 2011
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