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| |    Teen-Parent Battles That No One Wins by Robert Needlman, M.D., F.A.A.P. reviewed by Lynn Cates, M.D., F.A.A.P. For many parents, raising a teenager is like fighting a long war. There are daily skirmishes, but years go by without any clear winner. Like a border dispute between neighboring countries, the parent-teen war is about boundaries: Where is the line between what I control and what you do? Both sides want peace, but neither feels it has any power to stop the conflict. In part, this is because neither is willing to admit any responsibility for starting it. From the parents' point of view, the sole cause of the strife is their adolescents' complete unreasonableness. And of course, the teens see it in exactly the same way, except in reverse. Both feel trapped. In this article, I'll describe three no-win issues that commonly arise between teens and parents and then suggest some ways out of the trap. Trivial disputes These are battles over issues that are really not very important. Examples include the color of the teen's hair or the frequency of shampooing, the cleanliness of the bedroom, the preferred style of clothing, the child's failure to eat a good breakfast before school, or his tendency to sleep until noon on the weekends. Parents often feel that their adolescents adopt certain behaviors solely in order to test the parents' resolve. They fear that if they give in at all, they will lose control utterly. From the teen's point of view, the parent is a tyrant, pure and simple. Blaming The goal of a blaming battle is to make your opponent admit that her lousy attitude is the reason everything goes wrong. You can easily recognize one of these skirmishes when you hear the words, "You always..." As in, "You always interrupt me! You never listen to what I have to say." The counterattack, of course, is to throw the blame right back, like a soldier lobbing a grenade: "Well, I wouldn't have to interrupt if you'd ever stop talking!" Needing to be right It doesn't matter what the topic is--politics, the laws of physics, or the proper way to scramble an egg--the point of these standoffs is to prove that you are right and the other person is wrong. At the core of these disputes is the wish to be considered an authority--someone who actually knows something--and therefore to command respect. Unfortunately, as long as parents and teens continue to assume that the other person is uninformed or irrational, they'll continue to fight these battles forever and never make any real headway. Avoiding the no-win trap There are no simple prescriptions to make parent-teen relations completely tension-free, but there are some general principles that can help.
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