Liking vs. Loving Your Teen
“I don’t always like my teen. In fact, if he were not my son, I ‘m not sure he would be the type of person I would want to meet at a party. Don’t get me wrong I love my teen, but I don’t always like them.” This sounds harsh, but before you cast any judgments, consider the difference between liking and loving your teen.
Liking your teen has a lot to do with their traits independent of how you raised them. They just happened to belong to a different political party, or they happen to have womanizer qualities. These are hard pills to swallow of you are nothing like this. Remember, your teen comes from you and is not a carbon copy of you. These are only some of the ways they remind us.
If you force your teen to be someone they’re not, to be more like you, their natural state will struggle with you and the result will be a lot of fighting. This does not make for a peaceful home nor does it place you in a position to be someone they would trust to influence their mind to change.
It is also very important to separate your teen’s disliked traits from your loved teen with your words. “I don’t like it when you do that, or I don’t like that part of you” can be less of a sting than “You make me sick.” Here, you are trying to be specific about what it is you don’t like. You don’t want your comment to sound like an indictment of who your teen is as a person. You’re trying to let them know you do love them. Make that clear by using your words to single out the behavior that you don’t like from the person that you do love.
When you do this, you teach your teen about compassion for those who don’t think the way they do while teaching them that you love them enough to acknowledge this is only one part of who they are and not the sum total.
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