Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I am a teenager expert. I actually have raised four children of my own and
I've raised countless others for many people by doing treatment foster care for youth ages 12
to 18. In this video, I'm going to be telling you how to deal with a teenager that doesn't listen.
In this video, I'm going to talk about what you need to do before you get to the moment where
you need them to listen. And then we're going to talk about what to do if they don't listen.
Now, there's 2 different types of not listening, right? So, sometimes there's the teenager who
just pretends like they don't hear you. And then there's the type of teenager
who talks back to everything and they just won't hear the truth. Whatever it is that you're
saying or trying to teach, they're going to be oppositional to that at every turn. Well,
both of these problems actually can be solved in the same way. When I was a foster parent,
I brought troubled youth into my home. And sometimes they were there for a long time,
sometimes they were there for a short time. The majority of those foster children had something
in common. And that was that they were very strong-willed and oftentimes very oppositional.
Which meant that I would tell them they needed to do something and they were like,
"You can't make me", right? That kind of thing. Or I would try to explain something to them
for why they needed to make a change and they would put up an emotional wall. And not want to
hear what it was that I had to say. Which then can give the person, the parent the impression
that the child doesn't actually care. That's not necessarily true. They just have a habit
of battling with you. One thing that you can do to make it so that this battle habit doesn't need to
perpetuate any longer is prepare the teen ahead of time by teaching them the skills they need to
get what they want. I used to say to them, "Do you want to get pretty much whatever you want?" What
adult says that to a teenager? Nobody. They're always like just controlling them and trying
to tell them to do everything. They'd look at me and they'd say, "Yeah." Like, "What's the trick",
right? Because they're a little oppositional. And I'd say, "Well, you know what?" There's
these 4 skills and honestly, if you master these 4 skills, not only will you be a leader in society
and you'll be able to land just about any job and get promotions and have good relationships in your
life. But it's going to establish trust in your family relationships and then we'll know that we
can give you like pretty much whatever you want. Because you will also know that you have wisdom
and you won't ask for things that you shouldn't. And they were like, "Oh, interesting." Right?
The interest is peaked. So, then we started to share with them and teach with them the
4 basic skills. And they sound super basic. But to govern yourself, to control yourself enough
to do them actually takes a significant amount of willpower. But they're up to it. In fact,
even my toddlers can do these skills. And they are liberating once they finally learn how to do them.
So, these skills are following instructions, accepting "no" answers, accepting consequences
and disagreeing appropriately. So, once you've taught them the skills that they need so that
they can communicate better with you and get more things going their way. Especially that
disagree appropriately skill. They love that one. Then you're going to want to pre-teach
them. Also how you will handle situations when they don't use the skills properly. So,
there are 5 different teaching styles that I use to correct problems and to teach certain behaviors
to the children. So, those 5 teaching styles help me correct anything. The children know
the scripts. They know exactly what words I will say to correct them. Your parenting needs to be
that predictable. If it's that predictable and if you stick to it consistently, they have nothing
to argue about. And if they're tuning you out and you've already taught them ahead of time,
it doesn't matter if they tune you out. You can know full well that they know what's going on
and you can just follow through with it so that there's no more power struggles that are resulting
which is huge. So, you need to have predictable words and words that everybody understands that
are going to be calm, that are going to appeal to the logical part of the brain and that are
going to be predetermined. So, you pre-teach them what all those are. So, that they could role-play
on the parent side and say everything that you are going to say. And you're going to stick to
it. And then you've got to have predetermined consequences as well. We've got other videos
that talk about consequences and really this whole program is talked about in great detail. There's
a really extensive comprehensive training that is done on teachingselfgovernment.com.
It's called the Teaching Self-Government Parenting course. So, if you go and find the teaching
self-government parenting course then you will get all of the training. You'll be able to put
all these pieces together to help you with some of the most difficult behaviors and to create
bonds of unity and love in your family. So, now what do you do if they're not listening? Let's
talk about that. The first thing you never do is you never talk back to them if they talk back to
you. So, if they're being oppositional and they're like, "Whatever. You can't make me. I don't care.
You're so mean." Or whatever kinds of things they say because they don't want to listen to
what you have to say. Don't ever talk back with, "Honey. Yes, I do. You know that's not true". Or
whatever it is that you normally say. If you do that then you go into the other don't do which is
don't have a power struggle. If they are talking back to you, they are initiating a power struggle.
If you talk back to them, then you are engaging in the power struggle and it becomes very difficult
to get out. Once you're trapped in a power struggle, nobody listens to anybody really because
we all go to the emotional part of our brains and we just try to survive and come out on top.
This doesn't help with listening or understanding. It's not going to help them in the long run. They
don't get understood if you fall into a power struggle. So, and they don't necessarily know
that. Obviously you should explain that to them at some point when you have a little private
one-on-one talk with them. But don't talk back. That's the thing to remember. It's like a cardinal
rule. Don't do it and don't power struggle. There's another cardinal rule. It's not necessary
to power struggle with the children to get them to listen to you. So, what do you do then? Let's
talk about that. So, we already talked about how you're going to teach them skills that they need.
Right? You're going to teach them 4 basic skills. How to follow instructions, accept "no" answers,
accept consequences and disagree appropriately. So, let's say they don't follow the instruction.
Then what should you do? 2 things. Be calm. Number 1, be calm. And if you don't know how to be calm,
there is a link below this video in the description section that is called the
Calm Parenting Toolkit. And I highly recommend clicking on that. And there are other youtube
videos about calmness that I'm going to tell you about in a minute. So, understand calmness. How
is it that you communicate calmly to another person? Are you taking things personally?
Are you getting in their face? Are you allowing stress to take over so that you can't think?
Even if you think your face looks calm, your heart and your mind might be sending signals of stress
and trying to control them. To them, they can feel it. We can all feel it when someone isn't calm
even if they are keeping a completely stoic face. So, be calm. Next, be consistent. So,
you've taught them these are the skills you need to use. They each have a skill set
attached to them. '"These are the skills that I'm going to use to correct your problems. These are
the exact words that I'm going to say." They're so predictable. You've taught them every word ahead
of time. You might even have little cue cards. In fact, in the teaching self-government program,
we have these little cue cards that remind you of some of those words that you're going to say
so that you can get through those interactions in a minute and not fall into your old habits
as well. So, you're gonna say, "Okay. You've got the skills. You've got my skills even. You know
exactly how this interaction is going to go. Now, here we go." Oh, and you have your consequences
predetermined. That is important. Now, parents can use consequences in really manipulative ways.
So, the type of consequences you pick are vital. In fact, we have videos on here on consequences
where I go into detail about what types of consequences to pick. So, I'm not going to
go into that detail in this video. But just make sure that you are not picking consequences
that are facilitating more power struggle. You're trying to just elicit some emotional
response in the child. That doesn't make a good negative consequence. So,
if you've got predictable consequences, predictable skills, predictable teaching,
all you have to do is follow-through. So, then just make yourself follow through. Don't give up,
don't burn out, don't allow yourself to burn out. When a parent is self-governed, they can create a
self-governed child. And the biggest part of being self-governed as a parent is deciding
that you have a duty to keep doing that teaching no matter how worn out you feel like you may be.
If you've enjoyed this video and if you would like some more help with your calmness, you'll probably
want to check out my next video which is This Is The Key To Calm Parenting. Click on that now.