During adolescence, teenagers begin to pull away from their families in order to define who they are as individuals. As a result, teens are extremely sensitive to parental control. It’s easy for them to feel micromanaged, over-lectured, and over-advised. Children who feel they are being controlled either become dependent or rebellious – neither of which is desirable. As a parent, your challenge is not to relinquish your power when your child becomes a teenager, but shift from being the decision-maker to being a coach or consultant. To help ease this transition, we have some tips for how to pick your battles:

Tips for Avoiding Unnecessary Battles with Teens

• Avoid getting into fights with your teen over stuff that doesn’t matter in the long term. The clothes on their floor, their hair color, the dirty dishes they left in the sink, what they wear to school, and their music choices just aren’t important in the grand scheme of life.
• When you feel annoyed, take a moment to consider if the issue is truly worth your time and energy.
• Don’t nag or criticize over small irritations. Ask yourself if the issue will matter a year from now. If it won’t, it’s not worth an argument.
• Too many rules is overwhelming and frustrating for anyone, so whittle down rules to the most critical things. It’s okay to set expectations about behavior, but try to be selective and clear with the results you want and allow them to decide the when and how of obtaining the results.
• Remind yourself of this important truth: anger or nagging have never inspired change in anyone. Ultimately, because humans are all wired to desire control, pressure from someone else always creates resistance, so nagging your teen or yelling at them actually gives you the opposite results of those you want.

Tips for Identifying Important Battles with Teens

• Stay focused on the goals you have for your family – peace in your household, a good relationship with your teen, preparing your teen for a successful adulthood – and weigh every battle by asking yourself whether the issue at hand is important or not.
• Take stock of your beliefs and values – what is truly important to you – and focus on just a couple of areas that really matter to you.
• When you have an important goal, try to focus on the end result and not the way your teen gets there. For example, rather than dictating your teen must play a team sport, let them know you think it’s important that they get exercise and learn how to be a team player and ask them what activities they would like to undertake to achieve those goals.
• Decide on your bottom lines – the 1-3 things you are willing to go to the mat for. For many parents, their bottom lines center on good health and safety.
• Have just a few rules and stick to those consistently while letting the rest go.
• If you can let the small things slide, it increases the amount of peace in your home and also gets your teen to pay more attention when you are upset about the big things.

Final Thoughts…

If you fight everything, you will exhaust yourself and damage your relationship with your child. In general, you want to set your home up as a sanctuary – a supportive place for everyone in the family – so choose your fights wisely. Conflicts are draining, so only fight an issue that is really worthy of your time and energy.  Your values should largely determine what expectations you set for your teen.