Tatyana Batysheva, a Moscow City Duma deputy and director of the Scientific and Practical Center for Child Psychoneurology, gave her parents advice on how to get along with a teenager and try to understand him. The parliamentarian told the Moscow City News Agency about them.
“In adolescence, separation begins, this is normal. If for pre-adolescent children, mom and dad are best friends and main authorities, then for a teenager they are no longer, and this also needs to be taken for granted. Now communication with peers is more valuable for him. Therefore, I recommend that parents remain a “reliable home front”, but at the same time respect the personal boundaries of the grown child and distance themselves a little,”Tatyana Batysheva said.
The Moscow City Duma deputy noted that many parents are perplexed why the difficulties of adolescence, in their opinion, begin too early. Usually they are expected at the age of 13-14, but modern children often "delight" parents with the beginning of growing up already in the lower grades. The fact is, she clarified, that the age of puberty has now shifted to an earlier one.
“Parents often forget how they themselves felt or behaved in adolescence. Especially those who had a child late enough - for them this is a deep past. However, there is a lot to remember. For example, the difficulty of a teenager's perception of his body. It changes abruptly, unexpectedly, and unevenly. The head, arms and legs grow first, and then the torso. It is very difficult for children to accept these changes, they feel very vulnerable. Imagine that your body suddenly becomes unrecognizable. Serious stress, right? " - explained Batysheva.
She also recalled that adolescence is characterized by unstable work of the hormonal system, autonomic regulation, the formation of the cardiovascular system, so the child may feel bad and not understand what is happening to him. At this age, children are more likely to get tired, sleep and eat a lot, their mood is constantly changing.
“Parents find it difficult to understand how a teen's brain works. It is developing intensively, but there are specific features. The frontal lobes, which are responsible for self-regulation, self-control, concentration of attention and long-term planning to the end, are only formed about 20-23 years. But the limbic system, which is responsible for emotions, pleasures, imaginative thinking, is overactive during puberty! Therefore, adolescents are purely physiologically characterized by high sensitivity, intuition, creative thinking, and this will have to be reckoned with,”the parliamentarian added.
Tatyana Batysheva wished all parents to remain patient and recommended not to refuse consultations from a specialist psychologist, if the need arises. “The main thing to remember is that the difficult period will pass, and the matured teenager will return to his parents to build new, mature, trusting relationships. We need to wait for this moment and, if possible, minimize conflicts,”she stressed.