Expect and require respect—but don’t assume any disrespect is intentional
Have you noticed that those “drama” moments are also those that carry the most risk of our daughter’s rolling their eyes at us…. and then of us as parents escalating to DEFCON 1?
In the For Parents Only research, one of my greatest surprises was how often the teens and pre-teens truly didn’t realize that their tone and body language were conveying serious disrespect toward the person they were talking to. They might in fact be exasperated and think their parents are being totally stupid—but they rarely intended to directly say so!!
Developmental experts have found that many teens and younger children haven’t fully developed the situational and self-awareness that allows us as adults to realize (for example) “My tone is getting very frustrated as I’m talking to my boss: maybe I should back off a bit.”
Part of our job as parents, after all, is to help our children learn this awareness and this skill. And the only way of doing that is through practice. Which means, by definition, that emotional conflicts will likely be our primary training ground! But for that to work, we must be the trainer, not the one who makes the drama worse. To both enforce our child’s respect in communication and help them learn, calmly tell your daughter, “You may not realize that your arms are crossed, your voice is raised and your tone is implying that I’m an idiot. Let’s have you say that again, using a different tone, please.” Calmly doing that each and every time, expecting the best of your daughter, will usually bring about a very good result over time.
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