Lying, and life skills, and teens...oh my!
Can I get through one week without yelling at my teens?
My twelve-year-old daughter and I have gotten into a routine which I loathe.
I ask her to do something (clean her room, shower, do homework, pick out her clothes the night before, clean up the mess she left in the living room, go outside and walk the dog, get some fresh air, etc.) and she says “OK,” then completely ignores me.
I insist. She responds with an exaggerated sigh and growing indigence, and still ignores me.
I ask again, more forcefully this time, adding in a timeframe for the task and a consequence. She offers excuses, and often, a lie explaining that the thing is done, or she did it at her Dad’s house, or a promise to do it in the morning when we both know she won’t… you get my drift.
It’s not fun.
On the surface, I feel like her behavior is classic, surly teenager crap.
It would be really easy to think: I have to break her of this before she gets too old for me to exert influence. Or: this kid’s spoiled and lazy.
Queue the rabbit hole … I need to find the right therapist, I need an organization/motivation app and a cute chore chart, I have to play gestapo and stay on her with consequences and punishments…
As parents, we spend a ton of time and thought on building good habits and improving routines. It’s fucking EXHAUSTING. We do it because we want the kid to be a high-functioning (and ideally) happy adult capable of healthy relationships.
We also do it because running a household with kids is like being foreman on a factory floor… you have to keep the product moving, the parts in stock, and the workspace safe and sanitary. You also have the additional challenge of keeping everyone sane, yourself included. If a worker is not doing their bit, productivity suffers and the foreman has to lay the smackdown.
Point is, I don’t want to spend so much time and energy cajoling this kid to just DO THE SIMPLE THINGS I’M ASKING!
Looking deeper, I recognize that I pulled a lot of the same crap as a kid. I can remember stuffing clothes in the back of my closet rather than folding them. I can remember telling my parents that I finished my homework when I really planned to do it on the bus the next morning. I remember feeling like an ugly weirdo most of the time, and a disappointment. Why didn’t I find schoolwork easy? Why was it so hard and horrible for me to do math? I ate more than other kids, I sucked at sports, I didn’t like sleepovers, etc. I was also just as messy then as my daughter is now. Crap.
I was also preoccupied. There was a whole dramatic social world at school that made up my daily reality. I was beginning the search for identity which at that age, is mostly seen in the mirror of other people’s reactions to you. Everyone is wearing hip-hugger jeans with a GAP flannel and I don’t have the requisite flat stomach OR anything from the GAP! The other girls are really good at creatively folding and passing notes in class and no one has passed me a note all year! I specifically remember a boy in French class calling me “laid et gros” (fat and ugly). The whole class laughed and the teacher said nothing.
Really dude?
Self-impression…. confirmed!
Some of this was/is probably common at one point or another to most teens, and some of this might have been how I was parented or unique to my personality.
The important thing is that tweens and teens are walking around looking for their reflections in the world. They are afraid they will see something bad, and so they are looking for that confirmation. They are realizing how big and complicated life is. They’re hormonal. It’s a lot.
This is not to say that dissing chores is excused by the hardness of teen hood.
It is to say that with all kids, we have to acknowledge that there is a lot of nuance behind their doing or not doing something. If it were as simple as: Clean = Good, Slob = Bad, we could have just stuck with wooden spoon parenting.
If we look deeper, we can come up with a better, easier, and more long-term solution.
So I ask myself: “Self, what would have been helpful for you back in the day? Why didn’t you just give your parents a break and pick your shit up?”
The first thing that comes to mind is that I felt tremendous shame.
Because I felt ashamed, being asked to do things that were a challenge triggered anxiety. Naturally, we resist things that cause us anxiety. When I was told that my room was a pig sty, I would freeze.
When I was my daughter’s age, I remember regarding any chore which involved cleaning and organizing as impossible torture. I was uncomfortable with anything which involved stillness, silence, and routine (three things which are cornerstones of good spiritual growth and mental health). I loved books but it was hard for me to quiet my mind long enough to settle down and read, though when I did, it was cover-to-cover. I hated picking up my room, but if someone was chatting with me, or I could put on music, it wasn’t so bad. It was the tedium of repeating the same motions (fold, open drawer, close drawer) that drove me nuts. The silence of being in a room alone just waiting for the task to be finished felt impossible.
I have ADHD, and I think my daughter does too.
Here is an article from ADDitute which explains my state of mind beautifully…
One thing life has taught me is that people have completely different brains. We are not born as lumps of clay waiting for someone to form a good shape. We are all working with different software. If I knew any names for different types of clay to use in this analogy, I would list them.
Ultimately, I think my daughter is feeling shame because she just doesn’t see mess until it is pointed out. She stands out among the kids in this house for this negative trait. She is called out for her mess far more than she is praised for her sweet personality or creativity. She’s also afraid, because she doesn’t understand why she is so “lazy.” Her older brother gets straight A’s, her step-sister loves movement, her younger brother (the punk) is actually really good at picking up after himself, which makes for unflattering comparison. Other kids don’t seem to become paralyzed when confronted with a chore, so why does she?
Here’s where the lying comes in. I don’t think she lies because she just wants to get out of doing a chore, I think she lies because she feels ashamed and overwhelmed by tasks that seem easy. Here’s another great article about ADHD and shame by Edward Hallowell, M.D.
Here’s a quote from the above article which sums it up nicely:
“Living with ADHD can feel like a constant stream of apologies: we’re sorry we’re late, sorry we lost our keys, sorry we can’t keep the house neat — no matter how hard we try. If you have ADHD these endless apologies and self-blame may have added up to a crippling sense of shame. If you won’t even look in your purse anymore because you’re tortured by how disorganized it is, you may have a problem controlling your shame.”
I decided to try and use some ADHD tools for my daughter which have been surprisingly successful.
I keep a narrow focus on essentials, so, in the mornings (not her prime time), I don’t tell her to make her bed or put her dishes in the dishwasher. I just focus her on hygiene and clothing. This is “for now” until all essentials become reflexive.
I’ve been asking her to do things via text message. This strategy is two-fold, first it cuts down on yelling, and second, it gives her a list to refer to when she gets distracted.
I’ve been encouraging her to put on a podcast and start a timer when she does a chore. Something about having a “deadline” or “finish line” is motivating, and listening to a podcast is the modern version of whistle while you work. It’s multitasking. She can focus her mind on the words, which cuts down on the intense tedium.
I’ve been teaching her to log everything into her phone’s calendar and to add popup reminders for every little thing (take shower, go to Dad’s house, wear sneakers for gym tomorrow, study math for ten minutes every day this week before Friday’s test).
Finally, and most importantly, I have been empathizing with her by talking openly about how I find cleaning and organization hard as well, which cuts the shame. I also celebrate her successes. I don’t want to be the foreman who scares workers into working harder by threatening to dock their pay, I want to be the foreman who earns their respect with connection and celebrates them for their hard work (even if I would have preferred the work be done the previous day). I want her to crave praise and a feeling of accomplishment rather than fear a reprimand.
When it comes to issues of co-habitation, often everyone is bringing different problems and challenges to the table. When my daughter refuses to clean her room, my partner sees an act of willful disrespect. He painted the room for her, and found Taylor Swift posters for the walls, so why doesn’t she cherish this labor of love by keeping it clean? I, on the other hand, become afraid because I don’t want my daughter to experience the same struggles that I have experienced around organization and holding onto junk. I also don’t want my partner to be upset. Plus, I am so busy that chiding her is just one more chore, and I don’t want my relationship with my daughter to be defined by this shitty dynamic.
Kids can display an incredible kaleidoscope of obnoxious behaviors. If every person involved in the rearing of a kid were to rank behaviors on a 1-10 scale of obnoxiousness… each would have a different score. My partner would rank cleanliness generally as a 10, whereas I might rank it as a 6. He finds messiness incredibly distracting and stressful, whereas I can ignore it and get to work.
We don’t automatically see that our reaction to a kid’s behavior is coming from a specific place in our minds, but if we can identify that place, it gives us useful information to help manage the impact on the household, and the impact on our stress as parents.
Who has an immaculate, respectful, straight-A, Cello-playing, varsity team member who volunteers at the homeless shelter on weekends and avoids Snapchat at home? ; )
