I have no reason for being so sleepy and laggy and unmotivated and sad the last few days. Except that we’re all going to get old and die and so will everyone we love.
Rob has been at the moodier/angrier end of the teenager spectrum recently, surprising me with his sudden outbursts over what seems from my point of view to be NOTHING. It’s hard to respond peacefully/defusingly [ha—I originally had this as “diffusingly,” like I was making tea] when I’m not even sure what’s going on. Sample conversation:
Other child, looking at Paul’s desk: “OOOOooooo, a new keyboard! Let me try it!”
Rob, turning around and getting involved with sudden and unexpected scorn: “It’s not even PLUGGED IN yet.” *scoff sound*
Me, in a friendly voice: “It’s a cordless one.”
Rob, with even more intense feeling: “It still has to be PLUGGED IN. The thing that MAKES it cordless still has to be plugged in SOMEWHERE.”
Me, puzzled by this outburst and unsure how to respond/proceed (i.e., is it that he’s embarrassed to have been wrong so he’s trying to prove he really was right, or does he know the thing that needs to be plugged in hasn’t been plugged in yet so he’s trying to rudely-but-nevertheless-accurately correct what I said?): “Mm hm, yes, that’s right.”
Rob: “WHAT?? It DOES. There’s a THING that gets plugged into the computer!!! YOU SAID it didn’t need to be plugged in!!”
Me, cautiously, in a mild, explaining tone: “Yes, I know, I just thought you might think it had a cord, since the last keyboard did. You can check if you like to see if that other thing is plugged in yet. Maybe it isn’t yet, but I thought Daddy already set it up.”
Rob: *exasperated sound; hands briefly beseech the heavens; he spins around in his chair and is back to his computer typing crankily*
Me: *bewildered and annoyed*
It’s difficult to imagine this going on for the next decade or so, but perhaps it gets easier with practice. I’m trying to remember if it got easier to deal with toddler irrationality/outbursts or not, and I THINK it partly DID—if only because by the time the fifth child was being a toddler I was aware that the stage would pass without me having to actually make a toddler understand that he/she was nuts.
That sounds fun… reminds me of watching my sister interact with my parents and siblings when I was a teenager. I do think ALL teens go through some attitude “issues” but I know some are way worse than others so hopefully you get more on the “easier-ish” side of the spectrum. (I’m going to be hoping the same for myself when the time comes!!)
This phase of teenagerhood is less than fun; my daughter is flirting with this phase as well. The know-it-all attitude is bad enough, but the voice tone she tends to take is regarded in our house as being unacceptable. That’s what we focus on: she can correct people and argue if she wants, but she HAS to be respectful in her words and her tone of voice.
This is exactly what we did, Leigh! My feelings were that I treated my daughter with respect, and I expected the same kind of treatment in return. I will be the first to admit though, on the whole she was (and is, she’s 19) a very easy going kid, so we were lucky.
I feel like I’ve got toddler irrationality AND the beginnings of teenager attitude/angst. I have smaller sample size but my nearly 8 year old daughter is already pulling the moody “I’m not even going to talk to you” response to my seemingly innocuous comments. This morning it was my comment about her eating her snack food in her lunch and not her fruit (even after she said how much she loved the fruit combo I chose for yesterday’s lunch). She rolled her eyes and stomped off and later let me know that I “shouldn’t accuse her of things when I don’t know what I’m talking about” Turns out the snack food had been brought home and was in her room (how was I to know? It wasn’t in her lunch bag with all the fruit…) And I pointed out gently that I was, at the time, MAKING her lunch–HELPING her.
Is it a girl thing or a my kid thing to get the attitude so early? How is Elizabeth? Different from her brothers and twin?
It makes me worry for the teenage years.
Meanwhile the toddler is making bizarre demands about sleeping under his “sheep” which is actually a folded king size sheet that was in his room and can now never leave his bed.
Kids!
Elizabeth definitely has some attitude stuff I haven’t seen in her brother. She has some SERIOUS sulks, where I’ll say something totally reasonable and she ends up mute and furious. I’m especially dreading the teen+girl combination.
oh dear. I think I’m glad #2 is a boy :)
Every time I read a post like this, it makes me want to call my mother and offer a 20-year-late apology.
Yup.
I am not sure I will be able to handle it that well when mine are older (because I am not handling their attitudes now). I tell stop talking back and stop being so rude in a very firm voice and if it continues too long after that I end up yelling and giving out consequences. I have a feeling that won’t work for teenagers so much….like it will just make it worse, right? I have no idea how to talk to a teenager, but I am not sure I will be able to hold myself back. I feel like I tend to just become like a teenager myself when I get angry.
Ugh. I don’t suppose it’s consolation that after they move out you get a lot smarter?
Having no experience with teens whatsoever (7 months to go here)– I imagine there will be some individual variation. And the one who’s queued up next is more easy-going in general, right?
YES—although, we’re noticing some “furious with tears in eyes” silence from him that’s making us fear we’ll be sorry we complained about the mouthy firstborn.
Oh, God. This is giving me flashbacks to when my brother was a teenager. He had the WORST “I am the smartest person in this family and I will not let ANYONE have the last word about ANYTHING” attitude, and he would just TURN on you out of the blue. It was awful. If nothing else, it does ease the separation anxiety as college approaches. I think we were all thrilled when it was time for him to depart (though the superior attitude got worse before it got better, and now he is a lovely adult, of course).
I think that since all teens are different in a way that toddlers aren’t (with toddlers, you can kind of figure out what sets them off and plan accordingly, and you figure out how to diffuse tantrums, etc), it’s harder to know how to cope with each one. I was more of an ice queen and bottled things up and shut my parents out kind of teenager. Which wasn’t a blast for them, either, but I was less volatile, I guess — but I’m sure they also had to find ways to deal with that (plus I had major anxieties about school and ballet and stuff — I was extremely INTENSE, which requires a different kind of parenting). Anyway, I think my parents mostly coped by having active lives outside of our family and probably keeping a generous cache of adult beverages in the house.
“If nothing else, it does ease the separation anxiety as college approaches.”—ha ha ha and also groannnnnnnnnnn YES.
In re your opening, I used to teach a class on 19th/20th C. horror fiction to first-year college students and the day we started Poe, I’d always say at the end of class that we were all an hour and fifteen minutes closer to death than when we walked in the room. Usually, it got laughs, but every so often one of those kids would look genuinely shocked and then I’d feel a wee bit guilty.
I had a two year old and a bitty baby around for a week, and I couldn’t figure out why I was SO HAPPY the whole time. I realized I was just enjoying the feeling of competence. It was so nice not to feel inept, annoyed, and mildly mentally ill. Teens, man. And I had fully intended to enjoy this stage, too.
I’ll pipe in from the toddler side of things: I notice with my current 2 year old there is a lot more laughing at his behavior (to ourselves, not at him) and thinking “ah, toddlers” whereas with my firstborn we spent a lot more time feeling exasperated and like this stage was horrifying and would never end. So perhaps it will get easier with time?
I remember when my (older) brother was 13 my mom would respond to all his outbursts with a chuckle and say “he’s 13.” Which I thought was *hilarious* …. until I turned 13 and she started doing it to me. Then I was infuriated.
OMG yes!!! But in our house, the 16 year old male is the calmer and quieter of the two and only overreacts when pushed too hard (to do something totally unreasonable, like explain why he has missing assignments – grrr). But the 14 year old female – aargh! I told my husband that if I start menopause soon, he might want to just take the boy and move out. When I try to tell her that her tone is rude, she insists that she didn’t say it that way, that we all heard her wrong, and that we never say anything to her brother (well, that might be because he doesn’t talk rudely to us!). I’m really not looking forward to the next few years AT ALL! Come on, college!
Re: your first part, I can sort of deal with the idea that one day we will ALL be dead but I cannot even a little bit deal with the notion that one day ONE of my partner and I will be dead and the other of us will not and that will be just AWFUL for whoever is left behind.
Re: your teenager, I don’t know. I’ve been teaching high school and the fifteen-sixteen year olds are the WORST. They throw attitude to teachers, they are perpetually convinced that they are the smartest person in the room and they don’t care about anything. Ugh. I’ll take seventeen plus, or eleven to thirteen, gladly, but the fourteen to sixteens are terrible.
I was trying, unsuccessfully, to have a pleasant conversation with my 8-year-old during our 15-minute drive home from school yesterday. Finally, I said, in as even a tone as I could manage, “Do you really need to contradict everything I say?” Him: “I DON’T CONTRADICT EVERYTHING YOU SAY.” So yeah, I hear you.
With mine the worst of the worst was between the ages of 11-14. Although we still had a few outbursts from 15 to – well, to now, they were/are less frequent. All those hormones raging, I suppose.
I swear, teens are dementors – they can just suck the light and joy out of a room in a nanosecond when they feel like it. Each teen is different – difficult at different ages or (if you are lucky) not difficult at all. You have to use your instincts as to what works best with each kid. But for heaven’s sake, when they are in that mood, don’t even TRY to reason with them. You’ll end up wanting to rip their heads off.
It’s been a rough few years around here – can you tell?
“if only because by the time the fifth child was being a toddler I was aware that the stage would pass without me having to actually make a toddler understand that he/she was nuts.”
If that isn’t the personification of parenthood I don’t know what is. It’s so perfectly apt.
As someone who was a truly atrocious teenager, I have deep sympathy for you. And like the other Alice, I think that I’ll offer up an apology to my mother next time we talk.
It sounds like Rob is dealing with the teenager standby of being mad *about* situation A, and then being mad *at* situations B-Z, which was a frequent occurrence for me. And if he’s like I was, “situation A” can be anything from a bad interaction in 2nd period math to frustration with our country’s batshit approach to closing down Guantanamo.
As for what worked when I was an angry young thing, focusing on tone was moderately useful in our house. I was allowed to be mad at the world, and being quietly sullen was OK, but any tone that added an unspoken “you absolute IDIOT” to the end of the sentence was a problem. If I wasn’t in a place to be able to pull things back, I think I usually just sulked off to be Righteously Indignant at Life’s Great Injustices on my own, so there weren’t any real consequences, though.
As for my mother: she greatly relished the availability of cheap, good wine during this period.
I heard an interview with the author of the book Brainstorm about teenage brains on NPR, and it sounds exactly like this. Something about how teenagers see even innocuous comments as combative, and the reasons why. Seems like there wasn’t that much in the “and what should I do about that” category but the research behind it all seemed very interesting.
What’s funny is I’ve been mentally composing this EXACT SAME POST AGAIN. I’d forgotten I’d written it! I think I need to read that book.