More and more families suffer from the destructive relationships between parents and adolescents. The relationship between parents and adolescents has become one of the intractable problems in a stressful life. Yet, people generally don’t have a proper way to resolve these issues. I believe that the relational conflict between adolescents and parents is caused by bad parenting and a dreadful family atmosphere, resulting in adolescents' mental health problems and making the parent-child relationship grow distant. However, this problem can be solved by adjusting the ways they communicate and by learning to control their emotions.
Nowadays, the mental health problem of adolescents has become a severe conundrum. It leads to depression, anxiety, self-accusation, and so on. Those psychological problems can bring plenty of difficult problems for teenagers to solve. Adolescents’ mental health problems are significantly affected by conflicts in the parent-child relationship. According to a study by Burt et al., the experiment included 808 pairs of 11 year old same-sex twins. The result measures covered symptom counts for ADHD, CD, and ODD from structured interviews with twins and their mothers. The outcome shows that through genetic and environmental factors, conflicts accounted for 33% of the covariation among the disorder. The author of this research summarized that parent-child conflict appears to act as a common vulnerability that increases the risk of multiple childhood disorders. Every conflict between parents and children indicates that the child is likely to develop some mental illnesses such as conduct disorder, major depression, antisocial thoughts, et cetera. The results from the experiment and survey indicated that children’s mental illness has a direct association with a high probability of parent-child conflict. As parent-child conflict increases, antisocial and disordered behavior and depression can be observed. Thus, adolescents' mental health will be affected by conflicts in parent-adolescent relationships.
As the conflicts between parents and adolescents become more frequent and intense, there will appear further problems in their relationship, and they will become increasingly estranged. The conflict between parents and children will make them grow apart. Pickhardt is a psychologist who focuses on parenting in addition to being a doctor of philosophy. He states that the frequency and intensity of these conflicts will increase as the process of adolescence. There are three parts that act as the engines that drive this process: Separation, Differentiation, and Opposition. Separation reduces adolescent involvement with their family; Differentiation makes parents feel unfamiliar with their child because they are assuming their identities which parents are unwilling to accept; in the process of Opposition, children will argue with parental requests, disobey parental rules and thus on.
Adolescence is a critical period. Alfred Adler is a psychologist who is the founder of individual psychology. As Adler claimed, numerous behaviors in adolescence have the goal to gain independence and equality with adults. Usually, children have thoughts in this period which cannot be understood by their parents. This will cause numerous differences and conflicts between them and make adolescents not willing to share ideas with their parents anymore. These conflicts can lead to a cold relationship. The analysis from Pickhardt also illustrates why there are so many conflicts between parents and children, and how they drive parents and children apart. As a result, conflict is a factor in the estrangement between parents and children.
Parents tend to underestimate the impact they have on their children. Their words, behavior, and attitude can have many negative effects on their children that indicates that parents and children will have a bad relationship in the future. Therefore, one of the causes of parent-child conflicts is bad parenting, which can harm children’s psychology and demeanor. On the grounds of Richards-Gustafson’s article, she claims that bad parenting can make children depressed, have poor resilience, be antisocial, and tend to show aggression. According to a 2011 study by Rowntree, the UK’s Department for Education, it found that children who received bad parenting are two times more likely to misbehave. Poor parenting can have a negative impact on children regardless of their race or socio-economic status. The author of an article about bad parenting said that children are like sponges-- they model everything a parent does and incorporate what they see into their own lives. In the process of children’s upbringing, they will learn what they see and hear. Parents' physical punishment and unhealthy expression will make them lack emotional support and when they become adults, they will also use these methods to treat others and their parents. Thus, bad parenting can cause parent-child conflicts and lead to a worse relationship.
Additionally, family atmosphere can be fundamental to a child’s upbringing. It is an indirect factor contributing to parent-child conflicts. As a consequence, parent-adolescent conflict can be caused by a negative family atmosphere such as one that is favoring egocentric, violent, intolerant behaviors, et cetera. Exploring Your Mind has an article about the family atmosphere. It indicates that the family atmosphere can have a significant effect on the members of the family. When the cohesion between family members is low, it becomes the origin of stress that carries an emotional weight for children and parents. This can directly arise many intense conflicts between parent and child. The influence can be positive or negative. A negative atmosphere will arise when there are some behaviors such as violence, disruption, intolerance. This interferes with their well-being and it further leads to additional tensions. Therefore, a negative family atmosphere is the cause of parent-adolescent conflict.
There are more and more parents who don’t know how to communicate with their children and in the process of their communication, conflicts will constantly arise that will deteriorate parent-child relationships. Hence, one of the key solutions to parent-adolescent conflicts is to adjust the ways they communicate. According to Baum’s research, she gave us 11 ways to overcome conflict by communicating better.
Avoid yelling: experts indicated that yelling can induce fear and helplessness which make an argument worse;
Acknowledge their feelings: If you can show you understand them, they will also ask you about your feelings;
Understand their story: try to put yourself in your parents’ situation. This can help you find a better solution. Many families are suffering from parent-child conflict, which can cause pressure and unhappiness. However, when we calm down and truly understand what we want, we won't say something we will feel regretful after the “fight”.
In Baum’s conclusion, while we are communicating, we can understand others' thoughts and our emotions can be comforted. When we are in this situation, it will be considerably easier to find a solution. Therefore, changing the way we communicate can help us solve the parent-adolescent conflict.
Whether parents or adolescents, a stressful life can make our emotions become uncontrollable, and parent-child conflicts is primarily due to our inability to control our emotions. A great way to solve parent-adolescent conflict is to learn to control your emotions. Newport Academy Organization published an article focusing on emotional problems which give us some useful and detailed methods to help us solve this problem. We should feel our emotions instead of pushing them away and escape; according to research at Johns Hopkins, they discovered that meditation can greatly quiet the mind and adjust our brains to become healthier. Furthermore, getting enough sleep can help you handle challenges and deal with your emotions easier.
It is not easy to navigate stress, but learning to control our emotions is a sustainable and easy-to-access tool. Newport’s article lets us know how to release our negative mood, so that we will not release these bad moods to parents or children to cause conflicts. When you know how to control your emotions well, many struggles will become much easier. Consequently, learning to control our emotions can greatly help solve parent-child conflicts.
The relational conflict between parents and adolescents has become a widespread social problem; it has seriously affected our lives and even completely destroyed some families. In order to solve this problem, both parents and children should change the way they communicate and learn how to control their emotions. Parent-child issues can results in adolescents having psychological problems and alienate them; these effects are due to bad parenting and a destructive family atmosphere. If we find the key to solve this problem, it will become easier to resolve the relational conflict between parents and adolescents. After the parent-adolescent problem is solved, teenagers can regain their self-esteem. At the same time, parents can manage their families better, which can promote the development of their work and life.