When kids and teens act in challenging and difficult ways, as parents we often feel angry and frustrated. 

But we are not just angry.  More often than not, we are experiencing another, harder to notice, emotion.  When I am working with parents, I will sometimes ask them to figure out what other feelings they have when dealing with young people behaving in tough ways.

Here are the four mostly commonly experienced feelings I hear about.

Fear. 

When kids and teens act in unlikeable, difficult or irresponsible ways, we experience fear about them or their future.  If I don’t teach them this now, bad things will happen.  I’m scared that this will never change.  If they keep on acting in this way, people will dislike them, they will be unsafe, bad things will happen.

Many people assume that psychologists spend all day telling people how to feel better and cope with life.  In fact, junior psychologists themselves sometimes make this assumption. They think they are supposed to be spending most of the time in session talking, giving advice and providing information.

Which means they completely freak out when they can't think of what to say.  I remember this feeling very well!  
While giving good advice, helping with strategies and providing good psycho-education IS part of therapy, it's not the most important thing psychologists do.  

If you've spent any time in or near a classroom lately, you'll have seen the amazing job teachers are doing trying to help students learn, while catering for a huge range of abilities, learning needs, emotional problems and physical skills.   Thirty young people, all with their own needs and a huge checklist of curriculum to cover - I've heard teachers describe it as combination of war zone/emergency room/therapy centre!  

Classrooms are incredibly busy places. 

This means our own children will not receive teaching in all the school and learning skills they need in those classrooms.  Whether we like it or not, even the most awesome teachers simply don't have time to "do it all", for every student.

As parents, we need to help.

I've worked as a psychologist specialising in kids and teens for 20 years.  I've seen hundreds and hundreds of families and young people.  I've read a lot of research.  I offer a lot of advice.  More than one client has said to me, "I just wish I could take you home so you can do this stuff at my house"

But just in case you think I've got my own parenting totally figured out, I offer you this little insight into what actually happens at my house.  Here are the parenting mistakes I make time, and time again.

Common sense tells us that when parents and teenagers get on well, and feel good about their relationships with each other, things go better.

But common sense is backed up by research which tells us specifically what a warm parent-teen relationship does.  Here are three key research findings.

When researchers ask teens to rate how warm and supportive their parents are, they find that:

When parents are rated as warm and supportive, teens are less likely to engage in risky behaviour (eg abuse of alcohol, risky sexual practices).

When parents are rated as warm and supportive, teens are more accepting of their parents monitoring their behaviour (ie knowing what they are doing across the week - at school, at home and with friends).    This is important because in previous studies, higher parental monitoring is associated with better school performance and other success indicators.

When parents are rated as warm and supportive, teens are more likely to tell their parents about the difficult situations in their lives.