[박수빈 국립정신건강센터 연구소장/소아청소년정신과 전문의] “I think the kid is going to go mad because he says ‘what should I do’ if I say anything to him with an annoying tone every time he’s about to enter puberty.”
“I think parenting would be ten times easier without smartphones, games and social media.”
Since the beginning of mankind, the conflict between adolescent children and their parents has been a recurring theme. Isn’t there a saying in prehistoric caves that young people these days are spoiled? that
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It’s true that even with rum, raising a child is an extreme environment these days. After industrialisation, as the period of education became longer, young people became dependent on their parents for a long time. The stress and pressure on children to study is getting worse. Fun things to attract kids, things that stimulate peripheral nerves are everywhere with high accessibility. In this difficult period for children and parents, how to get through puberty for my child is the biggest task on earth for parents with children of this age. In order to understand the adolescent who is capricious and irritable, we must first understand the characteristics of adolescence. The most characteristic of an adolescent is ‘capriciousness’. “I think my life would be ruined if I lived like this. ” and then turned around, immersed himself in the game again and said, “I want to do this now, but how do I do that?” He is an adolescent child. Parents are frustrated because they don’t keep their word, but the child’s heart to study must have been sincere at that time. The next time you say something like that, why don’t you say, “I don’t believe you anymore” and try to believe it again? Accept that it can only be one day or one week.
Another characteristic of adolescence is that the world revolves around ‘I’. The developmental psychologist David Elkind expressed the egocentrism of adolescence with the words ‘Fable Fable’ and ‘Imaginary Audience’. A ‘personal myth’ is the belief that I am special and that my feelings and experiences are fundamentally different from those of other people. Young people believe that only they have true friendship and love, and that others will not experience or understand this. So, the romance of adolescent children who live with the words ‘Mum knows nothing’ and ‘the love of the century’ only burns despite their parents’ opposition (but the fire is quickly extinguished again ). On the other hand, like the superhero in the film, he commits reckless acts with a baseless belief that he will avoid all danger. No matter how much parents worry about the risk of leaking personal information and cyberbullying and warn them about cyber friendships and the use of offensive language, they protest, saying, ‘This has never happened before, and no child is involved in such a thing in my class, so why only me?’ An ‘imaginary audience’ is a misconception that one is the main character of a play and that everyone else is an audience that only sees me on stage. Due to the illusion that everyone in the world is paying attention to themselves, young people are troubled even by small mistakes that others may not notice, and when they feel that their prestige has been eroded in front of others, they are very angry at small comments.
What should I do with a teenager who can’t seem to control me, and I think I’ll regret it when I grow up if I leave him like that? What parents can do is wait. You have to be patient and understand that ‘the brain restarts under the influence of hormones, and his head is going to explode’. “Isn’t that kind of behavior against the social norms!”, “How many years will you struggle to play for a few years?” If a child does not understand (maybe pretend not to) understand something so obvious, it is because the child’s brain is not ready for it yet. To understand that studying hard now and getting good grades can expand your options in the future requires further development of the areas of the brain responsible for planning, judgment, and impulse control. Parents want to clear obstacles in front of their children and let them go on a safe and good path, but children grow up through trial and error. When the time comes, puberty ends when most children realize that they are not superheroes or the main characters of the play, and that others are also the main characters of their own stages. At the end of the day, a child can go one step further when parents are there to hold hands and maintain a good relationship.
