How Parents Can Manage Teenage Resistance and Rebellion

Source: Carl Pickhardt Ph. D.

Compared to their daughter or son’s relatively compliant childhood, parents can experience adolescence as a more socially resistant age.

Functionally, this resistance gradually wears down the old similarity and dependence that attached them in childhood, creating more abrasion between them. The young person’s growing desires for more freedom of expression and independence are at work.

Consider Two Kinds of Resistance

The more common resistance is oppositional behavior, where parents can encounter increased active and passive resistance to their requests and demands. “Why do I have to?” “I’ll do it later.”

The less common resistance is outlaw behavior, where parents encounter outright rebellion against their authority. “You can’t make me!” “You can’t stop me!”

So how might parents want to respond to common resistance, and to less common rebellion?

What Resistance Looks Like

Adolescent resistance expresses the growing desire to live on one’s more independent and more individual terms. Typically, this resistance takes two forms. There is active resistance in the forms of questioning and arguing: “Just tell me why?” And there is passive resistance in the forms of forgetting and delay: “I heard you the first time, and I’ll do it—in a while.”

Active resistance expresses disagreement, like disputing the need for doing what is requested: “Why pick up now what will be messy again?” Passive resistance asserts timing and degree of compliance. The young person's thinking seems to be: “You can tell me what, I’ll decide when, and when I get enough ‘when,’ I’ll do what you want—at least partly.”

In response to active resistance like arguing, parents can explain: “We will be firm where we have to, flexible where we can, give reasons for our rules, and always want to listen to whatever you have to say.”

In response to passive resistance like delay, parents can explain: “When we ask you to do something, we will follow through with supervision and checking—what you call ‘nagging’—until what we requested has been done.”

What Rebellion Looks Like

For a few teenagers, the entry into adolescence can feel like a call to arms to defend and assert personal freedom. “No one should order me around; my right to live my life my way is worth fighting for!” I don’t know why some young people are independently and individually constituted this rebellious way, but a headstrong few, perhaps by temperament, seem to be. “She’s never liked being told what to do!” “He’s always been his own boss!” Rebellion is the determination to oppose outside rules and restraints.

Some social outlaw adolescent behavior requires the company of peers, doing in a group what each would never dare alone. For example, vandalism—breaking, marking, or stealing property—is rarely a solitary adventure. Individuals need the company of others to urge them on, share the risk, and keep them company. Parents still insist on individual accountability. “Others doing wrong is no excuse for following along.”

Parents are not going to reason or punish rebellion down. They have to work with it; or in teenage parlance, they need to “get used to it.” So, some advice as parenting gets harder to do.

• Don’t take rebellion personally. “It is not a rejection of us, only acted out against us to express growing independence.”
• Accept leadership unpopularity. “Part of our thankless job is to set terms of responsible behavior for you to live by.”
• Explain the oppositional trap. “The more you oppose outside social authority, the more you may turn it against you.”
• Insist on accountability. “If you’re old enough to make your own choices, you’re old enough to face their consequences.”
• Work the exchange points. “Just as we do for you, so you must also do for us; and sometimes you are going to have to do for us before we agree to do for you.”
• Encourage communication. “If you are willing to talk out your objection, we want to hear what you have to say.”
• Identify costs. “When you rebel for rebellion’s sake, you may be engaging in self-defeating behavior.”
• Warn about risks. "When you dare the forbidden it is safer if you keep your decisions substance-free."
• Respect rebellion. “While we may not agree with your refusal to follow all the rules, we admire your determination to live life your way.”

In general, I don’t believe every adolescent commits outlaw behaviors; but I do believe most adolescents are tempted at some time. Act on it or not, even the most socially compliant teenager harbors a rebellious streak.

Compared to parenting a child, adolescence can be a more oppositional and occasionally more outlaw age. In the latter case. sometimes it can help hard-pressed parents to appreciate that from this rebellious abrasion, the adolescent is developing more social independence and expressing more individual identity.