Why Do Teenagers Push Back? What I Learned From Constant Back And Forth With My Teen
Last Saturday, I was folding Lila’s soccer hoodies on the couch, the half-eaten bowl of popcorn I’d made for movie night sweating next to me, when she trundled in the door, scuffed Converse leaving salt marks on the entryway rug, and dropped her news. She, Mia, and Jake were going to the new horror release at the downtown theater, the one that started at 8:30 and got out at 10:15. She wanted to go, and she needed to stay for that showing, not the early one we’d agreed to a week before.
I said our standard Saturday curfew is 9:30, so 10:30 was the latest I’d agree to. She rolled her eyes so hard her whole head moved. “All the other parents don’t even check what time their kids get home on weekends. You just don’t trust me.” I said it wasn’t trust, it was that she had 8am practice the next morning, and even with carpooling, she’d be lucky to get to bed before 11. She said she’d set three alarms, she’d never missed a practice, why couldn’t I give her this one thing. I repeated 10:30, that was my offer. She stormed down the hall, slammed her door hard enough that the framed photo of her 8th grade graduation fell off the wall. Ten minutes later, my phone pinged: a text from her, sent from her room 20 feet away: Can we talk?
That’s the rhythm of life with my 14-year-old: ask, push back, disagree, step away, try again. For the first year of her teens, I thought this constant back and forth was just a problem. She was being stubborn, she was testing me, she was trying to get her way no matter what. I’d either dig my heels in and end the conversation with “because I said so” or cave just to get 10 minutes of quiet, and both ways left me irritated and her upset. Then at fall parent-teacher conferences, her guidance counselor said something that changed how I see it: that back and forth isn’t fighting. It’s practice.
Teenagers’ brains are building the skills they need to make their own choices as adults, she explained. They don’t get that practice by following every rule without question, and they don’t get it by getting everything they ask for. They get it by asking for what they want, explaining why they deserve it, negotiating when they don’t get the whole thing, and accepting a compromise. This isn’t about being rude, it’s about learning how to advocate for themselves, without the stakes being as high as they will be when they’re 18 and living on their own.
That made sense, so I started testing small changes to how I handle these back and forths, and most of them have made things easier for both of us. The first thing I do now is ignore the attitude and stick to the request. When Lila yells that I never trust her or that I’m the worst mom in the world, I don’t respond to that. I just say “I hear that you’re upset. What do you need for this to work for you?” That cuts out 10 minutes of going in circles about my feelings as a parent, and keeps us focused on the actual problem.
The second thing is I always leave a small piece of every non-safety decision open for negotiation. I don’t negotiate whether she has to come home before midnight on a Saturday, that’s a hard line. But I do negotiate what time exactly that curfew is, depending on her plans. I don’t negotiate whether she has to keep her grades up to go out on weekends, that’s non-negotiable. But I do negotiate what kind of extra help she gets if her grade slips. When she got a C on her math midterm last month, I initially said she had to go to twice-weekly tutoring after school. She pushed back, said tutoring would make her miss all of art club, which was the only thing she looked forward to all week. She offered to do 20 minutes of extra practice problems every night after homework, and show me her quiz grades every Friday. If they didn’t go up, she’d do the tutoring. We agreed, and her last test was a B+. She got to keep her art club time, I got the guarantee that her grade would improve.
The last thing I do is call a break if things get too heated, instead of letting it spiral. If we’re both raising our voices, I just say “I’m too frustrated to talk about this right now. Let’s come back to it after dinner, in an hour.” That keeps us from saying things we don’t mean, and gives both of us time to calm down instead of walking away angry for the night.
We still have days where the back and forth wears me out. Some nights after an hour of going back and forth about whether she can dye her hair or what time she needs to leave for a friend’s house, I just want to throw my hands up and let her do whatever she wants to end the conversation. Right now we’re going back and forth about her getting a part-time job at the coffee shop downtown. I’m worried it will take too much time away from homework and soccer, she says she wants her own money to spend on concert tickets and clothes, and she can manage her schedule. We haven’t agreed on anything yet, and some nights I go to bed tired of talking about it.
But I don’t see it as a fight anymore. It’s just practice, for both of us. I’m learning to let go a little at a time, she’s learning how to ask for what she wants without letting her temper take over. It’s messy, it’s slow, and it’s not always going to end with both of us happy. But it’s working, for now.
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