Comment by Zelphyr
4 years ago
> Did you ever deal with an instance where your kids started telling you "no" in response to demands you felt were reasonable, twisting your original explanations to use against you, for things like eating, cleaning up or hygiene?
As a parent of teenagers... omg, yes. LOL. I think it's as much because they're teenagers preparing to leave the nest as much as anything.
The question was aimed at me. I never experienced that.
That doesn't mean the teen years didn't have some bumps. The worst of that was cleared up by explaining to my children that they were being flooded with hormones and a side effect of high levels of testosterone is aggression and anger.
So if they were feeling very, very angry, it wasn't because they were being subjected to extreme injustice they had never before seen. It was because they were hormonal.
That conversation ended with the punchline "You're problem is called testosterone, not my bitch mother." which caused everyone to crack up.
After that I occasionally would say "You sound like an icky, hormone soaked teenager." And my son would say "I am an icky hormone soaked teenager" and he would try to tone down whatever made me say that and I would try to cut him some slack for being hormone soaked and not entirely in control of his big, fat mouth because of it.
I love you. You sound like an awesome parent.