Raising your grandchildren (or nephews or cousins) can be a deeply rewarding and joyful experience in this season of your life. However, sometimes, these precious children become grumpy, sweaty, almost adult-sized beings you don’t recognize for a moment. Suddenly, they spend all their free time buried on the couch with their phones, sneering at your attempts at simple conversation, like, “Good morning.” What happened to your precious grandchild? Why is it so hard to connect with this tween or teen?
Change Your Expectations for Connection
During a teenager’s journey to adulthood, they are trying to become their own independent people. This process involves (among many other functions!) rapid brain development while they are forming identity. They need this developmental process to become healthy adults. However, because so much is happening inside them, they often come across as angry, frustrated, selfish, thoughtless, or even critical of all they’ve known thus far. Your parenting style, family values, and even your haircut are all suspect to them! They are wrestling with what they’ve experienced and figuring out how to carve their path forward with an identity that fits.
Sometimes, the adults around these children becoming adults aren’t ready for these changes. And sometimes, your grandchild’s expressions of this developmental process can hurt your feelings. When you recognize the changes, it’s empowering to change your expectations of what “connection” means with this grandchild and learn new ways to navigate it. By responding to this child’s behaviors, you can model healthy communication and how to adapt to changing situations.
Three Keys to Connecting with Tweens and Teens
These three critical communication elements can help you adjust your expectations of your young person and improve your connection with them.
1. Reach Out to Your Grandchild
Remember that while this tween or teen is working through their identity and figuring out what kind of adult they want to be, they may not reach out to you or other adults in your family like they used to. They are more likely to reach out to their peers. It will help if you can expand what you define as “reaching out.” For example, they may only approach you with a rant about a problem with a friend or to vent about a grade they feel is unfair. They might only approach you when they want to hang out with friends or need a ride to the game. This is their new version of reaching, even if it’s very different from their sticky little hands begging for a hug.
We know that tweens and teens can be almost painfully blunt and come across as rude or thoughtless in their reach for you. They don’t hear themselves the way we hear them. Additionally, they are still learning social skills and may have challenges or delays in emotional maturity.
Despite these challenging behaviors, try to reach out to your tween or teen. You should wade through the stuff you used to correct (language, tone, attitude, etc.) to listen for the need under their words. And remember that they will often seek a safe space (you!) to dump these challenging thoughts or feelings. Your role as a trusted family member is to provide this safe space. Their need is to be seen and heard.
Please don’t read this to say that you should ever accept disrespect, abuse, or bullying from a tween or teen living in your home! Instead, work on balancing how they reach out against what you know about their developmental stage. You should prepare yourself for their versions of the ‘hard truth’ about your imperfections, such as your cooking, your fashion sense, or your understanding of their generation, and understand that it’s part of growing up to adulthood. You can make light-hearted jokes, ask them for another way to share their thoughts or re-direct them. And on the occasion when you do get a compliment, cherish it for the truth it represents to them. Make sure they know how great it feels!
2. Be Available to this Tween or Teen.
Being as consistently available for this grandchild (or nephew or cousin) is crucial. When they reach for you, they need to know it’s safe to keep reaching for you. Be prepared that your tween or teen relative will likely reach for you at the most inconvenient times – like at 10 p.m. when you are shuffling off to bed. Their bodies and brains are on entirely different timetables than yours, and it can be hard to be there when they reach for you.
If you cannot be present when they reach for you, try to have a short conversation that lets them know you want to revisit this matter.
For example, text them immediately if they try to call you during an important work meeting.
“Bud, I really want to talk about this with you. Can I call you back when this meeting is over?”
Whatever way your family does this, always include language that reassures them. Let them know you want to be fully with them and that you value their reaching out to you.
As this young person navigates the path to adulthood, your physical and emotional presence is a touchstone to which they will keep returning. Remember when they were toddlers? They would play at the park or in the yard and run to check in for a quick hug, a touch on the shoulder, or an affirmation that you were there. It’s as if they were telling themselves, “Here you are. I’m okay now that I can see and touch you.” You served as an anchor for them as they ventured out and returned to safety.
Touching base with your presence might look different during adolescence. However, this tween or teen still needs reassurance that you are there, waiting, and available when they need it. They will venture further into the world in friends’ cars, on class trips, and off to volleyball tournaments. Knowing you are present and available gives them the same touchstone they needed as toddlers.
3. Receive from Your Tween or Teen
If you can also intentionally choose to widen your ability to receive from this young person, you will strengthen their understanding of your availability and presence. What this tween or teen can offer you in a relationship will change dramatically as they go through the stages of becoming an adult.
Suddenly, this formerly sweet child is now critical of your parenting style, politics, faith practices, and community culture. Plus, your jokes are lame, and those jeans are just embarrassing! But take heart. These sharp barbs and criticism will soften as they grow.
Again, it would help if you never accepted disrespect or abuse from this young person. However, using your understanding of their changing brain and developmental needs can help you gain some perspective. Knowing what they are growing toward can help you increase what you can receive from them. You can even use it to stir some compassion for the many changes their brains and bodies are experiencing. Let your tween or teen know that you won’t accept their delivery. By being open to receiving these, you show them that you value their perspective and are willing to listen and learn from them.
Effective Connection Starts with You!
Your tween and teen look to you and the other safe adults to follow into adulthood. Being consistent in reaching out to them, choosing to be available when they reach back, and increasing how you receive from them can all work together to improve your connection and set them up for success. Navigating adulthood can be scary and challenging for tweens and teens. Knowing that you are there to support them reassures them that they will be seen and heard and never alone.