Adults Get Tips for Parenting Teens at Carlmont High

For many parents, the years spent raising teenagers are often filled with drama.

There may be shouting, screaming, and poor decision-making from both teens and parents.

Dr. Laura Kastner believes it is possible to raise teens with very little drama.

“I’m here to get the latest research into the hands of parents,” Kastner said while addressing a group of parents at Performing Arts Center on Tuesday night for the parent education event “Getting to Calm: Cool-headed strategies for parenting tweens and teens."

Laura Kastner, Ph.D., a clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the University of Washington, has co-authored several books with Jennifer Wyatt, Ph.D., including their latest, “Getting to Calm: Cool-Headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens and Teens,” from which the event took its name.

New scientific research on the teen brain, Kastner said, makes it possible to explain the illogical actions and behaviors parents often see in their teenage children.

“It really does change our understanding of how teens behave,” Kastner said.  

Understanding this new brain research, Kastner told the more than 300 local parents in the audience, will help them plan for common teenager behavior.

Kastner said that as children get older, parenting gets a little more challenging, but with the right strategies parents and children will be able to make it through these often tumultuous years just fine.

Even parents of good kids have to deal with problems, Kastner said. She added that an important part of parenting is helping children learn from their mistakes.

“The average teen is going to have increased moodiness, emotional reactivity, and more risk taking,” Kastner said.

Kastner said it's the parent's job to guide their children into what she calls pro social ways to feed their need for excitement during the teen years.

If there's one knock on her strategies, Kastner believes it's that some parents initially view her strategies as soft, often calling it “marshmallow parenting.”

But Kastner called her strategies anything but that. And, as if to prove her point, she called on a few parent volunteers from the audience to role play a scenario.

The skit involved a teenager and his mother. The teen becomes emotional at being denied something he wants to do -- attend a concert a few hundred miles from home and camp out afterward with two friends.

In the scenario, the 16-year-old teen begins to berate his mother when she says no to a trip that lacks parental supervision.

The accusations from the teen come fast and furiously -- you’re over protective, you’re ruining it for me, no one likes you, kids feel sorry for me, people say you’re too strict, you don’t you know anything.

One way to react to such a teen outburst is to take the offensive and perhaps yell and curse at the teen. That is, of course, not a strategy Kastner recommends.

Kastner said it's the job of parents to stay calm even as the kid loses control and resorts to name calling.

She said that the moment a parent resorts to the same kind of behavior the kid exhibits, the child will cite the behavior of the parents as a reason for their own actions.

If the amount of knowing laughter elicited from the parents in the audience during the role playing skit was any indication, then such scenarios are common enough.

Above all else Kastner said parents need to employ strategies where they use what she calls their “thinking brains” even as their teens tries to bait them into making rash statements and reacting emotionally using their “emotional brains.”

Parents were given a handout to take home with them as they entered the Carlmont Performing Arts Center for the event, but it was just a teaser, as the majority of in-depth information and strategies are contained in Kastner’s book.

The 14 chapters of “Getting to Calm: Cool-headed strategies for parenting tweens and teens” contains many of the situations common to parenting teenagers today.

There is even a section in the book containing strategies for parenting when you disagree with the other parent involved in rearing your child.   

Kastner's visit to Carlmont High School was another in a series of parent education events sponsored by the Carlmont PTSA.