Don’t Return the Serve…
Often our children confuse their sense of self-value with their need for control. Ultimately, each of us wants to be heard and wants to be recognized. One common way that children and adolescents seek acknowledgement is by challenging their parents on a variety of very sensitive issues. As a parent of young children, you may have heard your child tearfully charge that “you don’t love me anymore.” As your child arrives at adolescence, these refrains tend to become more creative: “I think that I’ll paint my bedroom black…why shouldn’t I buy all my clothes at the Salvation Army?” Or, has your adolescent ever voiced that statement that most of us dread hearing: “I am absolutely not going to college.”
At these junctures, we view parenting as having a lot of similarities to the game of tennis, with you on one side of the court and your child on the other. Part of the game strategy, of course, is to return the serve to a place on the court that your opponent can’t reach. If you run them around the court enough, your opponent will become exhausted with the energy required to return each serve, and you will emerge the winner. Consider that part of your child’s agenda is to run you all over the court by serving up statements and questions that we may feel obligated to answer (or return).
These challenges, or volleys, are often nothing more than a relatively safe vehicle for our children to establish their own identity and uniqueness. Unfortunately, those parents who are overly conscientious (and we certainly include ourselves in this category!) tend to view these sorts of statements as gospel. We run all over the court in an attempt to formulate compelling arguments to support our positions, i.e., “if you don’t attend college, are you aware of the ceiling that will be placed on your future earning potential?”
In the “game of parenting,” as opposed to tennis, the rules are different. Serves shouldn’t be automatically returned. As a matter of fact, when parents do return a serve with a volley back to their children (e.g., a resistance or a rationale)—they frequently add extra energy to an issue that might otherwise have fallen flat. Sometimes you’d just be better off letting the balls pass by and stack up on your side.
When your child gets tired--and realizes that you aren’t going to return each serve—they may change strategies and begin to serve, or communicate, in a more meaningful direction.
