Reply to "You want to ruin my life"

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

Reply to ""You want to ruin my life""

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]"Wow, it sounds like you are really upset. I love you, and I want to help make your life better, not ruin it. It's a problem if you feel I'm doing something that serious and detrimental. Would you like to talk about it?"

If irritated teen stomps off to do whatever you said because it's not worth a long conversation, situation over.

Otherwise:

"OK. What I thought was going on, was simply that I asked you to take a shower. That seems reasonable to me, but obviously it's a problem for you. I don't really want to be making you do things that upset you; I would way rather come up with solutions that work for both of us and still get done the things that need to get done. What's going on here from your perspective?"

Then, hopefully, you will figure out the root of the problem. Is she feeling like you nag her? Was she in the middle of something? Did she have plans to take a shower at another time? Is there a massive crisis going on that she's trying to deal with and the request to shower is simply terrible timing?

All of those things can most likely be worked through to find a mutually agreeable solution.

"You're ruining my life" is a pretty strong statement of discontent, and I would rather my child not be that upset if there's a reasonable way around it. My vision of our family and my role as a parent is that I am my child's ally and advocate always, so if she's not feeling that that's the case there's something wrong and I would want to address it.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics