This Is How to Turn Off Your Teen's Argumentative Brain

Inside: Do you feel like you are constantly arguing with your teen, they don’t listen, and they are always pushing back? Good news, it’s not you. Blame it on evolution and their brain.

This is a contributed piece by Steve Pearlman, Ph.D., Founder of The Critical Thinking Institute. You can find his Neural Codes Young Minds course here.

Parenting Teens and Tweens uses affiliate links in our posts where we earn a small commission for products purchased from links in our content.

If your teen’s brain drives you crazy sometimes, it’s supposed to. Your teen’s prefrontal cortex, the house of all of our rational thinking and executive functions like patience and self-discipline, won’t be fully wired to the rest of the brain until age 25. And when I say wired, I am not being metaphoric. Compared to you, your teen’s brain has much less myelin—the sheath that greases signal flow—between their prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain. And compared to your brain, it has fewer wires that allow the prefrontal cortex to control their emotional brain, which means that they literally cannot exercise as much control over their emotions as you can over yours.

Worse, evolutionarily speaking, teens are wired to dislike their parents. In fact, several studies have revealed that teens often interpret their parents’ faces and tone of voice as angrier and more hostile than they actually are. If your teen has ever reacted negatively to something you said that was perfectly innocent, or if your teen tends to react negatively to much of what you say, now you know why.

Why would natural selection want parents to be tortured in this way? It’s because teens are designed to want to break away from their parents. Evolution determined that once your teen could procreate, your job is pretty much done. It’s time for your teen to move out, create some offspring, and start the cycle afresh. Like so many behaviors and traits that natural selection has given us, this is not the best thing for them in modern times, but it’s what evolution has wrought.

How can you navigate their brain to stop arguing with your teen all the time?

How do we best prepare teens as they push us away and try to navigate the world on their own? And as parents, how do we manage the relationship with our teens whose brains naturally see us as potential enemies?

Ideally, we want to help them build their skill sets for greater executive function. My work at the Critical Thinking Institute teaches teens how to seize control over their brain functions—how to recognize their brain’s effort to “think” reactively and emotionally and how to shift it into slower, well-reasoned critical thinking. Doing so helps transform teens into more rational beings because it provides them with a method for channeling their angst, stress, and consternation into deliberate thought and rational solutions.

But there are things that parents can do to help their teen make that shift, as well. Once you understand that your teen’s brain is wired to see you as potentially hostile even when you’re not, you can trick it into being more at ease–and hopefully stop arguing with your teen all the time.

Three Ways You Can Stop Arguing with Your Teen

1. Change your body language

Believe it or not, your body language is responsible for about 75% of what you communicate, and your teen’s brain is constantly reading your body as angrier than you intend. So, don’t give it anything remotely provocative. In interactions with your teen, try moving a great deal less, and when you do move, move slowly and calmly. A good way to practice this is to move like you’re walking neck-deep in water.

2. Calm your speech

Many people work from the premise that if their teen sees them as hostile, then it’s a good idea to overcompensate by being particularly upbeat or funny. That has value at times, but even that upbeat assertiveness on your part can still seem hostile to them (or passive-aggressive.) What’s been shown to produce better results is speaking calmly, slowly, and softly. And with just a little smile. This can prove challenging, especially when your teen is upset or yelling, but as you start to see results from it, it will become easier. You may also like to read Five Critical Tips to Defuse an Emotional Teen

3. Stop asking so many questions

Despite how counterintuitive this might sound and how difficult it might be for you, stop asking so many questions. All brains, yours included, are wired to become defensive when questioned, and that’s even more true for how your teen’s brain perceives your questions.

I’m not talking about complimentary questions like, “What’s your secret to your great hair?” I’m talking about any questions with intellectual or emotional stakes: “Why are you late?” “Where are you going?” “What’s going on between you and your friend?” Given your teen’s biological baseline of perceiving you as hostile, perhaps you can see how asking a question feels to them like being interrogated in a small room under a hot lamp. But if you transform your questions into leading statements, you can circumvent your teen’s reactionary response and elicit a lot more of the information you want.

You may also like to read Teens Hate These Five Questions, So Ask These Instead

For example, let’s say that your son, Brian, had an argument with his friend, Tom. It’s tempting to ask, “What’s going on with you and Tom?” But that could trigger a defensive response. You not only just put him on the spot for an answer, but you might also be perceived as making an accusation: “What’s going on with you and Tom?” can be heard as “What did you do to Tom?” or “What’s wrong with you that made Tom angry?”

Instead, use interested, leading statements. “It’s difficult when friends fight” might only prompt a simple response, such as “yeah,” but that “yeah” was volunteered, not solicited. Your teen’s brain chose to respond of its own volition because you did not threaten it. That increases your chances of the conversation continuing rather than your teen shutting you out.

But don’t stop at the “yeah.” Continue the process in a positive and non-threatening manner. “Knowing you, you sat down with Tom and tried to talk it through.” In actuality, you probably have no idea what your son did to address the situation. He might have done nothing. But that does not matter; you will still elicit a response: “Nah, we haven’t even texted about it yet.”

After just a few statements, you might find that you hacked your teen’s brain into opening up a little. You might say, “I don’t know Tom as well as you do, but it seems unlike him to be quiet for long.” Again, you might be completely wrong. And again, it doesn’t matter. You still prompted your teen to volunteer a great deal more information. “Actually, Tom is the quieter one. I’m the one who is more likely to reach out to him, but this time I …”

In sum, your teen’s brain isn’t wired very well yet, certainly not for strong executive function. What it is wired for is seeing its parents as angry and hostile so that it wants to get away from you and procreate. But you can offset its instincts if you know how. Calm your body language, soften and slow your tone, and stop asking questions.

Isn’t that easy? Oh, wait. I meant to say, look at how easy that is.

Are you looking to help your teen develop critical thinking skills? Steve Pearlman, Ph D. is the world’s premiere thought leader and expert on Critical Thinking. He is the author of America’s Critical Thinking Crisis: The Failure and Promise of Education, and has an Editor’s Pick TedX talk entitled “4 Tips for Developing Critical Thinking Skills.” You can find his Neural Codes Young Minds course here.