How To Discipline A Teenager Who Doesn’t Care About Consequences
Training a child can be a very tasking job, more so when they become teenagers. Is your teenager giving you a hard time? Do you want to know why they behave the way they do? Or do you just need help on how to discipline a teenager who doesn’t care about consequences?
Continue reading this article to learn how to discipline a teenager who doesn’t care about consequences.
Why is my teenager misbehaving?
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A teen exhibits some behaviors which are not uncommon once you reach that particular age. Although it tends to be consistent and constant, here are some reasons they act the way they do.
1. Risk Taking
More often than any other age group, teenagers tend to take reckless risks, which they later reflect on after a long period. Studies have revealed that teenagers take that very high level of risk not because they do not think about it but because they spend a very long time thinking about it.
A teenager’s brain tends to spend more time forming what was felt than previously thought. Decision-making in teenagers comes far too slow than decision-making in adults. one cannot compare the amount of time it takes a teenager to conclude to the speed at which adults arrive fast in decision making.
It takes teenagers an average of 170 milliseconds to deliberate over the consequences of making a decision, making them more likely to decide that the risk is worth it.
2. Effect of Peer Pressure
When a teenager gets to a certain age, they start making different kinds of friends who have the potential of making them take more risks. It is normal to think in-depth about how teenagers get easily influenced by peers in making decisions. An adult may wonder why that occurs a lot, but it could have happened to him when he was a teenager, and he must have grown out of it.
Brains of adults and teenagers will react differently to the presence of peers in making a decision. It was studied and discovered that some teenagers will avoid taking risks whenever they are alone or whenever there is an adult present to guide them, while the potential of them taking that risk in the presence of their friends is very high.
They will go ahead to proceed and take that risk. A teenager’s brain tends to become more active when in their friends’ presence but remains in a constant state in an adult no matter whose presence they are. That translates to teens when trying to decide whether to do something or not.
Also, they are pushing against internal pressure that cautions people against doing harmful things in that state. Still, as the brain develops when you grow, the connection ends, and adults get no extra good feeling from taking risks in their friends’ presence.
3. Lack of Concentration
Teenagers may resemble young adults in their physical presence, but their brains are still like young children to experts. That part is one reason you will see some teenagers behaving like a toddler all of a sudden.
As they are growing, their brain is remodifying itself, and that can lead to them, for a while, acting and behaving in a similar way to how they did when they were still small.
The way a teenager’s brain functions when distracted while doing something is due to the massive amount of activity in their frontal lobe, scientifically. The presence of a lot of grey matter in a teen’s frontal lobe is far too much. Still, it is bound to decrease the more they grow drastically, which translates to the brain making efforts to process all activities occurring around it and overload them.
An adult brain will work more actively in an efficient method that aids concentration and makes it more accessible.
4. Becoming too emotional
Teenagers are predicted to not care about other people’s feelings, and they seem to flip out over nothing. It has been discovered that teenagers have a much harder time interpreting vocal inflection and facial expressions in the right way from other people, which often leads to irrational reactions when in an emotional situation.
5. They tend to become dumber
Sometimes it is wondered and thought in-depth about what has occurred to the bright child that was raised.
How is it possible for a sharp child who tops his class to start declining in grades when there seems to be no change in the amount of work they are doing right from time? It is nothing to panic about, and there are some changes in the brain responsible for this. The intelligence Quotient, which is believed to be stagnant over a lifetime, is now known to fluctuate drastically in a teenager’s brain.
The grey matter helps store and process info when young people start to die off or get destroyed by the brain when age starts creeping in. They start forgetting some things they know because deletion of that information is the handiwork of the brain.
Ways to help a teenager with no regard for consequences
1. Focus on your well-being
You must maintain taking care of yourself whenever you feel so stressed. You tend to skip things, lack sleep due to worry. Refuse to eat all because of the situation but ensure that you create that time to take care of yourself and your teen so you won’t break down in helping your teenager overcome the problem.
2. Maintain Calmness
Whenever you talk to your teenager, frustration may creep in, but it is best to keep that calm nature and make yourself focused.
It is natural for teenagers to get annoyed and wind you up. Still, whenever you sense yourself filled with rage. it is advisable to stay silent for some time before responding most appropriately.
If you take a drastic approach, something that could have been avoidable may not occur. It leads to an escalation of the situation instead of the matter having died down. That calm nature will display your behavior to him, and this will also show them how to behave if faced with it.
3. Maintain an interactive session
You need to ensure your teenager can speak and talk out whatever is triggering him to display some behaviors. Parents must guarantee that freedom to talk, and you need to show more the art of listening. Allow the teen to speak and ask general questions while you keep listening and giving the responses.
Instead of challenging them when they display a specific behavior. Please find a way of getting any exciting piece that they can read that tends to shape the behavior back to normal.
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