Is your teenage daughter an emotional wreck?

If your daughter displays unacceptable behaviors, it may not be a discipline problem at all. She can be an emotional mess.

As a mother or father, you can probably relate to your daughter more than you realize. Think about it for a minute, we go on with our lives living, thinking and feeling like adults because that’s what we have now. However, we were all teenagers at one time.

Are you always looking for ways to remedy behavior problems?

I think we all do this and yes there are some great tips and ideas and of course I’m not saying we shouldn’t try at least some of them. Along with what I will share with you from my own personal experiences, there must be some kind of routine and set guidelines for everything to work together. Behavioral problems are only part of the symptoms of what is really going on emotionally within your daughter. So yes, we need to treat the symptoms as well, but that’s only part of the problem and they will be temporary solutions as well.

Are you constantly trying to find the next best discipline tactic?

Again, of course, they need discipline in their lives, we already know this. Discipline is very important in the lives of your daughters not only to teach them right from wrong and to have consequences for their actions, but they also want it. Believe it or not, she will feel more loved knowing that you care enough about her and her well-being by not allowing certain behaviors, yet I can’t say enough that this is only part of the problem in the first place.

Are you ready to get to the root of the problem?

Teenagers have a lot of stress on them, more than we knew when we were kids. Your daughter has a lot to deal with in her day-to-day life and the added pressure of her peers and other children at school. The difference is that they are not armed with the tools and maturity that adults have. We as parents need to get to the root of the problem with our teens in order to get any results. Now you can take them to counseling or you can take the bull by the horns and do it yourself. First, understand that your daughter will likely yell and yell and maybe even close some doors early in the process. Okay, we are ready for it. I know my daughter appreciated it all at the end, so there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Get a pen and paper and give it to your daughter. Tell her to write down everything she likes and dislikes about herself and to be very real about it. Next, have her write down everything she wants to change about herself, including how she feels when certain situations arise. It is very important that she is real, so you may need to point out certain things that may seem difficult to get her started.

Take these “lists” and go through them one at a time, now no matter how long it takes you to finish these lists. So take the first item on the list and talk about it. Together you will need to figure out how to change it, this can take time depending on the size of your list. My daughter had a four-page list so it may seem overwhelming, but don’t let it seem like it because the purpose is to remove that overwhelming feeling of emotions running through her. It took us 6 months to complete the list by checking all these things as we went along, it became a challenge for her that she enjoyed. We would sit down every night and she would take out the newspaper (we both had access to it in a common place) and she would say “Ok, mom number 13”. You get the idea.

This will help you organize your feelings and gain more confidence. Many times our teens don’t even know what is wrong or what the problem is because they are so agitated and overwhelmed with all these different emotions and they don’t know where to start anymore, so the natural reaction is to just give up and walk with a big chip on his shoulder and he suppressed the anger to release it. Which in turn results in releasing him in all the wrong ways and at all the wrong times.