Ways to handle conflicts with adolescents

Through adopting various conflict solving techniques, teenagers will also be able to acquire important life lessons and learn ways to resolve conflicts with their peers. Therefore, this study seeks to examine how parents can be able to minimize conflicts with the teenagers or ways that parents can use to handle conflict effectively. Basically, parents want the best for their children but it is sometimes difficult to bring out the best in teenagers due to miscommunication that may arise as a result of conflicts. Both adolescents and parents respond differently to conflicts by expressing different emotional reactions leading to a misunderstanding between them. Teenagers are often driven by pressure from peers who make they feel that they should be given their own freedom to make decisions with their friends and to do what they want without being stopped by anyone.

Parents should be honest when handling conflicts with their teenagers. Parents should provide their genuine reasons why they feel the behaviors of their teenagers is not right without hiding any information from them. This will enable teenagers to be honest about themselves and to provide their genuine reasons as to why they behave that way. Lack of honesty will only worsen the conflict since both parties will be arguing based on lies and it will be difficult to find a solution to the problem. Honesty will enable parents to learn about what revolves around the lives of their teenage children, the challenges they face and what they have tried to do about them. This occurs when parents and teenagers try to solve the conflict with anger or both the parents and teenagers have more than one conflict to solve and they keep referring to the past conflict as they try to solve the current conflict.

This can result in fighting between the parent and teenagers and lack of communication between them. It is therefore important to include a neutral third party who will be able to help in handling the conflict in an efficient way. Through the involvement of a third party, parents and teenagers will be able to express their opinions concerning the conflict and the mediator will be able to ask both of them questions before a general solution that suits both parties can be achieved. According to Pickhardt and Carl (2013), a mediator cannot support any of the parties and therefore provides advice to both the parents and the teenagers and helps them to find solutions that will be practical for both of them without engaging in any fights or any further disagreements.