Parents and Teens

After more than 20 years of living “out of town” and working closely with adolescents and their families, and after tens – if not hundreds of thousands – of conversations with teens and parents through school counseling, nationwide phone calls, and private practice, I can honestly say that I have encountered the full spectrum of mental health realities. But if I pinpoint what I have found to be the single biggest impact, the most important variable in the equation of adolescent mental health and adolescent thriving, it is the ever evolving and deeply unique parent-child relationship.

I am not trying to oversimplify complex situations. I am not trying to place a bandage on larger and broader realities. But I can say, with the full weight of my experience, that the parent-child relationship is the most impactful and meaningful relationship in a child’s life, and even in the most difficult times, it is the relationship children continue to crave.

This article is a brief summary of a few of the themes that I explore more deeply in my upcoming book, Parenting with a Plan, where I discuss the power of relationship- and respect-based parenting, and how the quality of the parent-child connection affects a wide cross section of adolescent life. I want to focus on the basics, and especially on how the parent-child relationship shapes two areas that come up again and again with teenagers: friends and peer pressure. 

The Teen Brain

A few years ago, I attended a wedding in New York and found myself seated next to a young man, Yoni, with whom I had been close during his high school years. I had been his teacher and eventually became his therapist, but I hadn’t seen him in years. He was learning in Israel and had just flown in for the wedding.

Back in high school, Yoni was a skateboarder who loved the sport and built his own ramps in his backyard. One night at 2:30 a.m., I received a desperate text asking me to come to his house right away. When I arrived, I saw the back end of a small car sticking out of the pool. Yoni and his friends had decided it would be a great idea to drive the car onto the skateboard ramp. The ramp collapsed violently, and the car nosedived into the water.

Years later, sitting at the wedding, Yoni asked, “What in the world was I thinking? That was so crazy, so impulsive.”

That story is extreme but not unique. Adolescents kick footballs into chandeliers instead of simply putting them away. Family road trips turn into screaming chaos for no clear reason. A student stays up the entire night before the SATs watching playoff highlights instead of sleeping.

Why do teens act like this? Why are they so unpredictable and impulsive?

To answer this, we need to understand the adolescent brain. Traditional research once believed the human brain was fully developed by age six or seven, but newer research has changed that understanding. While the brain reaches most of its physical size early, true cognitive development begins around age 12 and continues until about age 25. During these years, the brain undergoes intense remodeling, reorganizing, and rewiring. Development gradually reaches the prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for planning, judgment, emotional regulation, and decision making, so that by the mid-twenties, young adults are better able to balance impulses, risks, goals, and values.

Until then, it is chaos. Researchers have described adolescence as a major work in progress, basically a 10-year state of temporary insanity.

This phrase is not meant as an insult. Teenagers are not broken. This developmental phase is part of Hashem’s design. Their impulsiveness, mood swings, emotional highs and lows, passion, curiosity, and willingness to take risks are all part of becoming themselves. The adolescent brain is under construction, messy and temporary – and also their path to greatness.

Our job is to stay close to them, support them, guide them, and believe in them even when they make us crazy. Because they are not broken. Not at all. Understanding this changes how we parent. Much adolescent behavior is actually age-appropriate, and asking, “What were you thinking?” rarely produces a meaningful answer. When we understand what is happening inside their heads, we can parent with more patience and compassion.

Respect and Relationship

How can we successfully engage these temporarily insane kids? The answer is Respect-Based and Relationship-Based Parenting, or R&RBP.

A powerful illustration comes from Yosef resisting the wife of Potiphar. Seeing the image of Yaakov reminded Yosef how much he loved and admired his father and how deeply he wanted to emulate him. Even without fear of being caught, that connection gave him the strength to walk away. This is R&RBP. When children love and respect us, admire us, and feel our devotion towards them, they do not want to let us down. They use us as their guide when making life decisions.

There is no simple formula, but adolescents consistently describe what increases or decreases their respect.

Respect grows when parents:

?       Admit mistakes honestly

?       Apologize without demanding one in return

?       Show consistency and calm effort

?       Take genuine interest in the child’s interests

?       Work hard without complaining

?       Hold back criticism

?       Trust children to make mistakes

?       Listen without judgment

?       Negotiate and compromise fairly

Respect decreases when parents:

?       Behave irresponsibly

?       Ignore or act cold

?       Lash out in bad moods

?       Treat children like peers instead of children

?       Dismiss opinions

?       Model hypocrisy or screaming

?       Become physical or frightening

?       Expect beyond ability

?       Use harsh words

?       Refuse to understand hard days

?       Always need to be right
These reflections allow parents to evaluate where they stand and where some self-awareness may be needed.

Forming an Identity

Beyond the adolescent brain and R&RBP lies identity formation, perhaps the most complicated piece. Before age 12, children believe what parents and teachers say. During adolescence, the brain rewires and something shifts. Teens realize they can think for themselves. They question, test boundaries, and reconstruct beliefs about goals, religiosity, morals, friendships, academics, and more.

We want and need to be part of that journey. If children feel close to us, respect us, and know our love and devotion, our values become woven into their identity. If they do not feel close to us, they may adopt opposite beliefs simply to create distance. This makes identity formation messier and more painful.

Children will face complex situations without us present. If there is close relationship and respect, they will use us as their moral compass. If not, they will float wherever the wind takes them. One of the most powerful ideas I’ve come across is from a pasuk in Parshas Vayigash. When Yehuda pleads with Yosef for Binyamin’s release, he says of his father Yaakov: “His soul is bound up (keshurah) with the boy’s soul.” (Bereishis 44:30)

The Baal HaTurim notes that the word keshurah appears only one other time in all of Tanach: “Foolishness is bound up (keshurah) in the heart of a youth” (Mishlei 22:15). The Baal HaTurim explains that the way to counteract the foolishness, the confusion, the impulsivity, and the recklessness of youth is through the keshurah – the deep attachment between child and parent. When our child’s soul is bound up with ours, when there’s love, respect, modeling, and connection, they have the strength and direction to navigate their adolescence successfully. That’s our goal.

Friends and Peer Pressure

There are two big misunderstandings parents tend to have: how friendships are formed, and what peer pressure actually is and isn’t.

On a Southwest flight, I mentioned to a talkative neighbor that I was working on a lecture about how kids choose friends and how parents play a role in that process. He confidently told me parents have absolutely nothing to do with their kids’ friendships, that it’s a spectator sport and parents are excluded observers. The truth is, parents and, more specifically, their relationship with their children are probably the main factors and predictors of whom their children choose as friends. Many parents feel disconnected from their child’s friend choices, as if their relationship and their child’s social world are entirely separate, but these lanes actually merge.

Another misunderstanding is peer pressure. A mother emailed me, “I have a nice son who is being influenced by his terrible friends.” She described her son as an “angel” who was suddenly pressured into doing bad things by “bad kids.” She wasn’t entirely wrong that he was experiencing peer pressure, but the way she understood it was mistaken and unhelpful.

 We need to untangle this mess and understand how adolescents choose friends and how peer pressure really works.

Researchers in Florida tracked friendships over time. They asked over 410 seventh graders to list friends, focusing only on reciprocal friendships, and identified 573 pairs. They returned every spring for the next five years. The results were very telling. Fewer than one in four friendships that began in seventh grade lasted into the next year. Fewer than one in ten survived the transition from middle school to high school. Only one percent lasted through twelfth grade. Adolescent friendships are fluid. A close friendship one year may vanish the next.

The key insight was that adolescents are drawn to peers who are similar to them. As kids grow and their interests shift, they seek new friends whose experiences, personalities, and values match their evolving identities. When two people are alike, communication flows easily. When they’re not alike, friendship is harder to maintain.

In my daily work, two main categories come up: home issues and friends. I hear heartbreaking lines: “I just don’t feel connected to anyone.” “I feel like I’m never anyone’s first choice.” “There’s no one similar to me in my class.” “We used to be best friends, but we kind of grew apart.” “I haven’t had a good friend in years.”

 I also see “friend clusters” in classrooms: athletic crew, techy kids, gymnastics girls, shmoozers. Even religious observance can impact whom they feel similar to. Kids gravitate toward peers they feel most similar to.

The Parental Link

Let’s connect this to parents. As we mentioned, adolescence is a 10-year stretch of temporary insanity. Brain development is still in progress. Judgment and regulation are weak. Impulses are strong. If we want to guide our teens, we must build strong relationships with them, full of respect, trust, emotional support, and connection. That is Respect- and Relationship-Based Parenting, R&RBP. It means relating to our teens in ways that make them look up to us, appreciate us, love us, and want to emulate us. It means learning to communicate properly and creating a relationship that serves as an anchor in stormy seas. When R&RBP is in place, it becomes much easier for our children to internalize our values. Those values become their moral compass, and a strong parent-child relationship helps clarify identity. That identity becomes the filter through which they choose friends. Birds of a feather flock together.

Will our children sometimes interact with kids making poor decisions? Very possibly. But when R&RBP is in place, their closest, truest friends will share their values and background. When the foundation is shaky, things get more complicated. A police officer once brought a teen named Michael to my house on a Friday night after people reported him riding his bike on the shoulder of a highway. Michael told me his mother came downstairs, kicked his friends out, and tore into him. She proceeded to make him feel terrible about himself and his friends. He went on to explain to me why he hangs out with those friends: “We’re all sad. We’re all upset. We’re all frustrated. We all hate our parents. Of course those are my friends. What does my mother expect?” He was right. Kids gravitate toward similar peers, not only in hobbies but in pain and emotional experience.

That leads to what peer pressure really is. Once hurt kids find their group, they don’t want to lose it. Peer pressure is often an internal pressure to behave in ways that bring peer acceptance. It’s a perpetual internal drive to fit in, remain part of the group, and feel included. We should probably rename peer pressure PIIP, peer-induced internal pressure. One boy told me he used his phone on Shabbos because everyone was sitting around on their phones, and without it he felt like he didn’t belong. Nobody told him to do it. Peer pressure starts internally, not externally.

Two critical points: Negative behavior happens in the presence of peers, but it’s not because of those peers. It’s because of internal pressure to secure and maintain acceptance. Also, we can’t allow “bad friends” to divert attention from the root issue, the reason a child is seeking those relationships in the first place. These issues are often symptoms of a much larger problem. It’s far too easy to blame the friends.

Connection Is the Key

We need to remember that adolescence is not a malfunction. Kids are supposed to start thinking for themselves, testing limits, forming identity. But parents can interpret this as defiance, and love and closeness begin to feel conditional. Over time, kids pull away emotionally and seek connection elsewhere.

Let’s also remember that their requests are normal. Sleepovers, the mall, phones, Wi-Fi, clothing, davening later, a different minyan. We need to be able to field these requests appropriately and not shut them down. If not, the relationship becomes stuck and distant.

It is challenging, but no more temporary insanity for us. We’re the parents. Our brains are fully developed. It’s on us to maintain the relationship through it all. If the relationship is rocky, don’t be surprised when your child seeks peers who understand him or her. They’ll bond over shared pain, shared rebellion, and shared emotional experience. The behaviors that follow are symptoms of a deeper relational void. Be smarter. Strategize and learn the skills. Internalize how powerful and impactful it is for us to build and maintain strong relationships with our kids. It’s the best protection they have and the clearest predictor of good friend choices, healthy behavior, and long-term success. Ultimately, whom they choose as friends is a reflection of how connected they still feel to us.

As I mentioned in the beginning, children crave their relationship with their parents, and it is the greatest anchor, stabilizer, and grounding force in a child’s life as they navigate the stormy seas of adolescence. Our job is to learn more, read more, become more skilled, and truly recognize the beautiful power we have to help our children grow into healthy adults.

Rabbi Akiva Sutofsky is a school therapist at Hillel Academy of Pittsburgh and also has a private practice. His book, Parenting with a Plan, is scheduled to be released before Pesach and includes haskamos from Rabbi Aharon Lopiansky and Rabbi Reingold. The book can be found in all local Jewish bookstores and at Menuchapublishers.com.