Book Review: "Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy! Loving Your Kid Without Losing Your Mind," by Michael J. Bradley

This award-winning book is guaranteed to provide humor, comfort, and character education instruction to parents, but with a unique twist. Instead of being a book of instruction on how to build character in children (although it contains plenty of that) this book is also a builder of character in parents.

With great good humor (which makes the books a delight throughout) Dr. Bradley reassures parents that even though all their teachings and injunctions seem to be falling upon deaf ears, they do indeed impact their children’s characters. In fact, children basically become who their parents are. Therefore, raising children, he says, means raising ourselves. The parents’ own characters will impact their children’s in manifold ways.

This is not news, except recent brain research shows that teenagers’ brains are still developing in crucial areas of decision-making and in the pre-frontal cortex—the so-called “seat of civilization”—all the way into the early and mid-twenties. Parents’ attitudes, actions, and words are especially freighted during these years as they have the potential to “hard-wire” the developing brain with permanent moral behavior patterns.

Gaining Respect—the Only Way to Teach Character

Gaining a child’s respect and not reinforcing bad behavior through our own reactionary examples is the only way to teach character well, according to Dr. Bradley. For example, Dr. Bradley describes a scenario wherein a teenage girl has completely “lost it” at her parents in a frightening way. She has punched out some sheetrock, filled younger siblings with terror at her rage, and yelled terrible things at her parents. Even though the parents are understandably put out by this, if they have followed Dr. Bradley’s training manual, they have not resorted to displays of temper themselves, even though mightily provoked. They have remained calm, which helps the child to calm down. They have endured an emotional and verbal onslaught that seemed designed to attack them in their weakest, most vulnerable points, yet they have not given in to impulses to retaliate in kind. When enough time has passed for everyone to be able to look at the incident objectively, the parents guide the teenager to assume the responsibility of repairing the wall and repairing the hearts of her siblings. Their own hurt feelings? Dr. Bradley suggests to wave them off. “Show her strength and control like she never knew existed,” he counsels. If she apologizes, forgive her instantly. “Mercy is not a weakness that encourages her to snap out again. It is a rare and wonderful grace that will humble and awe her and make her want to be like you—and respect you.”

Ultimately, gaining their children’s respect is the way parents’ impart their values to their children, Dr. Bradley counsels, and they gain respect because of their strength of character. Good character is the only vehicle on a one-way road. If a child respects his or her parents, the child will eventually follow in the parents’ footsteps, even if there are some identity-building deviations along the way like green hair and concerts by the “Flaming Pukes”.

Of course, the fact that example is the best teacher has been known for a long time. Adolescents particularly hate hypocrisy in adults, and they always have. However, Dr. Bradley places it within the context of modern parenting—a journey that calls for specialized skills never needed in less demanding and less socially toxic times. The moral dangers out in our crazy world are simply too great—and children’s consciousness simply too high—to rely on older models of parenting when a show of parental authority was enough to stanch bad behavior. Reactionary parenting—shutting children down, imposing harsh punishments, and anger—might have worked in society as it was a generation ago. Now it merely prolongs immaturity and irresponsibility in a world where immature and irresponsible behavior can lead to drug addiction, AIDS, and horrific rage encounters with armed fellow classmates. Modern parenting, Dr. Bradley says, calls for an elusive mix of firmness and flexibility, performed with masterly calm.

This opening salvo in Dr. Bradley’s book sums up his take on the type parental self-control that commands respect:

“Your defining act of love for your child will not be the 2:00 a.m. feeding, the sleepless, fretful night spent beside him in the hospital, or the second job you took to pay for college. Your zenith will occur in the face of a withering blast of frightening rage from your adolescent, in allowing no rage from yourself in response. Your finest moment may well be your darkest. And you will be a parent.”

Thou Shalt Apologize at Every Opportunity

One way to demonstrate good character to an adolescent is to apologize at every available opportunity, Dr. Bradley counsels. Parents are going to mess up—there’s going to be yelling and misunderstanding and unfair groundings and crossed signals. Apologies tend to inoculate the relationship from the damage parents’ imperfections cause. Bradley has found that this is one parental strategy that teenagers are helpless against. They simply do not know what to do when a parent apologizes. They’ll listen almost endlessly as the parent goes on and on about his or her own shortcomings. It opens up their minds.

“Apology provides you with a vehicle for sneaking in all sorts of important lessons for your kid—lessons about respect, humility, honesty, courage, self-discovery…Apology models, teaches, and heals both the child and the contrite parent.”

Parents are not, however, to apologize in order to be apologized to. We should focus on our own shortcomings. We will appear stronger, more courageous, more honest, and more willing to change if we focus only on what we did wrong, rather than what the child did to provoke the reaction—and it models to our children how grown-ups deal with mistakes.

Not Tsk, Tsk, Tsk—Rather, Ask, Ask, Ask

Another character-building strategy is to continually ask your child questions that make him or her think. This is probably painful to the child. (“She’d rather you just smack her and get it over with…” but parents should continue to ask about how, for instance, a violation of trust impacts a relationship. The parent should ask the adolescent to define what trust really is. Getting the child thinking and coming up with answers from within is a great ways to educate for character. It jump-starts moral development and resounds longer in a child’s consciousness than ready-made, prepackaged and pre-programmed lecturing from parents.

Asking questions like, “Is that really the way you want to talk to me?” and “Is that really the way you want to behave?” or saying, “Tell me more about you think about God and religion” throws the developmental responsibility right into the child’s lap and exercises the moral parts of the brain responsible parents most want to develop.

Inoculate children against a crazily immoral world, Dr. Bradley counsels, by allowing them to grow into ownership of parental ideals through earning their respect, teaching through example, apologizing for parental foul-ups, and seeking to help children “own” their own moral armaments through questioning.

Dr. Bradley’s book takes the reader into the mental and emotional world of the contemporary adolescent—a world many parents might be reluctant to enter but which is crucial to understanding what kinds of influences and choices a typical adolescent faces today. He coaches parents, throughout the book, in how to handle today’s most dicey as well as most common problems. The humor and pathos of real-life examples make this expert and honest book by a veteran adolescent psychologist (and parent) a delightful and enlightening read.