Children on the verge of adulthood can be a challenge for most parents. Where there was once a sweet, compliant child, now there is a raging or recalcitrant young person. Advice on how to cope with this ranges from severe punitive measures to blatant ignoring it. With such divergent answers, how do you know what to do with your disrespectful kids? In this article, I give you three sure-fire ways to handle the disrespect. Hint: it doesn’t involve either of the above.
1. Respect Your Child and Listen
It’s a horrible feeling when your (almost) grown daughter or son speaks to you with vulgar language, a raised or nasty tone or worse, outright verbal abuse, but demanding respect or punishing doesn’t work. The difficult truth is children learn respect from you. Ordering or demanding anything from anyone is disrespecting them; unless you’re in a job where the person is getting paid to compensate for being ordered around.
