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Adolescence
Seeing Through the Teen Manipulation Game
Sometimes teens have to go to extremes to get what they want.
Posted December 10, 2018
Most parents of teenagers are familiar with their teen’s attempts at manipulation. Teens have a sizable toolbox of tactics. They play parents off each other. They guilt their parents by accusing them of loving a sibling more than them. They cry, feign illness, or use charm to get what they want.
“Why is Susie being extra helpful today” you wonder. “Why is Johnnie answering my texts so soon when he usually ignores them?” Parents are used to going to the next step of the game. “What does my teen want?” savvy parents ask themselves when their teen uncharacteristically goes out of their way to be helpful or charming.
Sometimes a teen’s tactics for manipulation can be extreme, especially with parents who are inflexible or authoritarian. Recently a mother called me to say that her 17-year-old daughter Jasmine had threatened suicide at school. The principal called her and asked her to take her daughter to the emergency room. A crisis team talked to Jasmine and recommended that Jasmine’s mother make an appointment with a therapist as soon as possible.
“Can you help us?” the mother asked me. I said that I would try my best, and found an appointment for Jasmine and her parents the following day.
Jasmine was a shy pretty girl with shoulder-length blonde hair and big blue eyes. She was a senior in high school. As I typically do, I first spoke with Jasmine and her parents together. The parents were obviously very worried about Jasmine’s suicide threat. “Why did you say you wanted to kill yourself?” I asked Jasmine. “I feel so hopeless, like there is no hope for me,” she answered in a soft almost inaudible voice.
Wanting to clarify what was going on, I asked Jasmine’s parents to step into the waiting room so I could talk to Jasmine alone. What troubled her most, she told me, was that her parents didn’t listen to her feelings. The main issue was her AP math class. She wasn’t keeping up. Even a tutor was not doing her any good. “I don’t want to take that math,” she told me. “I have enough math credits to graduate,” she continued.
I told her that dropping the math class sounded like a reasonable thing to do if it was putting her under too much pressure. “Would you like to discuss that with your parents?” I asked her. She nodded. “I haven’t been able to share that with them,” she said. “They don’t listen to me. My father is so overbearing. He’ll be angry.”
I told Jasmine that I would take her side in what seemed to be a reasonable request. She was almost eighteen years old and able to make decisions for herself. She was a conscientious student and was getting good grades in her other AP level classes.
Jasmine’s mother was fine with my suggestion that Jasmine drop the math class because she was feeling too much pressure. Her father, as Jasmine had predicted, was not so happy. “It’s best to finish what you start,” he insisted loudly.
Hearing this, Jasmine looked even more hopeless. I told her father that what he said was generally true. It’s best to teach kids to finish what they start. That’s is a good rule of thumb for success. But in this case, his daughter was feeling too pressured by all her AP classes. Since she had enough credits to graduate and wasn’t planning to have a career that required math, why not take the pressure off?
Nonetheless, her father persisted. He suggested that she meet with the tutor more often. Jasmine said the tutor wasn’t helping. She didn’t want to take the class, especially since she didn’t need it to graduate. Eventually, with my help, Jasmine’s father came around to his daughter’s point of view.
Suicide threats by teens must always be taken seriously. But it is important for parents to understand the underlying message in the threat. This means that parents must really listen to their teenager and put their own preconceptions aside.
Jasmine’s father had his daughter’s best interests at heart. Of course, he did. He was a caring father. But he wasn’t listening to Jasmine’s pain, because he could not conceive of her dropping a class, of her not finishing something she had started. Since her father was vocal and somewhat overbearing, Jasmine felt hopeless at ever getting him to hear her feelings.
Jasmine’s suicide threat was not a conscious attempt to manipulate her parents to get what she wanted. Not at all. It was a cry for help. But it was also the only way she could get her parents to therapy so they could hear her and agree to her dropping the math class that was making her feel miserable.
