You’ve raised your children as well as you could, but lately, you’ve clashed a lot more often with them. Once, acts of disrespect happened very infrequently. Now, they’re pretty much a part of your everyday life. What can you do to better understand your children and curb this problem?
To manage disrespectful children, the following strategies may be helpful:
- Initiate restitutions
- Don’t keep repeating warnings, only do it once
- Promote good behavior
- Make sure to punish bad behavior
Do you want expanded pointers on the tips and strategies we mentioned above? If so, then keep reading. We’ll talk about each tip in much more depth in this article. We’ll even discuss how to handle disrespect if it’s coming from your adult children.
What Does It Mean to Disrespect Your Parents?
First, let’s begin with a definition of what constitutes disrespect. A disrespectful relationship can happen between children and parents, adult children and parents, and even between coworkers or romantic partners.
For the sake of this article, we’ll focus on the child/adult child and parent relationship. When a child shows disrespect towards their parent, they may do one of several things, including the following.
Talking Back
You ask your child to take out the trash and they give you a snarky comment in return. Up until then, everything was fine, so why the attitude? You try to tell your child to act more nicely, but they keep up with the backtalk.
Insulting
Backtalk can quickly give way to insulting behavior. Maybe your kid proclaims that taking out the trash is stupid. They may even call you, the parent, stupid. As a child gets older, their language can become more creative, including using curse words. This can really start a fight, especially if you don’t want your child to talk that way.
Yelling
If your child begins yelling at you, especially unprovoked, then they’re being incredibly disrespectful. Basic requests and commands shouldn’t warrant such an aggressive response.
Rolling Eyes
Everyone thinks of teenagers as disaffected, but rolled eyes and big sighs can start in childhood. By doing this, your kid is blowing off whatever you told them. Their sarcastic reaction can upset some parents.
Ignoring Requests
Maybe you tell your child to go brush their teeth and get ready for bed. Then you leave the room to clean up from dinner or take care of the laundry. When you come back in 20 minutes later, your child’s still on the couch where you left them. Their ignoring you shows huge disrespect.
While everyone recognizes disrespect when it’s happening to them, which disrespectful behaviors offend a person will vary. For some, a bit of taunting or even some name-calling doesn’t really get under the skin. With others, that kind of behavior will serve as the impetus for a huge fight.
Mistakes Parents Make That Push Children Away
Now that you know how to identify disrespectful behavior in your children, you’re probably eager to figure out the root of the problem. When did your sweet angel turn into a little devil?
Children may show disrespect for a myriad of reasons, such as:
- They feel like they don’t get enough attention from you, so they lash out
- They have an underlying condition, such as attention deficit disorder or even depression
- They’re being bullied in school
Also, you could accidentally push your children away without even realizing it. How? If you’re guilty of the following, it could be you’ve bred your child’s disrespect.
You Always Say Yes
This may seem counterintuitive, but hear us out. Your child sometimes wants you to set boundaries. It shows you care when they have a curfew or they can’t go to the mall alone. If you always say yes to everything, even when you wish you didn’t have to, your kids don’t feel challenged. There are no boundaries for them to push, so they get bored and disengaged.
You Always Criticize
We all need constructive criticism in our lives. With this, you tell someone what to improve gently but firmly. It’s not all good feedback, but it’s not exclusively negative, either.
Everyone thinks they can offer up constructive criticism, but sometimes the feedback comes across as harsher than anything else. If you’re critical of your child all the time (even without necessarily realizing it), you could damage the relationship.
You Hover
Helicopter parenting has become enough of an issue that it has a specific term. As the name tells you, it’s when a parent lingers over the shoulder of their child at pretty much all times. You jump in at the first sign of trouble, even though your child could probably handle the issue themselves. You never give them the chance, though. Thus, you’re limiting their potential. Without being allowed to exercise problem-solving skills for themselves, your children will always rely on you to sort all their problems.
As the years go on, they’ll resent you for this. Tweens and teens grow more independent, and they will not want their parent lingering like a shadow, watching everything they do.
You Can’t Stop Checking in
It’s normal to worry about your children when they’re out and about. Even at school, you can get apprehensive. With the horrifying rate of school shootings these days, that concern isn’t unwarranted at all.
Still, you have to allow your children to live their own lives. Resist the urge to text, email, or text them every five minutes. Don’t stalk their social media either. Let your kids have some degree of independence or your relationship will become more and more strained.
What a Normal Parent-Child Relationship Should Look Like
After reading the above list, you have to admit, you’re guilty of a few (or more) of those things. You want to rectify the matter, but just what does a normal parent-child relationship look like?
That’s a fair question. Such a relationship will differ for everyone. It should have a healthy basis of mutual respect, with pillars like honesty, space, independence, and closeness.
You want to foster a great relationship between you two, one where your child feels like they can go to you anytime to talk about any topic. You should both communicate openly and honestly, even when it’s not always easy.
Sometimes, letting your child grow into a healthy individual means stepping back a bit. Helicopter parenting, becoming your kid’s shadow, and tracing their every move doesn’t allow them to experience the kind of growth they need. As hard as it can be for you to do, you need to let your kid fail and make mistakes. It’s only through these failures that they can learn what they did wrong. Then they can avoid making the same mistakes again next time.
A normal parent-child relationship isn’t completely devoid of arguments. Tensions will inevitably rise, but it’s how you handle them that matters. Having screaming fights with name-calling and threats won’t solve much. Instead, it only drives a wedge further between you and your child. If one or both of you has an angry streak, then recognize that and walk away when a fight’s getting bad. Take some time to cool off and then have a constructive conversation.
Speaking of constructiveness, offering constructive criticism to your child helps them become the person they dream of being. Overly critical parents hinder their kids from obtaining the same goals, as we said. The criticisms chop the child down until they’re nothing. They grow up without self-esteem or believing in themselves.
Maintaining a healthy, happy, and rewarding relationship between parent and child will take lifelong adjustments. Your approach to parenting will surely change as your child matures into a teenager and then an adult. Likewise, the way they handle their relationship with you should morph and evolve.
Strategies for Parents to Manage Disrespectful Children
By this point, you should be able to identify when your child acts disrespectfully towards you. Also, you should have a greater understanding of why this behavior occurs, even if you’re at the root of it. With a glimpse into a healthy parent-child relationship per the last section, it’s time to do some work.
Reducing the disrespect your child shows you will allow you both to work towards that healthier, happier relationship. The following strategies will help you manage your disrespectful children.
Implement Restitutions
There are many ways to punish a child, as we’ll cover shortly. One such ingenious method that’s not exactly punishment but isn’t fun either is restitution. With this, the one who did something egregious, such as your child, makes it up to the person they affected.
Let’s say your child was roughhousing and broke your favorite vase. As restitution, you make them save up their allowance for several weeks and put the money towards a new vase. This punishment might be more effective than making them issue a simple apology.
Why? Well, kids don’t have a lot of money. They want to use the allowance they do earn on the fun. When they have to spend week after week saving that money towards something boring (to them) like a vase, they’re going to remember the process. The next time they start roughhousing indoors, they should think twice about whether they want to continue.
Stick to One Warning Only
Your child keeps acting up, and you’ve had enough. You threaten them with something, such as taking their phone away or sending them to their room. Your kid ignores the warning and keeps right on doing what they were doing.
Aggravated, you probably issue a second warning, right? You know, just in case they didn’t hear you. When that doesn’t work, you repeat your warning for a third, maybe even a fourth time. This doesn’t work either, unsurprisingly.
You need to give your child one opportunity and one opportunity alone to heed your warning. If they blow you off, then do what you had said you would. Send them to their room or take their phone away for the night. This may seem harsh, but it’s effective.
When you say the same thing over and over but don’t take action, you’re like the boy who cried wolf. Your child knows you’re not going to act on your warning, so they don’t listen. Worse yet, they persist in their bad behavior. When you do what you said you would after one warning, that teaches your child you mean business. The next time you issue a warning, they’ll probably take you more seriously.
When Your Child Behaves Well, Reward Them!
All this talk about bad behavior might make you wonder what you should do when your child acts well. Let them know about it!
Right now, you might punish your child when they’re bad and do nothing when they’re good. That teaches children that behaving well gets them what? A lack of punishment? That might not serve as a strong enough impetus to motivate further good behavior.
When your child has a good day, tell them how proud you are. Let them know how much you appreciate it. You could even offer physical rewards like a sticker or a monthly treat like dinner at a pizza restaurant or an ice cream cone.
Children like receiving praise. It keeps them acting well, which in turn can end the disrespect.
Create Punishments for Bad Behavior
If your child has more bad days than good ones, you cannot let them run amok. You need to stop their behavior somehow, and punishments work. Nowadays, parents view punishment very differently. For some, it might be a single spank. Sometimes even mentioning a spanking will make a kid shape up very quickly.
Younger children typically get a time-out as a punishment for misbehaving. Once they’re tweens or teens, though, this approach no longer works. Then, you might send the child to their room. Taking away luxuries like their smartphone, video game consoles, or tablets also makes a significant impact.
Then, there’s always classic grounding. This method for misbehaving teens keeps them stuck in the house for a few days or even a week. To them, that’s pretty unbearable.
How to Deal with Disrespectful Behavior from Your Adult Child
What do you do if it’s not a young child or even a teen that’s showing disrespect, but rather, your adult child? Perhaps this child still lives with you or maybe they flew the nest. Either way, any of your interactions leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Be Aware of Childhood Patterns
In many cases, when in a dynamic like living in one’s childhood home, old patterns tend to reemerge. Your child could take on that bratty persona you’ve thought was long since dead. You react to their behavior the same way you used to despite that many years have passed since your kid was a teen.
It’s not easy to stay conscious of these patterns, but it’s something you have to work towards. When you notice your adult child reverting or catch yourself doing the same, bring it up. Then remember that you’re a different parent today than you were then and they’re a different type of child. Practice conflict resolution in another way, like two adults.
Speak about the Matters at Hand at a Mutually Convenient Time
Trying to hash things out over a certain issue when you’re both upset will get you nowhere. Instead, you need to find a time when you and your adult child can sit down and have an honest conversation.
Bring up the behavior that’s hurt you and describe each incident. This way, your adult child knows just what they’ve done. If they have any gripes against you (and they might), let them speak their piece as well.
Talk about Future Goals
What does your adult child hope to accomplish with their life? Most of the time, when an adult child returns to the nest, it’s after college. Perhaps they were living with someone and that relationship didn’t work out, so now they’ve moved back.
Regardless, their life is sort of in flux at the moment. They’re trying to navigate adulthood for themselves. Having to live with their parents might make them feel ashamed and embarrassed. That’s not a knock on you. It’s just that modern society expects adults to go to college, get a great job, and live on their own. When that doesn’t happen, it can breed disappointment, bitterness, depression, frustration, and resentment.
In fact, most of your adult child’s disrespect can stem from those emotions. If they feel like they’re a failure, they might take out their anger and sadness on anyone within range, i.e., you.
If your adult child wants to move out but is struggling, help them if you can. This doesn’t mean monetarily. If they need a full-time job or a job at all, offer to ask about leads among your circle. If they’re finding it difficult to get an apartment, look up some places for them.
Establish Expectations and Live up to Them
While you undoubtedly sympathize with your adult child if they’re having a hard time and not meeting their goals in life, that doesn’t entirely erase or excuse their disrespect. Until they can find their own place, they’re living with you, and that means you two need to come up with some ground rules.
Just like the one-warning tactic we mentioned earlier in this guide, you must be willing to do what you promise. Yes, that means following through even with an adult child. Otherwise, all the expectations you have of this adult child/parent relationship will fall through.
Steps to Restoring the Relationship with Your Adult Child
Perhaps your adult child doesn’t live with you and hasn’t in a long time. You two always had issues and never quite found a way to enjoy a civil relationship. As a parent, you’d hoped that when your child matured into an adult, you could enjoy a healthier, happier bond with them. That hasn’t happened, though. Instead, you’re more estranged than ever.
Can you fix the relationship or is it too late? In most instances, you can make some reparations.
If you two haven’t talked for a while, then pick up the phone and call. If your adult child doesn’t want to speak with you, then you might write them a letter or an email. Make sure it’s heartfelt. If you’re more responsible for the relationship falling apart, then identify your role in where things stand today. Mention you’re willing and eager to fix the relationship.
Your adult child will hopefully agree to at least talk to you. Don’t be surprised if they don’t want to see you right away, though. Work up to that point slowly but surely. If you two start rebuilding the relationship but find your old problems resurface, then you might want to consider involving a professional like a counselor, therapist, or psychologist. That can make a huge difference in the quality of your bond.
Hopefully, with time, the two of you can establish a loving, close relationship.
Conclusion
Disrespect from your child can occur when they’re young and even when they’re adults. By understanding why your child acts this way, you’ve already won half the battle. Perhaps your kid has a bully or they want more attention from you. An adult child might be frustrated by not having their own place and having to move back in with mom and dad.
By setting ground rules and sticking to them, you can work towards ending disrespectful behavior from children of all ages. Sometimes you’ll have to dole out punishments. Restitutions work well in teaching real lessons not to misbehave. Just remember to stick to your guns and establish your authority when punishing a child. Also, good behavior shouldn’t go unacknowledged. Your kid needs to know how you feel proud of them, so make sure you tell them.