Your Mom Megaphone: Why your teen tells you to calm down
How many times has your teenager told you to “calm down”? Did you have to take a deep, calming breath and remind yourself that you were the adult in the room? I can feel my own death stare and tightening lips just remembering those conversations at my house.
It feels innocuous, right? You are talking about something minor. Maybe you are a little animated from the day. You finish a sentence and your teenager tells you, “Mom, calm down.”
Oh, my sweet Jesus. Give me strength not to launch my middle-aged body at this young person who seems to have no ability to read the room.
Nothing will raise my blood pressure and make me contemplate losing my religion faster than being told to ‘calm down”.
And from conversations with other moms, I don’t think I am the only one. Apparently, moms all across this great land are being told by their own teenagers to “calm down.”
It is as if the entire teenage population wants to tempt fate. If you see a mom rolling her shoulders and starting to hop from foot to foot with fists under her chin, she’s probably just been told to “Calm down” by a 17-year-old.
I think being told to “calm down” is particularly maddening to moms because we feel shut down, and we feel misunderstood. In my experience, when the situation comes up, I am NOT actually raising my voice. However, NOW I immediately want to start shouting and hollering just so that they will see the difference. I feel grossly misunderstood. I feel like throwing my hands up in exasperation.
Were you listening to anything I was saying?
Am I only here to stay calm and do laundry?
Do you value my actual opinion?
I feel blind-sighted.
Here are my observations as an attempt to dive down into the murky waters of this common but infuriating phenomenon.
As babies, our children got really good at “reading” us as moms. We are their whole world for many years. In the beginning, moms have control over their environment, food, emotional wellbeing, safety, and comfort. It was in their best interest to know us and our moods. Is mom happy? Is she frustrated? If I ask her a question, how is she going to react?
This connection loosens in some ways, but never really goes away, right? We feel this connection even now as adults to our own mothers. For better or worse, we are connected to our moms. It can be an emotional asset or it can be an emotional liability. But the fact is, children share a bond with their moms.
During the teen years, our kids are stepping out on their own. It is the time to discover who they are, and in what ways they are different than anyone else--especially their parents. They want independence. They pride themselves on being individuals. They want to walk their own path and chart their own course. We wanted that too at their age.
Then they walk into the kitchen and start talking to mom. For whatever reason, the topic gets animated. Mom feels like she is talking at a normal level and in a normal tone. She hasn’t hit her own interior threshold of “upset”. But she is probably in some sort of heightened state. Maybe she is feeling passionate. She is talking about something she feels a strongly about. Not fussing at them, but speaking about a cause or subject that is near and dear to her heart.
The teenager feels her heightened emotion and doesn’t like the fact that their own emotions are also getting riled up (because remember…babies and moms are connected). It makes the teen feel like a child again. The teen doesn’t like that “forced emotion” feeling of mom’s emotions rubbing off onto them. They feel a little yanked around and wish mom would just stop feeling so strongly about whatever so that their OWN emotions could stay calm also.
It takes a certain amount of maturity to recognize that you are in control of your own emotions, and the teen is not there yet. So they reach for the next best tool, get mom to stop feeling her emotion which in turn will allow me to stop feeling it with her.
So, they say, “Mom, calm down”.
They are actually saying: I am tied to your emotions more tightly than I want to be. I don’t know how to loosen the tie between us and not feel your heightened emotion in my own heart, so I am going to ask YOU to stop feeling instead.
So how should we as Moms react when we are told to “calm down”?
Given the fact that blind rage is probably not going to help the situation.
Here are some practical tips:
Take a deep breath.
Ask yourself. Even if I don’t FEEL LIKE I’m upset, what is my teenager seeing in me?
Can you be more specific about what you are feeling out loud to them? “I’m not upset, but I am passionate about this.”
Ask them to clarify what “calm down” means to them. What are they seeing that they want you to stop doing? Are you doing some sort of behavior (like not paying attention while driving) that they specifically want you to stop?
Realize that they probably won’t be able to articulate their own emotions because they are still learning about what they feel.
Affirm the fact that they spoke up. You want to encourage the practice of good communication as teenagers get older and your relationship shifts to a more adult connection. (I am not saying that their message, “calm down” is good communication, but it IS a start).
Be gentle knowing that the bond you share with them is a precious thing and worth protecting.
