Nagging your teen is a lose-lose for you and your teen. Not only do you both hate it, but it doesn’t work. Yet nearly every parent nags their teen, setting up a cycle of your nagging and their passive resisting. Then one day, your teen moves out, and you both feel a relief mixed with a sadness that you were both stuck in this stupid, wasteful way of relating.
It doesn’t have to be like this. There’s another way to parent a young adult that will feel good for both of you.
The problem with nagging
There’s a reason so many parents find their teen incredibly annoying. Here’s this kid who is perfectly capable of doing so much—or at least far more than putting a dirty dish in the sink—yet they do virtually nothing as if expecting you to do everything—which you’ve been doing for the past twelve-plus years. You deserve a little help, if not a break.
While you absolutely have the right to be annoyed, your annoyance tends to change nothing: your teen still does nothing, which makes you more annoyed, which makes your teen hide out in their room—doing nothing.
So you nag. Which doesn’t do much
Even if it works, nagging comes at the price of your expending energy to get your teen to expend none, not to mention cluttering your brain with remembering your teen’s tasks while your teen seems to forget them.
This is the lose-lose cycle that nagging sets up.
But there’s a larger problem with nagging, and to appreciate it, we have to see things from your teen’s perspective and what they developmentally need.
What your teen developmentally needs
Teens badly want to be independent—except for the times when they don’t!
But mostly, they want to prove they are capable people, separate from their parent who has spent the last decade babying them. They know they are being swept down the river of time and will soon be adults, and they both desperately want this and fear it—they fear it because the whole prospect of adulthood seems intimidating and a bit too much to handle. Which means that, at times, they want you to take care of them.
For the teen, your nagging makes them feel irresponsible and incapable.
If they were planning on emptying the dishwasher, they wanted to do it on their timeline, not yours, so that they would feel independent. If they now empty it because you reminded them, their doing so places them in a child’s role, which is offensive to the teen. They have to assert their independence at all costs, which means not emptying the dishwasher explicitly because you asked them to do so.
This is when parents throw their hands towards the sky and wonder what else they can do. When they remain silent, the dishwasher isn’t emptied (on the parent’s timeline), and when they nag, their teen just shrugs, glowers a bit, and walks away—and that’s a best-case scenario!
What parents can do
1. Form an alliance. For starters, it’s important to remember that, in the end, you both want the same thing: for your teen to be independent and capable. Your alliance is formed around your common goal. But to form an alliance, you must first change your perspective.
2. Changing your perspective: seeing your teen as a teammate. After more than a decade of your being in charge, it can be difficult to let go of this, but it’s a necessary step for your teen’s growth.
Changing your perspective means seeing your teen on an equal footing, that their wants and needs are equally important and valid as yours. If your teen is your teammate, then the goal is shifted away from what you want towards what is best for the team. Emptying the dishwasher becomes a shared goal for the team, a team problem to solve.
When your teen sees this shift in you, it will build your alliance because the teen implicitly understands that their needs now count as much as yours.
3. Ask what your teen wants concerning household chores. Most teens want to contribute to the team effort. They want to be seen—and to see themselves—as capable. Depending on their age, they may not want to or feel capable of doing much—at least not initially. For example, the thirteen-year-old is not hankering to be an adult like the sixteen-year-old who will more readily buy into helping out.
This is the first step of treating your teen as an equal teammate. Just listen to what they want, and don’t criticize. If your teen also wants to sleep in on the weekend before doing chores, this too becomes a team goal for both of you.
4. Broaden the team’s shared goals. If you and your teen are now teammates, it’s not just emptying the dishwasher that the team needs but managing all the household necessities, like cooking, cleaning, shopping, dishes, clothes washing, etc. This doesn’t mean that your teen is now equally responsible for all these chores! It just means that you are a team, and all these chores take time—yours and your teen’s.
5. Focus on the contribution of time. Rather than focus on your teen doing specific chores, consider how much time per week feels reasonable for your teen to contribute to the team effort.
If you feel your teen’s estimate of weekly time is too low, you are entitled to push back a little. But rather than telling them, “Are you kidding me? An hour’s not enough time!” remember that you are teammates. A teammate would say something more like, “Yeah, doing stuff around the home is work, but don’t you feel a little good having done it? I think you’re underestimating yourself and what you’re capable of.”
Be flexible about the amount of time. If you’re only trying to get your teen to do more work for your benefit, then you’re not working as a team. The goal here is to acknowledge what each person needs and what they’re capable of. If your teen thinks they can only manage one hour a week, then start there.
“I think you’re underestimating yourself,” you might say, “But let’s start with one hour and see how it goes. If it seems pretty easy for you, then it would really help me if you could increase the time a little more. Let’s just see what your able to do and we’ll stick with that.”
6. Choose chores. If, for example, two hours a week sounds reasonable to both of you, what chores would your teen like to do? Be as flexible as possible—if your teen likes to cook, they could make dinner one night a week. Let them choose the chores they like regardless of how easy or hard they are.
The real commodity here is time. The two of you can figure out how long each chore generally takes so that your teen can rack up the two hours of work a week.
7. Step back. It’s helpful to remind your teen of your agreement: your teen’s jobs are theirs to remember and monitor, not yours. No nagging or reminding is allowed!
** It’s important that you agree on a day and time by which your teen’s chores need to be completed each week.
8. Revisit the arrangement. After a week, assess how well the arrangement is working. What does your teen need from you? Are you each keeping your end of the deal?
If, for example, your teen has elected to empty the dishwasher but doesn’t do so for days such that dishes accumulate in the sink, then this isn’t a good chore for your teen, and they need to find a different one. Again, it’s important to talk about this issue as a team problem, not your teen’s failing.
This arrangement will only work—and continue working—if your teen feels they are valued as an important part of the team, regardless of how much or little they contribute.
P.S. With some teens, the team mentality isn’t quite enough to motivate them. When they were five, they needed consequences, and perhaps they still do. The only problem now is that they are a teen and there are very few consequences that parents have at their disposal—and taking away their phone is NOT one of them!
There’s an answer to this problem, too, and you can find it in this post.
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2 thoughts on “How to Stop Nagging Your Teen”
I really like this new take on parenting in how we can be teammates. My daughter rolled her eyes at me when I told her my new approach but things have actually been a bit smoother since. We’re still working on it and I have to keep reminding myself not to say anything, a work in progress.
Hi JW,
Thanks for the comment.
Sometimes a teen’s eye roll means they not only heard you but are giving you some credit. It sounds like you’re both working on establishing a new way of interacting, and I appreciate your noting that it takes effort from both sides!