Understanding Teenagers – For Tennis Parents And Coaches
My son is fourteen years old, and he plays a lot of tournaments. He does o.k.
He does great at practice, but at tournaments he gets angry, or just tries to hit too hard and win all the time.
I have tried to talk to him many times, telling him to play smarter – he does all the hard work at practice and training and cannot play the best he can at tournaments.
Do you have any ideas for me? Thanks
Here’s where we adults get stuck with teenagers:
a) We want to change them – we want them to behave differently.
b) We don’t want them to suffer.
Note that one of the reasons that we don’t want them to suffer is because it makes us suffer and it’s for this selfish reason (stopping OUR suffering) that we want to stop theirs.
Here is what we CAN do:
1. We can try and understand their behavior
I have been enjoying a very comprehensive book about the brain and mind, titled Evolve Your Brain
Here is one of the excerpts about teenagers:
“One of the reasons why teenagers are so impulsive is that their frontal lobe (part of the brain) takes time to develop fully.
In an article published in Nature magazine in 1999, researcher Jay Giedd and his associates from the National Institute of Mental Health clearly demonstrated that frontal lobe development continues throughout adolescence and into the mid-twenties.
When we are teens, not only are we bombarded with a cascade of raging hormones, but we also lack the kind of impulse control that adults have (or at least should have).”
“We sometimes cannot reason with a teenager, because their frontal lobe is not fully functional for rational thought.”
And this is one thing that some of teachers and coaches who have been working with teenagers for years intuitively feel and realize: our reasoning with them DOESN’T work.
You just have to let go and let teenagers learn by themselves.
It’s like telling someone who smokes, drinks too much, or eats too much that these things are not good for their health.
What would they say? They would say, “I know, but I just can’t stop it.”
I’m pretty sure that most teenagers KNOW that their behavior is destructive, but they just CANNOT stop it.
They are at the mercy of their emotional brain until it develops more.
2. Let life teach them
One of my philosophies when teaching people to play tennis is to let their life and experiences teach them. I can only show them how to play, but I cannot force them to play that way.
I have tried before and it didn’t work.
I stopped trying. Who am I to know what is best for them?
We all became good in something because we made many mistakes in our field.
An expert is someone who has made thousands of mistakes and has learned from them. That’s how he now makes decisions that result in success.
What we often try to do (parents and coaches) is to prevent these painful lessons for our players because we see them suffer (emotionally) and we suffer at the same time.
But hey, that’s how we learn. That’s how we become smarter.
That’s how we eliminate many destructive parts of our personality because they simply don’t work.
But before we can do that, we must SEE and experience that they don’t work.
Don’t try to prevent your son from having these learning experiences because this will just prolong his learning stage.
Isn’t it better that we make mistakes when we are teenagers than when we are adults with much bigger responsibilities and are in situations where our mistakes will have much heavier consequences?
3. Show them YOUR way
We can try our best to guide them in the right direction, or at least the right direction according to our own narrow opinion. (Do you ACTUALLY know what is best for anyone?)
Remember that even though your way of dealing with life’s challenges may have worked for you, it is not the ONLY way.
There are more than 6 billion people on this planet and each of them has a slightly different approach to life. Many of those work and are different to yours.
Let your son develop his own approach; don’t make him become a carbon copy of you.
Try to become aware of your need to be validated.
This means that when someone agrees with you, shares the same views, or does things in the same way as you, you feel good.
You may subconsciously steer your son toward doing things the same way as you do them because you have a need to be validated.
And if someone doesn’t agree with us (challenges our beliefs and does things in a different way) then we don’t like him/her very much because this challenges our view of the world.
Maybe we aren’t right—that’s what the ego fears, and it fights to keep us in the “right.”
Ego can even be stronger than our need to make things best for our children.
Here are two more in-depth articles about the need to be validated:
In summary, I can only share my opinion and I am open to learning and modifying it in the future:
Understand that teenagers’ brains are not fully developed and that they cannot understand some of the logical reasoning that we try to convey.
The emotional part of their brain is dominant at this age, and it can trigger many of their actions. Many teenagers are aware of their emotional choices, but cannot change them.
Show them the way that you think is best for them. They learn much better through examples than they do by preaching.
Let them learn through mistakes and experiences; don’t try to prevent every painful learning experience.
It’s better that our children learn painful lessons when they are teenagers and the consequences are mild than it is for them to learn them when they are adults with much greater responsibilities and when consequences will be more devastating.
In many cases it could be you, rather than your child, who needs to adapt your beliefs and way of dealing with life.
Your beliefs and approach to life were formed many years ago, but the only constant thing in the universe is that it constantly changes.
Are you adapting to the changes of life, or do you stick with the same approach?
There is always a lesson for everyone involved in situations of conflict. What is the lesson for you?
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September 20th, 2007 at 8:46 am
I can relate to this article for I have 2 teenagers who have bad habits on serve techinque and producing topspin. When I am with them they seem to try and correct thier faults and it looks as though they will do well, but when they are in a match or practice on their team they go back to their same bad habits. Their ball toss is not where it should be along with their grip. They hit hard but often sail the ball long. I tell them to put more topspin on it but as you know it just goes by their heads. Any more suggestions or tips would greatly be appreciated.
September 20th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Continued from last statement; You need to be more patient with your own children and always go about teaching your methods in a positve manner, never saying your are not going te get any better if you don’t do like I’m trying to tell you. They will figure out their errors eventually as in the case with mine for they were making the errors in their match and they finally calmed down and played smarter tennis instead of trying to kill the ball and finish points to quickly. As for their service they still have bad habits but talk their coach and ask them to be more aggresive in helpling them correct their mistakes. Sometimes an opinion from another instructor from another person other than a parent can be helpfull.
September 20th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Hi Joe,
One thing that I prefer to do is instead of telling them what to do, I show them what happens if they do it the wrong way. Let them figure out and start accepting responsibility for their mistakes. If you tell them what to do, they keep relying on you. Now you are responsible if they miss.
You also need to go deep inside of yourself and examine whether telling anyone what to do makes you feel good. Or if taking too much responsibility for others makes you feel good too.
These are all traps of your mind you need to become aware of.