Initially published in 2017. Estimated reading time - 5 minutes. 

Sixteen years ago my youngest child became a teenager, twelve years after his oldest sibling, and over these many years I have had many conversations with other homeschooling moms, most of them with teenagers. A significant number of those conversations revolved around the topic of this talk. 

So, over the last twenty-eight years, I have had ample opportunity to think about how to work with resistant, uncooperative teens.  I suppose I have really had a much longer time to think about the general subject since I was one myself. Putting together my own internal experience, my experience with my children, and the vicarious experience I have gotten through many conversations with other homeschooling moms, I have developed some suggestions for helping families and teens work together to achieve their common goal: the perfection of the individual in the sight of God.

That is, after all, our common goal. It is your goal for yourself and for your children, and it is their goal for themselves and for you. We may not all always think about it explicitly in that way, but we are all searching for happiness, and true happiness is only found with and in God.

For that reason, before I go on to some very practical suggestions that have helped other families, I want to make the most practical suggestion. That suggestion is pray. Pray for your children. Pray for them specifically, by name, each day. Ask God to enlighten you with respect to each child’s needs. Go to Holy Hour and spend some time thinking about each of your children, talking each one over with God. The older I get and the more experience I have, the more I see that prayer is essential to every aspect of life. My favorite saying is “God has a plan.” It’s my favorite saying because I have seen how true it is. God has a plan for our daily lives, for each moment of each of our lives. We want to be open to that plan, and trust in Him.

So my first advice is for you to begin with prayer – and Holy Hours.

The idea of Holy Hours is good in many ways. Not only do you need the time to go to Our Lord in prayer, but your children need to develop the habit of prayer. A teenager who spends regular time with Our Lord, listening to Him, is more likely to listen to you. You can’t make someone pray, but you can give him the regular opportunity, and, in my experience, if you do that, he usually will pray.

I also think that encouraging your children to get to know the saints and to develop a relationship with particular saints is helpful to them. 

Now, as I said, these are practical suggestions. They are practical because we need God in every aspect of our lives; in prayer we acknowledge that and we follow Our Lord’s command to ask, so that we may receive. With the saints we are developing a relationship with the entire body of Christ. It is practical in other ways as well. It involves, on our side, a number of components that I want to discuss: conversation, deliberation, habituation, and reliance on the teen’s gifts. All of these components are important not only in this activity, but in a general way in dealing with teens, especially those who are uncooperative, and who often just don’t want to work.

Before I start I want to say that I am, in my reflections here, presuming a certain level of harmony in the house. Not a lot, but some. If your teen is at the point of defiance, not resistance, then I recommend professional help. If he or she is taking drugs, or has a pornography addiction, I have some things to say, as, sadly, over the years I have worked with families dealing with these problems. But that is not this talk. This is really about improving your relationship with your resistant, somewhat hard to work with teen.

The first item mentioned in my list is conversation. In terms of Holy Hours, this means that you talk to your teenager about how important spending time with Jesus is to you. Point out that if it were announced that Jesus was coming to the local parish tomorrow, in the flesh, for a specially arranged appearance, everyone would go. But we know that is in fact the situation. The conclusion is obvious; it doesn’t even have to be stated. Also explain to your teen what it is you get from the time you spend with Our Lord. Notice that all of this conversation is about your own experience, and the objective reality. It’s not telling him what he should be thinking and feeling, at least not directly.

If you want your children to see reality as you do, to have your values and your responses to life, you need to talk to them, and with them, not “at” them.

Initially we all think, “I spend all day with my children, of course I talk to them.” But I urge you to really think about it – do you talk to them and with them, or do you talk at them? Do you listen to their responses and actually consider them, or do you brush them off because you don’t have time?  

So the first thing to address, when your teenager is just not doing his school work, and not being generally cooperative, is to make sure there is conversation happening. That should include conversation about life, but it should also include conversation about school. One should have conversation about school subjects, religion, English, history, and science, and also conversation about the importance of school in itself. Don’t underestimate the impact of sharing your view of those subjects through your conversation. You can use the family dinner table as a platform for this kind of conversation. Think about it ahead of time and be willing to actually make plans for topics to discuss.

And be interested. We are so inclined to think that the high school student should just go off and do his work by himself. In my experience that works fine in some subjects and at some times. But when you are encountering reluctance to work, try doing the subject with your student. If geometry is the difficulty, do it together. Make it clear that you think this is fun, both in terms of content and in terms of company. You obviously can’t do that with every subject, especially when you have many children to attend to, but you can pick a subject and do that subject with your adolescent.

For years I did Latin with my high school students. I consider one of the high points of my homeschooling career to be the day my son said to me, “I don’t know how much I like Latin, Mom, but I sure like doing it with you.“ I think my son had that view partly because I made it clear to him how much I looked forward to spending that time with him each day.

Continued in Part Two: Deliberation. Communicate your decisions and let them see your reasoning!