The secret to getting your teen to listen to you

We often think of young people as particularly resistant to advice. We've probably all, at some point, rolled our eyes and done the exact opposite of what our parents suggested we do — with mixed results. Yet knowing how to successfully give advice and support to a young person can be hugely important, giving them the skills to deal with similar situations for years to come.
    
Young people lie at a particularly interesting moment when it comes to developing skills for dealing with negative emotions. At this pivotal point of their lives, they're typically seeking to explore who they are as an individual, making them quite likely to resist insightful advice from a parent. Despite often feeling that their parents 'just don't get it', they do also "remain reliant on, and highly sensitive to, the socialisation efforts of their parents," as Madeline Newman and Elizabeth Davis write in Emerging Adulthood.    
    
It's in this context that the University of California Riverside team explores how young people work through their emotional problems with the help of others, and in particular how open they are to accepting advice and support from their parents. They find a relationship between the success of such interactions and how much autonomy is afforded by parents, suggesting that young people are much less likely to resist advice when feel trusted to make their own choices.

The sample for this study comprised 194 young adults, all enrolled in an undergraduate psychology course. Firstly, they wrote a short, open-ended paragraph about the most recent time they had received emotional support from their parents, and whether or not their parent had tried to help them manage or change their emotions. They also reported what had led them to seek emotional support, and how exactly their parent had supported them, and how responsive, caring, and validating they were on this occasion. At this point, the participants also shared how much their parents' approach focused on 'cognitive support', such as giving information or helping create plans.

Next, the team sought to understand how beneficial the received support had been, as well as whether or not they had actively sought the emotional support, or whether their parent had approached them first. Information on their sense of autonomy (how much they felt that the decision was theirs to make) was also collected.

When young people actively sought advice and support from their parents, they were significantly more likely to believe that the support they received was responsive, caring, and validating. They also felt that their parents had provided them with better practical advice, giving them useful information and helping them decide what to do, than those who had not sought support.      

Unsolicited advice, however, was less effective overall — but how well it landed was influenced by how much autonomy parents offered. Those offering higher levels of autonomy were more likely to have their advice taken onboard than those offering less. 

They also suggest that authenticity was particularly important to young people; the idea that their parents are acting in a genuine, transparent, and truthful way in their interactions may help their advice seem more sincere, and therefore more likely to hit home.

The analyses used in this study are correlational, so aren't able to tell us whether any one of these factors directly results in a particular outcome. It's therefore unclear whether interpersonal emotional regulation affects autonomy, whether it's the other way around, or if there's a common factor that might be driving this relationship. Future research might be able to tease this apart further, perhaps by analysing interactions and dynamics over a stretch of time.

For now, though, the study does provide some reasonable advice for parents. If you want your child to listen to advice, try to trust in their ability to make decisions — it could improve the chances of them listening to you. 

Read the study in full.