Guest Author - Shaunta Grimes
Teenagers are sometimes called young adults, but the fact is that while their brains have reached a stage where they can comprehend abstract ideas and complicated thoughts, they don't have the life experience to put those ideas and thoughts into context. As a result, it is common for adolescents to engage in cognitive errors.
An Imaginary Audience
If you don't buy me these tennis shoes, everyone is going to think I'm a total dork!
Teenagers often make the mistake of believing that because they have the capacity to think about thinking, they can know what other people (especially their peers) are thinking. They feel their own feelings so deeply, that they have a hard time understanding that not everyone feels the same way they do.
As adolescents process what they think they know about their peers and other people, they unwittingly build an imaginary audience to their own behavior. For kids this age, fitting in and being like their peers may be incredibly important and they are often highly sensitive to difference. The need to control this imaginary audience leads to an intense need for privacy and an acute sense of self-consciousness.
You can help your child through this cognitive error by offering them the privacy they seek, while still being aware of what they are doing and who they are doing it with. Praise your child's individuality and place a high value on it.
The Personal Fable
No one gets me!
Conversely, teenagers are in such a period of growth and change, that they can develop a heightened sense of uniqueness. They begin to believe that no one else in the world has lived through what they are living through. This can be especially strong as they reach the point where being the same as their peers loses some of its value and they suddenly feel very apart from everyone they know.
Instead of insisting that you know how your teenager feels, encourage them to be proactive in their own problem solving. Your child is unique, even though their problems probably aren't. Be available to listen to their problems and offer support in them finding their own answers.
Psuedostupidity
Megan's reputation is her own fault, she shouldn't be hanging around those kids.
Psuedostupidity refers to a teenager's tendency to oversimplify complicated situations by only looking at a situation on its surface. While your child now has the ability to hold her own opinion and those of others in her mind at the same time, she doesn't have the life experience to cope with these differing thoughts. As a result, she may over-complicate a situation by hyperfocusing on one aspect and ignoring or not comprehending the others.
Rather than insist that your teenager is wrong, and make matters worse by adding your opinion to the mix, offer to walk her through the situation at hand and gently point out aspects she might have missed or might not understand.
Hypocrisy
Why can't I drink? You do.
Adolescents have great sonars for hypocritical behavior in their peers and especially in adults. The difference between the adult world, which they are so close to entering, and their own world can seem especially hypocritical to them. While teenagers often are unable to tolerate hypocritical behavior in others, they are pros at being hypocritical themselves.
As your teenager continues to grow cognitively, he becomes more and more aware of other people and what they do. As a child, he saw himself as part of you, now that he no longer does and is probably on the verge of being ready to pull away all together, he is seeing you and other people in a different light. Reminding your child that even adults have rules they have to follow, even when the rule makers aren't always held to the same standard. And apologize when necessary, to prove that adults are capable of that as well.
