It is normal, for example, for out of control teens to lead double lives, partly known and partly not known to their parents. But substance-abusing teenagers who lie to hide their habit become truly unknown within their families. This is why all recovery programs emphasize honesty with oneself and with others. To encourage honesty, parents need to explain to young children, and again to adolescents, how costly telling lies is to the liar.

A young child will often lie for the fun of making up a story, to fabricate an image to enhance his social reputation, or to escape the consequences of wrongdoing. Here the parent can explain the importance of truth telling, “It’s fun to pretend, but don’t use make-believe to make me believe what isn’t true. You need to tell me the truth so I can trust the stories you tell me. You need to be honest so I know that you are who you say you are. And you need to confess to what you did so we can deal with it and move on.

Most important, notice how you feel when you lie to me. Not as close and comfortable as when you trust me with the truth.”With adolescents, lying becomes more frequent and complex. Adolescents tend to tell lies for the sake of doing the forbidden and not getting caught. Their social freedom is at stake. Here parents need to itemize the high costs of lying. They can start by explaining that deception is deceptively simple.

To the teenager, lying seems like the easy way out, but it is not. From what I have seen in counseling over the years, lying gets teenagers into more trouble than any other behavior.Frequent lying places them not only in a false position with others, but in an increasingly untenable position with themselves. Liars live in fear of being found out, which is why they tend to become more secretive and less communicative with parents.

They become lonely and isolated in the family because they have distanced themselves to avoid giving themselves away. They feel out of control because after covering up one lie with another, they soon can’t keep their stories straight. They may even become so confused that they start believing some of their own lies. Deceiving loved ones who trust them makes them feel progressively worse about themselves.

Feeling that they lack the courage to tell the truth lowers their self-esteem. Finally, when their deception is discovered, they are increasingly surrounded by angry family members who feel hurt and who may no longer trust them. Now, even when they tell the truth, they are less likely to be believed. No wonder they are relieved when they are found out and have to own up to their lies.

Now they can stop all this duplicity, get back on an honest footing with others, and relax in the close company of those they love. That’s the lesson a lot of teenage liars learn: it’s hurtful to be lied to, but it’s far less hurtful than being the person who has been telling lies.It is important for parents to confront the issue of dishonesty because in children who lie and get away with it, lying is more likely to become habitual, affecting other relationships now and later.

Another form of lying that is particularly challenging involves misrepresenting misconduct as something else in order to excuse it. This type of lying occurs more commonly in adolescence than in childhood because it requires verbal sophistication. The teenager admits what he did but calls it something else to make it seem okay. The more often he mischaracterizes his actions to feign innocence, the more you have to challenge him about it directly. “You say you were just teasing your sister about her weight, but I think calling her ‘Piggy’ was meant to be insulting. I would like to talk about why you wanted to hurt her feelings like that.”

He makes fun of everything the younger boy says. Or the frustrated dad says to his academically unmotivated out of control teen girl, “I give up on you! You’ll never succeed in anything because you’re just like all your loser friends!” And the man abandons this daughter and shifts more attention to her high-achieving younger sister. The no name-calling rule also applies to parents of younger children. The parent who can’t stand it when his six-year-old cries over a lost toy should not say: “If you’re going to act like a cry baby, then I’ll really give you something to cry
about!”

Child abuse, cruel playground teasing, and the commission of most hate crimes depend on name-calling to pave the way to violence. Calling someone a hateful name can often motivate hateful treatment that follows. This is how we treat trash like you! Name-calling can start very young. For example, the frustrated four-year-old yells at his mother, “You’re a stupid-head!” and then slaps her in the face.

In the angry moment, the child may believe that it is okay to hit a parent who is acting like a stupid-head. Now is a good time for a serious discussion about the power of name-calling, the harmful permission it can give, and acceptable alternatives for expressing anger. “When you are angry, tell me that you are and we can talk about it. But, please, no name-calling. It hurts my feelings, and it encouraged you to treat me in ways that we don’t allow in this family. In this family, no one is allowed to hit anyone!”

It’s worth keeping this riddle in mind: When they fight, what do humans and other animals have in common? Answer? They all fight with their mouths. But animals use sharp teeth; for people sharp words are the weapon of choice. We are all misled when we are young by the old adage that is still in play: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” This is not true. In human conflict, words do most of the damage, and name-calling does the most damage of all. In addition to forsaking the use of abstractions, labels, and judgments in conflict, parents may also want to limit the use of negative commands.

In my practice I often see young children stop talking because impatient parents cut them off and shut them down.The worst is the parent who seems to suffer from a listening disability. This doesn’t mean being unable to hear; it means being unwilling to listen. She is often so focused on talking about herself that she can’t see beyond her own self-interest; she is “deaf” to any voice but her own. The most attention she can give to others is to complain, criticize, correct, or direct.

In counseling, her daughter complains, “There’s no way to talk to my mom because she does all the talking. She’s not interested in what I have to say. The only person she listens to is herself.” This is a parent with a high need to be known by others, but a low need to know much about them. The lesson is pretty simple. If you want your child to talk and listen to you, particularly in conflict, then listen to your child. Listening shows your child that you respect what he has to say.

Sometimes, however, an out of control teenager will deliberately go on strike, refusing to communicate in order to keep parents in the dark about her life. This sets up a conflict between their need to know and her need to be unknown, between their request for conversation and her refusal to talk. So what can parents do to bring her to the discussion table? Do not fight with her to get her to talk, but do hold her responsible for the consequences of not talking. The parent can say, “Whether or not to talk to me about your life is up to you. However, I do need to say that not talking to me may not work well for you because it doesn’t work for me.

This is what goes through my mind. First I feel ignorant and wonder what is going on. Then I begin to worry about you. That’s when I start asking myself: What if something’s seriously wrong? Then I answer my question by imagining the worst: You are in some kind of danger or trouble that you are trying to hide.

Wanting to protect you from this unknown harm, I decide to restrict your freedom. I don’t let you go anywhere and I don’t give you any money. You may get angry at me for setting limits based on unfounded ideas. You tell me that my thinking is completely off base. But how do I know? You wouldn’t communicate, and I was just doing my best by you based on all the information I wasn’t given.

That’s what can happen when you decide not to talk to me. My ignorance does you no favors. Of course, none of this would have to happen if you had kept me adequately informed. But, as I said, that is always up to you.” Another way to open up a dialogue is to forsake spoken communication for the written kind. Leave a private note expressing your caring and concern in an envelope on your daughter’s bed. Encourage her to write back if it suits her. By separating the message from the messenger and giving her time to read and think about what you’ve written, you signify your willingness to listen when she is ready.

Today, the number of ways we can communicate with our children has increased dramatically, thanks to the information technology we have at our command. After all, now we can trace where in the virtual world of the Internet our children go. We can have cell phone contact with them any time and check the phone memory and/or bill to see who is being called.

We can even use a global positioning system to track where in the world our teenager drives. “What about my right to privacy?” an older child will object. To which the parent must be ready to explain that a child’s privacy from parental intrusion is a privilege, not a right. “So long as you are behaving responsibly and keeping me adequately informed and remain open to discussion, privacy is yours.

However, if your behavior puts you at risk of harm and you will not talk to me about what’s going on, then I will ‘snoop and spy’ as you call it, and invade your privacy to try to find out myself. I will do this for your safety’s sake.” At first, many parents thought that these new communication devices would make it easier to keep up with their children’s lives, with their teenagers in particular, who like to revive the old childhood game of hide and seek, “Find me if you can.”

Actually, all this technology has provided little relief from parental ignorance, since the more we know, the more we want to know, and the more anxious we become when we realize how much we don’t know. Now the conflict question that increasingly perplexes parents is, “Do we know enough?” One parent thought so. “Call me when you get back to your friend’s house tonight,” she tells her teenage daughter, who readily agrees and calls as promised.

The problem, as trouble later revealed, was that she had been calling from her cell phone and was not where she said she was. Her parents then insisted that she call from friends’ houses on a land line, so they could verify where the call was made from. Parents usually give a child a cell phone so they can reach him anytime. But sometimes he doesn’t want to be reached, so he doesn’t pick up. By now, most parents have avoided this conflict by simply setting a condition of use: If he wants a cell phone he will have to answers their calls.

For every system of regulation and surveillance that parents impose, adolescents will try to find a way to circumvent it, perpetuating the ongoing conflict between parent as rule maker and teenager as rule breaker.Parents need to encourage communication as best they can and hold their children accountable for not talking. At the same time, they must hold themselves accountable for how they talk, particularly during conflict, when impatience and emotion can cause them to change their manner of speech.

When family members are in conflict, it means that something within them or between them is worth talking about. Not talking about things that bother them creates tension in the form of silent discomfort between parent and out of control teenagers. The relationship becomes strained or abrasive until what is being withheld is finally declared and discussed. The ten-year-old admits that the reason he has been hard to talk to is that he has been lying about keeping up with his homework. He feels fearful of being found out. Or the parent admits, “The reason I’ve been fussing at you about not wasting food and money is that there have been changes at work and I’m worried about losing my job.” Conflict can be informative.

Disagreement offers two opposing ways of considering the same issue. Clothes that a teenager thinks look “cool” can seem scandalous to her parents. Exchanging opinions allows each party to see the other person’s point of view and be informed by that perspective. Conflict has an upside if the participants are willing to learn from each other, and if they can put aside power struggles and instead address the questions that conflicts are always really about.

Ongoing uncertainty about what is going on within each other and in each other’s lives is what keeps us gathering information. Questions are a primary communication tool to satisfy our abiding curiosity. Ignorance about each other cannot be avoided, but we can only tolerate so much. When that curiosity cannot be satisfied and uncertainty about what the other person is thinking or feeling rules, a serious exposure to conflict is created.

Inadequate communication between family members creates a variety of problems: misunderstanding, estrangement, distrust, suspicion, and insecurity, among others. I see it often in family counseling: More conflict results from what people do not communicate than from what they do, from “shutting up” instead of “speaking up.” Open discussion has a chance of creating understanding, but ignorance allows a host of false assumptions to grow.

A major function of verbal communication for family members is to reduce the abiding ignorance between them. Exchanging honest information about our feelings and thoughts and behaviors, family members stay connected.

In families, ignorance about each other is the continuing problem that communication is meant to overcome. This problem is ongoing because no matter how much you and your children know about each other today, tomorrow brings new experiences and perspectives. It takes an enormous investment in communication to keep a family functioning together as a unit, to keep everyone “on the same page” and “in the know.” Of course, this knowledge is only as good as it is true, which is why so many family conflicts are about determining what the truth really is.

The child must learn that anger is only temporary. It takes experiencing some normal anger to and from the parent in conflict before the child comes to understand that this is a passing emotional discomfort, not any permanent loss of love. Parents can assure both the strong-willed child and out of control teen: “No matter how angry we may get at each other, our love will be there when the anger has gone away.”

And when correcting a child, never do it in anger, for two reasons. First, the consequence you impose is likely to be so extreme you will have to retract or at least modify it later, showing your child that you don’t mean what you say. “You’re grounded for the next year!” explodes the father whose teenage son has taken out the family car without permission, only to reduce the sentence to a week after he has calmed down. Second, anger can obscure the problem being corrected because the parents’ intense emotion becomes the most salient message the child receives. If you ask her why she was punished, she will say, “Because my parents were angry at me.” Ask her, “What for?” and she will answer, “I don’t know. They were just yelling at me like they always do!”

So the child misses the point about not leaving the back door open and allowing the dog to escape again. In conflict, the issues are often too important to get extremely angry about.Parents can help their child put anger in emotional context by explaining how the basic functions of all emotions are the same: registering the felt awareness of an event (sadness over a loss, for example) and motivating a response (grief, for example) to that event. Each emotion commonly arises in response to a different kind of experience.

For example, frustration is a typical response to the thwarting of desires or needs, fear is a typical response to danger, and surprise is a typical response to the unexpected. The function of anger is to identify violations. Anger is evaluative; it comes into play when we judge that we have been wronged. It then motivates us to make some expressive, protective, or corrective response, sometimes precipitating conflict that is fought to set things right.

Try asking yourself the same question when you feel angry. If the answer is, “I am also feeling sad,” or, “I’m also feeling anxious,” for example, then take the time to reflect on those emotions or talk about what that sadness or anxiety is. The benefit of this exercise is to clarify and amplify what is emotionally going on for yourself and for others. If parent or child thinks that all the other ever gets in conflict is angry, then valuable emotional information will never be revealed or discussed.

Conflict creates an opportunity for more communication if parent and child allow themselves to disclose more, which includes allowing themselves to be more emotionally known.People who feel obliged to please others or entitled to get their way can become angry in conflict for the same reason: their wants are denied. They may become angry when they fail to please, as being in disagreement with the other person implies.

And they can become angry when disagreement opposes their desire to prevail. In both cases, their “sense of should” has been violated. “I ‘should’ have pleased the other person,” says the pleaser. “I ‘should’ have gotten what I wanted,” thinks the entitled person. The only solution to people of either predisposition is to learn to substitute the word “want” for “should,” gradually coming to accept that getting their wants satisfied just some of the time is good enough: “I want to please you all the time, but I know no matter how hard I try, I really can’t.”

If you come under angry attack from your child and are on the receiving end of deliberately hurtful words, it is generally better not to respond in kind because that will just build more anger between you. Instead, pause, create a quiet space in the communication, then make an empathetic response. Beneath violent language there are often vulnerable feelings, so see whether you can shift your focus of concern to those: “I know you wouldn’t say that unless you were feeling really upset with me, can you tell me what those feelings are?”

If you can get the child to share his feelings instead of hurling insults at you, you change his view of you from enemy to concerned, compassionate friend. Then it is your turn to express your feelings, declaring that you need for him not to attack you verbally again. Now you can get back to the original issue and try to resolve it in a calmer way.

Starting when their children are as young as four of five years old and through adolescence, parents can find themselves under powerful emotional onslaught when the boy or girl finds that being reasonable will not prevail.There are a number of common emotional tactics that a young person may put into play when explanation or argument is causing conflict to go the parent’s way. Sometimes the son or daughter will act so loving that a parent cannot resist pleasure from this show of consideration and approval, and relents on that account. Sometimes the young per-son will act so angry, loudly or silently, that the parent will give in to relieve painful feelings of rejection.

Sometimes criticism from out of control teenagers will sway a parent who cannot bear appearing incompetent or inadequate in the young person’s eyes. Sometimes a young person’s display of suffering (sadness or tears) will be more than a guilty parent can withstand. Sometimes seeing a son or daughter act like a helpless victim of the adult’s decision can cause a parent to take pity on the young person and relax a rule they were contesting. Sometimes having a son or daughter express apathy can influence an insecure parent who fears abandonment of caring in their relationship. And sometimes a young person’s explosiveness can create a sense of physical threat that intimidates the parent into giving in.

Susan Forward defines emotional blackmail as “a powerful form of manipulation in which people close to us threaten, either directly or indirectly, to punish us if we don’t do what they want. At the heart of any kind of blackmail is a threat, which can be expressed in many different ways: If you don’t behave the way I want you to, you will suffer. . . . Emotional blackmailers know how much we value our relationship with them. They know our vulnerabilities. . . . When they fear they won’t get their way, they use this intimate knowledge to shape the threats that give them the payoff they want: our compliance.” You need to know what your emotional vulnerabilities are, because your child knows them well. She knows just which emotional strings to pull to get her way.

By being clear about your particular emotional vulnerabilities, you can prepare and protect yourself the next time emotional extortion comes your way. You can respond like the parent who refuses to be bullied by her loud, angry teenage son: “When you are through acting angry, I am willing to discuss with you, calmly and reasonably, what you want. Not before.” Always turn emotional extortion into rational discussion. And of course, parents must resist using emotional extortion themselves.

There can be gender role differences. Men may use anger to elicit fear, while women may suffer to elicit guilt. The man’s manipulative expression of anger implies a threat: “If you don’t let me have my way, there is no telling what I will do!” The woman’s manipulative expression of suffering is an attempt to evoke compassion or guilt: “You are hurting my feelings. I feel sad, and it’s your fault. You owe it to me to give me my way!” But not succumbing to emotional extortion does not mean that you should ignore feelings in conflict. On the contrary, feelings should be declared in order to communicate about your emotional state, but they should never be used for manipulative gain.

How can you tell whether the child’s expression of strong emotion in conflict is a true expression of feelings and not a manipulative ploy? If the child’s emotion subsides in response to your empathetic listening, his feelings were probably honestly meant. One danger of emotional manipulation is that it can corrupt the true meaning of honest feeling by creating distrust. So a parent to whom a child repeatedly says “I love you” to motivate parental permission can come to distrust the child’s expression of love when it is truly meant. Tired of being softened up this way, the parent asks, “What do you want this time?” Or the parent who continually expresses suffering to manipulate his child with guilt can generate similar distrust when honest suffering is expressed and only empathy is wanted. Now it’s the child’s turn to ask, “What do you want this time?” The more an emotion is used to manipulate, the less authentic value others place on the expression of that emotion.

And beware the strong-willed child or prickly mid-adolescent who uses emotional bluster to get parents who are bringing up an issue the child doesn’t want to deal with to back off. The protective belligerence conveyed by irritability or a dramatically displayed bad mood should not deter parents from discussions and encounters that need to occur.

When a child yells and loses emotional control, we call it “throwing a tantrum.” When parents yell at the child to get him to do what they want, I believe they are also throwing a tantrum. Both tantrums are a good example of what can happen in conflict when child or parent can no longer tolerate delay. They want to release emotion, get attention, or get a result now. As one parent in counseling described it, “When I get pushed too far I reach a breaking point. I just can’t take what’s going on anymore, and I lose it. I get loud so I can get the kids’ attention. Now they know I’m serious, which I can tell because they’re looking scared, like maybe I’m going to hit them.

Of course I never would.” But I disagree. “You have already ‘hit’ them. Threatening violence is a form of violence,” I say. “Any time you are about to reach your breaking point, take a timeout. Set a time for further discussion, separate, cool down, and then start over to deal more calmly with whatever was going on.” Many tantrums, whether by parent or child, are similar to what one psychologist terms “emotional hijacking” or what one of his sources calls emotional “flooding,” a state in which emotional intensity overrules rational thought and dictates impulsive action.

“People who are flooded cannot hear without distortion or respond with clearheadedness; they find it hard to organize their thinking and fall back on primitive reactions. . . . They just want things to stop, or want to run or, sometimes, to strike back. . . . At this point—full hijacking—a person’s emotions are so intense, their perspective is so narrow, and their thinking so confused that there is no hope of taking the other’s viewpoint or settling things in a reasonable way.”

Now only yelling will do, yet parental yelling is counterproductive; it does more harm than good. Yelling is not talking out what is wanted; it is acting out to get one’s way. Consider just a few of the unproductive outcomes. If a child gives in to parental yelling, he is at risk of developing self-contempt for not speaking up for himself and demanding to be respectfully treated. Thus parental mistreatment can lead to a child who is driven by fear and unable to assert himself. This pattern may carry through to his adult relationships later on.

How to recover from a pattern of yelling? Parents should calmly and insistently pursue what they want instead. Recover from yelling by going to the other extreme. Talking more softly can be very effective because the child does not expect this response. In addition, he must now listen carefully to what you are saying. This creates a new cue for seriousness. Now he knows the parent means business because she has lowered her voice.

The model for this comes from Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which encourages recovering alcoholics to maintain emotional sobriety so they don’t put their substance sobriety at risk. I define emotional sobriety as a state in which feelings are honestly acknowledged and openly expressed but not allowed to do a person’s thinking for them. It is critical for people in recovery to learn emotional sobriety because addictive behavior supports the habit of immediate gratification and impulsive decision making, of giving in to urgent wants and feelings no matter how self-destructive.

In addition to supporting abstinence, the twelve-step program teaches people in recovery to resist the urgings of impulse and emotion, to delay action for thought, to consult better judgment before making decisions. AA uses the acronym HALT: Never let yourself get Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. I have given this advice to parents of a sensitive or volatile child to help them reduce his emotional explosiveness.

“Before you enter into disagreement with him about chores,” I suggest, “check out his physical and psychological condition. Is he irritable from being hungry? If so, give him a snack before you set him to work. Is he aggrieved from already being angry? If so, listen to what recently happened at school that he still feels frustrated or resentful about. Is he feeling disconnected, anxious, and lonely? If so, take a few minutes to do something fun together. Is he cranky because he is tired? If so, let him rest.”

Conditions that commonly contribute to a child’s lack of well-being, such as hunger, anger, loneliness, and being tired, can increase the likelihood of conflict. It behooves us as parents to heed
that piece of folk wisdom “Don’t pull the tail of the tiger.” Parents must be mature and sensitive enough to know not to argue when either they or the child is upset and emotion rules the moment. When we are upset, acting on what feels right can do a lot of wrong. Sometimes judicious timing, waiting for feelings to settle down, finding out what those feelings are, can pay big dividends by encouraging the child’s cooperation.

Parents can be caught off guard when an intense adolescent is pressing to resolve a disagreement so he can do something or go somewhere right now. But you are not locked in to that emotional moment. If your high school student tells you that she “has to have” permission and money to go to a concert this weekend, rather than fight it out now, you can break tension and slow decision making down. “Give me a separation for now and then we’ll talk some more tonight, because this does sound like something important to discuss. I am not walking out on you; I just need time to think.”

Sometimes it’s the teenager who exercises better judgment. At the point where her parents are getting angrier and she is also ready to explode, the daughter may choose to walk away to break the tension and calm down: “We need to talk about this later when we’re not upset. I’m going to my room.” Sometimes the parent refuses to give his daughter the timeout. “Where are you going? Don’t you turn your back on me! Don’t you dare walk away until I’m finished with you!” But she is already in her bedroom, with the door closed. Infuriated, the parent follows after and pushes open her door, yelling,

“This argument will end when I am done talking and not before!” Now, denied the cooling off she was seeking, she screams at him. “You have no right to burst into my room like that. Get out! I hate you.” Unhappily, in this situation, there is little chance for mending. They both say things they will later regret, may apologize for, but can never take back.

Suppose your 15-year-old son grabs the remote control from his six-year-old sister, who is crying because he switched her favorite TV show to his. When you tell him to give it back and let her watch her show, he throws the remote down and storms out of the room, but not before adding insult to injury: “Oh, let the baby have her bottle!”

Now he is angry and so are you. You want him to apologize and call after him, “And don’t you come out of your room until you’re ready to say you’re sorry to your sister!” You want him to express remorse for behaving badly, although you know a forced apology will not mean much. Oh, he’s sorry all right, but not for making his sister cry. So how are you going to mend the relationship if any apology he makes will be insincere? The answer is simple: Don’t go for an apology, go for an actual mend.

Let your son know that before he gets to do anything else that requires your permission, the mending must take place, and it must take place in conversation with you. It is a three-step process. Step one is sensitization. You want him to be emotionally sensitive to how his behavior may have hurt his sister, so you pose a role reversal question. “Suppose you are six and your older brother grabs the remote and changes the channel to the show he wants to watch, and then calls you a hurtful name for acting upset. I want you to tell me three ways you might feel in that situation.”

The goal of sensitization is to create a sense of empathy. Step two is evaluation. You want him to place his behavior in an ethical context, so you pose an examination question. “In your judgment, setting your anger aside, do you believe that the way you treated your sister is okay? If you believe it is okay, give me three reasons why. If you believe it was wrong, give me three reasons why. Then let’s talk about it.” The goal of evaluation is to create a moral framework for his actions.

Step three is reparation. You want to place his behavior in the context of injury given, so you pose a recovery question. “What special act of amends could you make to your sister?” The goal of reparation is atonement. If, as part of the amends, he wants to apologize, that is up to him. But it must be in addition to whatever act of atonement he makes.

Parents often prefer a forced apology to an actual mending because the mending process takes attention and effort that a token apology does not. I believe mending is worth the time it takes because it can teach a valuable lesson about how to recover normal caring after some hurt is given or received, as inevitably happens in all significant relationships. Remember that a child is just an adult in training, and as parents we are preparing that young person to manage later relationships.

Do you want to send a young person out into the world without preparing him to manage the inevitable mistakes he will make in his significant attachments? Parents who neglect this education are often those who expect apologies from others but are constitutionally incapable of making apologies themselves. I am referring here to those parents who can’t admit to or make up for wronging others because they can’t bear being in the wrong.

Parents who are best at teaching children how to mend relationships are those who accept responsibility for their behavior. They can admit that they hurt their child, offer a meaningful apology, expressing authentic sorrow for what they did, and take steps to repair whatever damage has been done. More important, they resolve never to act that way again and they keep that resolution. These are parents who are modeling mending.

Blamers often feel that if they criticize an opponent enough, the other person will change his behavior. This rarely works. Instead, blame empowers the opposition. The blame equation is conflict = (all) you. The responsibility equation is conflict = (partly) you + (partly) me. And blame exaggerates its claims. Because blame often traffics in absolutes—the accusations “You never do . . .”/“You always say . . .”—it allows no middle ground.

Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t. Yet, there is often a seed of truth in an accusation that the other person can accept. “Mostly I don’t think I do what you say, but I guess sometimes I do, and I will try to be better about that.” Such acceptance of responsibility can open a dialogue instead of a fight. The parent says to the out of control teen: “I think we are getting nowhere in this discussion, and you are right, it’s partly my fault. What I would like to do is start this conversation over a different way. Could you please help me understand what I am missing in what is going on, and how you feel? That is where I would like to begin.”

In conflict, it is usually better to end than to begin the argument with blame. Begin with blame, and accusation encourages defensiveness that antagonizes the discussion. Postpone blame until the end, when the disagreement has been sorted out, and blame becomes the mutually agreed upon allocation of responsibility.

When both parent and child assume the mantle of the “injured party,” preferring to feel wronged than to admit complicity, blame creates standoffs. This is where pride enters the fray. Both parent and child remain committed to being “right,” stubbornly telling themselves, “I won’t back down, give in or be beaten.”

Such proud, willful parents and children can’t bear to lose an argument or to simply let an argument go. Parents who insist they are right can be relentless in an argument. “Don’t you know,” asks the exasperated child, “that not everyone believes like you?” “Of course I do,” snaps the parent. “But I also know they should!”

There is no arguing with pride. People who listen with their minds made up do not really listen at all. The only way out of an argument with such a person is to decide to let the difference between you stand. When winning becomes more important to one party than understanding, then conflict ceases to generate useful information. Pride refuses to relent on principle. Pride is often more of a roadblock for fathers because men tend to view disagreement as a performance issue.

Conflict is a competition, and they feel they must win because their self-esteem is at stake. In contrast, women are often more prone to treat conflict as a communication issue, a chance to create understanding, because for them the welfare of the relationship is at stake. In counseling, I have frequently seen conflict between a father and a son in his late teens founder when each “man” refuses to back down.

The dad won’t help financially with college unless the son achieves higher grades in high school, while the son refuses to perform up to his father’s terms and declares that after graduation he will make it on his own. Unbending pride keeps each man stuck in the stand he has stubbornly taken. In such standoff situations, I typically ask them both: “If things continue this way, with no resolution to your disputes, what will happen to your relationship?” The answer usually is, “It will get worse.” Then I tell them, “You each have to create an incentive for change.

When you are stuck in opposition like this, what do you miss doing together?” In response, both agree that one important thing they miss is going to sports events together and sharing that enjoyment. When they are this mad at each other, they have to give that up. “That seems sad,” I say. “It might be worthwhile to soften your stands over school with each other just enough to allow some of the good time together you miss.” And that incentive enables them each to put some pride aside and work with the other to get what both value. Not only does it take cooperation to prolong conflict, but also to create it.