Teenage Guidance: From Telling To Guiding | Anxiety Specialist | @caroline-cavanagh

22 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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In this segment, anxiety specialist Caroline Cavanagh explains why direct commands often backfire with teenagers, who are in a developmental stage that pushes them away from dependency. She argues that framing instructions as guidance respects their need for independent thought and makes advice more acceptable. Cavanagh illustrates the technique by sharing personal anecdotes—telling teens about her own past struggles and what she would do differently—so that parents can offer alternative options without dictating actions. This approach aims to reduce teen resistance, foster collaborative decision‑making, and support the adolescent transition toward autonomy.

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of an umbrella one, and that is rather than telling your teenager what to do, is changing it into a form of guidance. Adolescence is a movement from dependence to independence, and part of the process is that, is rejecting everything that you tell them to do because they're getting away from being dependent, and doing what they're told is dependency. So they want to have independent thought. So this works very nicely with that in that if you tell them what to do, they will likely do the opposite, even if they don't want to, because this deep down need to be independent. Whereas when you frame it in guidance, it becomes much more acceptable. So for example, something that I have done a lot with my, uh, my own children, but also with the teenagers that I work with, is I will reflect my experience. I will say something along the lines of, yeah, I remember when I struggled with that when you're, when I was your age and I did this and it really didn't work very well. So if I had my chance again, I would've done this instead. So what you're doing is you're giving them another option, but you're not telling them, but you're also advising them that if they go down the path that you did, it's likely going to end up in a fall as well.