What to do if your teen/ tween is gullible, naive, easily influenced by Peers/ Online Influencers

To a certain extent when children are very young being naive can have some healthy benefits i.e. not shouldering the burden of things that they can have no control over but later in life children who are naive and gullible can suffer and be exploited. We have seen the Andrew Tate effect on young gullible males who are sucked by his persuasive videos. 

So how can we hold onto our kids? How can we sharpen their intuition so they will listen to themselves first over the words of people who may negatively influence and exploit them.

This article is aimed primarily at parents of teens and tweens but may be useful for parents of younger children too as the foundations of inner trust begin early. Before training as a parent coach I was a Secondary School Film and Media Studies teacher. A lot of the skill in Media Studies is about critically analysing media. In this article I give you some ideas of how you can sharpen your teen/ tweens critical thinking when consuming media.

Emily Hughes- Empowered Parenting Coach

I am an Empowered Parenting Coach, I help parents who are struggling, to understand themselves and their kids better; essentially so they can have a nicer life! Because, if you are living in conflict and struggle with your kids then that’s a life less rich. Contact me today to see how parent coaching could work for you.

Cultivating Inner Trust

Asking a child lots of process questions will help sharpen their intuition and has the benefit of empowering them by letting them know they are trusted and that you are interested. Process questions might be things like “What's your plan for your bedroom?”, “What are you going to do next?”, “How are you going to ensure your homework gets done?”

Asking questions rather than lecturing or nagging helps the child to feel empowered and trusted. Similarly putting the child in charge of things like planning a Saturday, planning a meal, navigating on a simple map route may help them trust themselves and their judgement. 

The more empowered a teen is, the more they will feel a sense of inner trust and the less likely they will be to be naive.

Connection is King

If a teen/ tween is richly connected to their parents the parents are the child’s moral compass. If the child does not feel accepted, connected to their caregivers then other people can become the child’s moral compass and often it people who are persuasive and manipulative who will become the source of influence. A lot of what I coach parents of teens and tweens about is how to reconnect with their children to regain their place as the child’s safe harbour and source of influence.

Healthy No

Sometimes a child cultivating a really healthy “no” can be an important thing. For most children this comes easily but for some children they may need some encouragement. If our children are always denying their needs and ignoring their intuition to meekly please others… perhaps they might they end up meekly pleasing the wrong type of person when they grow older. Occasionally celebrating their no: “Whoah sounds like you are really sure you don’t want to do that” can be empowering.

Problem Solving Skills 

Similar to the two above an antidote to naivety can be to sharpen problem solving skills. So when your child has an issue, rather than rushing into fix it you could collaboratively solve the problem solve with them. Sometimes sitting down with a large piece of paper and brainstorming with a tween/ teen can be the best way to help them. The trick here is that the parent must resist the urge to lecture and fix. It takes immense courage to trust the child’s process and not fix things for them. Underneath this urge to fix is fear.

Critical Thinking Skills

If your teen/ tween start deferring their authority to peers or people on the internet the instinct from parents can be to “shut it down” but this only creates more of a pull away from the parent as the parent now seems the enemy. 

Instead the parent can get curious and help sharpen the child’s critical thinking skills. So for example a child becomes obsessed with an influencer online. Rather than saying “Stop watching that it’s toxic” you can instead get interested. “Hey I’m keen to watch some of this with you can you show me” and then as you watch neutrally ask questions:

“What do you think his views of women are? Why do you think that might be? Does this align with how you feel about women or not?” 

Some things you notice and get curious about: the language used, how the influencer addresses the audience, vocal intonation, pose and posture, camera angles, the setting, the props, repetition of phrases, How other people in the videos are represented.

A really interesting question when watching media together is this “What do you think his/ her aim is in making this video?”, “What do they want the audience to believe?”, “What do they hope the audience will do?”

Ultimatly you want the child to come to their own realisation that the content is toxic so that when they consume future media they will be able to discern whether the content aligns with their values.

Tuning into Intuition

One thing to make sure is that they are tuned into their body and their gut feeling, their intuition and their inner voice. It can go a bit like this; in early childhood a child feels a feeling. It starts as a sensation in the body their inner voice says “this is not safe” they tell their caregiver “im scared” the caregiver then says to them “oh don't be silly/ dont cry” the child then has to make a choice who to trust, the caregiver or the body and the intuition…. The child will always choose the caregiver over the body because attachment to a caregiver is life or death for a child. Over time if the child's feelings are continually invalidated by the caregiver they learn to distrust their body and intuition.

Even if you have tried to validate feelings, other factors in the child’s life may have lead them to distrust their body and gut feelings such as a negative school environment. In order to regain this intuition and gut feeling the parent can help the child to tune into their body and when they have an emotion you can ask “I wonder how that felt in your body?”.