A Mom And Dad Have Weekly Meetings To Strategize How To Parent Their Teen

Navigating the wild world of raising a teenager is no joke. Parents are met with young adults who have opinions, voices, and a lot more power than they once had when they were toddlers and elementary age.

On top of that, teens are under a huge amount of stress on top of their ever-changing bodies, the pressures of social media, and just a general weight of trying to figure out exactly who they are. (I’m 33 and still am working on this, so...) This can add a lot of stress onto a household.

So, how do you deal with the messy journey of parenting a teen? One mom and dad shared to TikTok that they think they might have the perfect parenting hack for teenagers.

TikTok user @anoldman1970 aka Greg Reed made a hilarious TikTok in which he clues other parents in on how he and his wife navigate parenting their teenage daughter. The couple have weekly “strategy meetings” to see how to proceed with dealing with the 13-year-old.

“You know you have a 13-year-old daughter when her mom and I have to sit down and do a strategy meeting once a week to figure out how to deal with her,” Reed explains with humor.

His wife can be heard cackling in the background as Reed continues. He goes on to explain that they believe, after strategizing of course, that she is in her “opposite mode” so if they desire her to do something, they need to ask her to do the opposite to see it get done.

“We figured out that, right now, she’s in her opposite mode. So, anything we tell her — she wants to do the opposite. So, we just had a strategy meeting on what to tell her to get her to do the things we want her to do,” he explains as his wife continues to chuckle.

“The other day we told her, ‘Hey, you can sleep in today because, y’know, we gotta do some stuff. We’ll take you to school later in the morning.’ ... We left her that text message,” he said.

He then reveals that their reverse psychology worked like a charm, and the teen actually got herself up early and went to school on time. “I got up,” he says. “And she had already got up and gotten herself to school by herself. I didn’t have to wake her up or nothing.”

“Opposite,” his wife says through laughs.

Recognizing the unpredictable nature and ever-changing moods of teenagers, he notes that he and his wife don’t know how long this strategy will last, but that is the current strategy.

The video, which now has 1.4 million views alongside 310k likes, was met with tons of comments from other parents who empathize with these parents. One user commented, “my teen literally admitted to me that she has this overwhelming urge to do the opposite of what I ask. Fun!!”

In a funny turn of events, turns out that their “opposite mode” strategy might have been too good to be true. “Found out it was field trip day,” Reed commented on the original video.

In a video update, Reed explained that he had originally taken a video of his daughter’s messy room saying he wished she would clean it but deleted it after she got so embarrassed that she cried. He then explains that he and his wife were getting ready to go to bed when they realized they hadn’t seen their teen in awhile. They walked upstairs, and what did they see?

“She was cleaning her room,” he said as his wife (once again) cracked up in the background. “She felt so bad about having her room look messy to a bunch of strangers on the internet that she started cleaning her room.”

He then goes around the rest of the house, showing messes all over noting with sarcasm that he hopes she doesn’t clean up anything else in the house. Hope there’s another update soon of a spic and span household for Reed and his wife.