You hit it right on the nail, so to speak. When my oldest daughter was around fifteen we argued incessantly. She didn’t want to hear no she couldn’t do whatever she wanted, she didn’t want to hear anything I had to say related to make up, clothes, friends, being late home or not being ready for school on time or anything. Melinda had a response for every remark and every reasoning to keep the disagreement going. One day I asked a psychologist I knew what to do and his response was that “you can’t win an argument with a teenager that they could even turn punishment into a disagreement.

So I took his advice. I started just saying what I had to say simply, succinctly, and abruptly. Then I told my daughter I wasn’t going to argue with her, turned around and walked away and went into another room before she could come up with a response. If she followed me I said, “I told you discussion over and ignored her if she tried to argue with me”. And I told her stepfather to start asking her if she had talked to me first about whatever the issue was about, and to say no or that he would ask me what I thought we should do. So there went the parental manipulation out the window, too. Did it always work? Of course not. But within a few months the arguments had decrease by around 95%, and peace returned to our household for the most part.

Her two siblings were thirteen and fourteen years younger than Melinda and having grown up seeing our interactions with their half sister, they didn’t try the same tactics. With my youngest daughter it became. . . .”but so and so’s parents”. . .but that is another story and another type of responses. I always wondered if fairies had crept into my son’s bedroom window as an infant and replaced him with a changeling, because overall he was pretty easy going and laid back and didn’t give us near the level of grief as my two daughters.