Why Is My Teenage Daughter So Rude to Me?

Asked in a Q&A how to raise adolescent girls who have become rude to their parents, Sheikh Assim doesn’t reach for a technique first — he reaches for honesty about his own younger self. “I was so full of energy and no wisdom,” he says. “All what I was good in is discipline. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Why didn’t you pray?” He describes himself as a magnifying glass in those years, catching every mistake and registering almost nothing good. It took getting older, he says, to introduce love, compassion, quality time, and the willingness to let some things slide.

His core diagnosis is simple: “every action has a reaction.” A parent who mostly criticizes, corrects, and vents frustration will tend to get rudeness, impoliteness, and distance back — not because the child is simply difficult, but because that is what negative vibes tend to produce. He’s notably compassionate about where that harshness often comes from, especially for mothers carrying a heavy load: a demanding household, little time for their own rest or prayer, frustration with nowhere to go except onto the children in front of them. Naming that pressure isn’t an excuse, in his framing — it’s the starting point for actually changing the pattern.

His reframe is to treat children as an investment rather than something to monitor or control. That means giving the relationship real time, especially through the teenage years, and consistently choosing encouragement over correction: noticing out loud when a room is tidy, a meal is good, or an outfit looks nice, rather than only speaking up when something is wrong. It also means deliberately looking past some small mistakes instead of catching every one. A child who senses they were let off the hook this time, he says, is often more motivated not to repeat it than one who is caught and criticized every time.

The most concrete part of his advice is about how parents spend time with teenagers at all. He tells on himself here too: he used to sit his daughters down and lecture them, only to notice them checking the clock and stifling yawns. The shift was to stop lecturing and start listening — sitting together at meals, asking about their day, their feelings, their aspirations, and contributing wisdom only after genuinely hearing them out, rather than leading with it. He closes with humor, saying that when parents listen and contribute their experience with love rather than lecturing, their children may come to see them very differently.