YES. NO. AND MAYBE

Learn to win a debate with your kids, and you’ll be ready to take on just about anybody.

 

Have you ever tried to argue with a teenager? It ain’t easy. Teenagers are probably harder to persuade than any other species of mammal. That Dog Whisperer guy? He would probably end up whimpering and submissive after one week of teaching at a high school.

Even if you don’t have teens in your family, you probably should check out these pointers anyway. Why? Because if they work on a teenager, they’ll work on everybody else — spouses and lovers, problem employees, problem bosses, problem sales clerks…anyone.

Don’t Try to Win on Points

When you attempt to overwhelm an opponent — whether it’s with logic or a club — you’re fighting, not arguing. In a fight, you try to win; in an argument, you try to win over someone. Essentially, persuasion entails making another person change his mood, come around to your way of thinking, or do something — which in the case of a teenager might involve things like cleaning her room or turning down the stereo.

The key is to focus on which of these you want from your opponent. Don’t worry about winning the battle. You’ll find that sometimes conceding an argument is the best way to win one. If you make the other person think he won, you’ll have a more willing victim to accomplish what you, in fact, want done.

In my recently published book, Thank You for Arguing, I talk about a dispute I had with my 17-year-old son George. He had used up all the toothpaste in the bathroom and didn’t replace it. When I called him on it, he said, “Whoever used the last bit isn’t the point, is it, Dad? The point is how we’re going to keep this from happening again.” He was being sarcastic, but he was right. And I told him he was right. “You win,” I said — and then I asked him to get some toothpaste from the basement. He was so happy with my concession that he trotted right off for the toothpaste. So, he won the argument. But I won the war.

Triumphs of Logic Are Meaningless

Anyone who has tried to argue with a teenager can tell you that the logical approach rarely gets you very far. Even the philosopher Aristotle, the guy who invented logic, admitted that logic isn’t the best weapon in an argument — and he didn’t mean just with teenagers, either.

So besides using logic to convince someone intellectually, you need to be willing to appeal to someone’s emotions. Humor, for instance, can be a great tool for persuading someone. The big problem is getting another person, particularly a teenager, to think you’re funny (intentionally, that is).

Anger is another useful emotion to tap into for rhetorical purposes. An angry person is more likely to take action than someone who isn’t emotionally involved (although there’s the chance that action might involve breaking things you’d rather see in one piece).

To keep an argument from turning into a fight, it’s usually better to lower the emotional heat than to raise it. Avoid making light of a teenager’s problems. Aristotle said that the chief cause of anger is “belittlement.” Sure, a 16-year-old girl’s passionate desire to travel alone to Fort Lauderdale may seem perfectly ridiculous to you, but saying so won’t calm her down. Instead, sympathize with her motive: “I can see why you want to get out of the house and have fun without us.” (This was easy for me to say. Getting her out of the house sometimes sounds like a pretty good idea to me, too.)

Character Counts — Even With a Teenager

Aristotle described a rhetorical weapon even more powerful than logic and emotion. It’s your character — or, to be more specific, your audience’s perception of your character. If your kids are willing to listen to you because they find you trustworthy and likable, they’re much more likely to do what you want. Of course, getting a teenager to find you remotely interesting, let alone to trust you, can be a major challenge. Teenagers are hardwired to mistrust their parents. So try the following:

Demonstrate Your Virtue

I’m not talking about the behave-yourself kind of virtue, but the rhetorical kind. That means showing belief in your teenager’s values. What might these values be? Anything a teen values: personal freedom, coolness, the environment.

Suppose you want your 16-year-old to turn down the stereo in her room. Teenagers value their independence more than anything; if you simply issued an order, you’d come off as the authoritative parental figure who never lets her make her own choices. To dodge that rap, you give her an option:

Parent: Would you mind turning that music down? Or if you want it loud, could you switch to your headphones?

Or you could appeal directly to the value of fairness, a passion that most kids have in quantity.

Parent: How about giving me a chance to play my own music? I wouldn’t mind cranking up some Lynyrd Skynyrd.

To most teenagers, that choice would make turning down the volume seem like a pretty attractive alternative.

Practice Disinterest

Most people use “disinterest” and “uninterest” interchangeably today. But “disinterested” used to mean “free of any special interest,” not “lack of interest.” People are much more likely to like and trust a person who’s selfless, someone who holds another’s interests above his own, or at the very least seems to be reasonably objective.

One way to make an audience believe in your objectivity is to seem reluctant to deal with something you’re really eager to prove. Make it sound as if you reached your opinion only after confronting overwhelming evidence. It also works for a teenager who wants to borrow his father’s car.

Son: You know, I’d just as soon walk my date to the movie. The theater is only three miles from her house, and there are sidewalks at least a third of the way. But her dad says he doesn’t want us to go by foot. Father: So you want to borrow my car? Son: No, I want you to call her father. Tell him I can protect her against street crime, and I have a cell phone in case a truck hits her.

The son shows excellent disinterest by pretending he’d rather walk than drive. In the process, he makes it in his dad’s interest to lend him the car. If dad isn’t a complete fool, he’ll laugh at this ruse — and hand over the keys.

Use the Eddie Haskell Ploy

This entails switching positions when you know you’re going to lose, so your audience thinks you’re on their side: “Your grandmother offered to pay for dance lessons, but I told her you’d rather learn to play the guitar. Is that okay with you?” It allows you to suck up to your victim, just as Eddie Haskell did to Mrs. Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver.

My daughter used this ploy in high school when her friends invited her to an unsupervised party. Aware that we would try to call the parents and then forbid her from going, Dorothy decided to use the occasion to bolster her standing with us — a sort of rhetorical sacrificial offering.

Dorothy: I’ve been invited to a big party this weekend. Me: Where? Dorothy: Just some kid’s house. But I’ve decided not to go. His parents won’t be there and [looking dramatically serious]...there’ll probably be alcohol.

Of course I saw right through it, having taught her the technique myself. But she gained major points for great rhetoric.

Know Their Language

When George Bernard Shaw described Britain and America as “two nations separated by a common language,” he could just as well have been talking about adults and teenagers. Teens use jargon and slang to distance themselves from the older generation and solidify their group identity. Codes like slang exploit the adolescent instinct for forming tribes and assuage their fear of being an outsider. Their special terms and syntax, ideally incomprehensible to adults, constitute a kind of social grooming, like the nitpicking chimps do to please each other. Call it code grooming. (It will be our own exclusive term.)

Kids use code grooming in their instant messages. Notice how fast they type — faster even than some of them an think. Why is it all in lowercase? Surely they know how to use capital letters and punctuation; they probably could spell out entire words if they wanted to. What are they saying? You have no idea — and that’s partly the point of all those weird abbreviations, acronyms, emoticons, and “wds 2 tuff 2 rede, LOL.”

Not that you should try to write and speak as they do. Heaven forbid. But learn adolescent code words by paying attention to what they say. Or browse MySpace or Facebook to check out the lingo and find out what they’re listening to. That way, when your daughter speaks to you in a language she got straight from a hip-hop CD, you don’t have to say, “Use English!” She is using English, but it’s in a special sociolect that isn’t yours. (In fact, a teenager could argue that the illogical rules and punctilios of correct grammar constitute a code language that’s not any different from her own hip-hop lingo.)

Words can bring us together or tear us apart. Learn the ones that will be uniters.

Irony Is Like Oxygen

One of the most effective code-grooming techniques is to say something that has a different meaning to outsiders than it does to insiders — a figure of speech called irony. Wayne Campbell, Mike Myers’s character in the movie Wayne’s World, uses irony on a clueless inventor who comes on to their public access show with the “Suck Kut,” a hair trimmer that, as he puts it, “sucks as it cuts.” Wayne concedes, “It certainly does suck.”

During times of social tension, teenagers use irony for social grooming. They want to know who’s in and who’s out, and irony lets them strike a double chord that uses two dialects at once. A kind of reverse password, it welcomes every member of the audience that “gets it.”

Irony is best when some people don’t get it. My daughter and I went to see the movie Adaptation, which drips with irony. At the end of the movie, when the screenwriter and his brother reconcile just before the brother dies heroically, one of the characters says something especially sappy that the audience is not supposed to take at face value. It’s meant to be funny. But a middle-aged woman sitting behind us said, “That is so true.” Dorothy and I looked at each other and cracked up. I’m grateful to that woman. She brought father and daughter closer.

You can use irony to sugarcoat the message you’re giving to your teenager. Parent: Wow, what did you do to your room? Daughter: What do you mean? It’s not my fault. Parent: No, I mean it’s fabulous. I love the look. It’s a study in carefree decor. My dirty clothes would look perfect on this floor. Here, let me go get some….

Well, it could work. At any rate, it might get a laugh out of your kid, and it just might break the tension.

All of these tricks and devices serve the purpose of manipulating a vulnerable young person. The thought of such mind control might make you squeamish. I mean, is this the way to demonstrate maturity? What if the kid learns the same tricks and starts emulating you? And should you let that tricky son of a gun out into the world?

Why, yes, you should. In fact, I think the world needs that sort of teenager. In order to persuade people, you have to understand them. Teens themselves tend to be extremely unpersuasive (except perhaps to other teens), precisely because they’re so self-centered. Schools do all they can to foster the creative side of this egocentric child, touting the wonders of “self-expression.” And this is all fine and good, until the child gets a little older and wants to persuade someone else. Teens won’t succeed until they can master an audience’s expressions — they must learn to speak the language of the other person and make them want to follow the lead. In short, every teen should learn how to argue.

And whether you sense it or not, argument surrounds you. It plays with your emotions, changes your attitude, talks you into a decision, and goads you to buy things. Argument and its attendant manipulation are behind political labeling, advertising, jargon, voices, gestures, and guilt trips; it forms a real-life matrix, the supreme software that drives our social lives. You either master the matrix, or live dumb and unaware within it.

Why am I talking about a matrix all of a sudden? Because my kids think The Matrix is a cool movie. Remember, it’s all about code.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Jay Heinrichs is the author of Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion (Three Rivers Press). In addition to arguing with his kids, he readily admits to debating himself at his home in Orange, New Hampshire.