Dad reveals he and his wife hold weekly strategy meetings to figure out how to parent their teen

Raising a teenager isn't an easy task. They are mostly rebellious about everything and prefer to do their own thing. Parents generally have to handle such situations carefully so that things don't get out of hand. One such parent is Greg Reed, who goes by @anoldman1970 on TikTok. In a video that has struck a chord with fellow parents of teens, Reed says: "You know you have a 13-year-old daughter when her mom and I have to sit down and have a strategy meeting once a week to figure out how to deal with her."

After strategizing, he revealed, they realized that their daughter is in the "opposite mode" these days. "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 says in the viral video.

So, reverse psychology is the strategy Reed and his wife are currently using with their teenage daughter. "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,'" he shares in the clip. "We left her that text message."

Their plan worked perfectly. "I got up. And she had already got up and gotten herself to school by herself. I didn't have to wake her up or nothing," he reveals. "Opposite," his wife chimes in with a laugh in the background. The video quickly went viral with 1.4 million views and 310,000 likes. Reed concludes the video by saying: "We don't know how long this will last. We are waiting for next week to see if anything has changed."

People on the internet loved the video and were happy that Reed and his wife are at least trying to make sense of their teenager's behavior. A TikTok user wrote: "My mom always said that raising teenagers is like trying to nail jello to a tree." Another commented: "The fact that you're trying to understand them is EVERYTHING. Don't give up on them." A third wrote, "*Narrator*... but the teen had already changed strategies by the close of their meeting..."

Many parents could resonate with them. One shared: "My daughter is 19 and this still works!! Try 'your OOTD is SO CUTE!! Love it!!' She instantly changes into something more appropriate, all on her own!" Another TikTok user said, "When my daughter was being a fussy eater, I told her, 'Oh no, that's not your dinner! Don't eat it. I’ll get you your food in a minute.' All gone!"

In a video update, Reed shared that when he took a video of his daughter's room to highlight the state of mess it was in, she got very upset about it and he had to delete the clip. However, some time later, when he and his wife were going to bed, they realized that they hadn't seen their daughter in a while. When they went to her room, "she was cleaning her room," Reed shared, as his wife laughed 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 on to show the rest of the house where there were messes and sarcastically says that he hopes she doesn't clean up anything else.