If you’re the kind of person who thrives on challenge and change, you’re in the right city. But if you like structure and routine, you may feel like you’re on a roller coaster that works faster (and lasts longer) than your Benadryl bottle. That’s because today’s teenagers are growing up fast, and sometimes the adults around them have lost their running shoes under the growing pile of Crocs and Uggs. So what can parents do to effectively help their children?
Becoming familiar with the stages of child development helps parents realize when to modify their parenting style. Waking kids up and helping them get dressed is great when our children are in the single-digit range, but if you’re still waking your adolescent and introducing him to his wardrobe every day, you may not be helping him grow. True, it’s easier to make our kids’ beds than to coax them into doing it. It’s also easier to finish our child’s term paper for them than to deal with a frustrated, demanding teenager. But the short-term benefits may not yield the long-term results we’re hoping for.
Our teenagers want to feel trusted. If we have confidence in them, they will have confidence in themselves. Sometimes they need to experience the consequences of independence first. If no one wakes them up for school, they’ll miss the car pool and end up stuck at home. That may sound like fun, but after three days, they’ll be climbing the walls and combing the house for an alarm clock (which you happen to have handy right then). At this point, you have created a powerful and positive change, and your adolescent feels empowered.
An adolescent student of mine wrote a letter to her parents in a creative writing class: “Telling your kids what to do . . . just makes us want to do the opposite. When we don’t really want to do our homework right away, don’t come over and say, ‘Do your homework.’ We know we’re going to do it, but if you say we have to, it makes us frustrated. Then we don’t want to do it. Just trust us; we will do what we need to do.”
Another telltale sign of emerging adolescence is the back talk of the child who knows better than his “ancient” parents—and we take it personally. Reading up on adolescence will help us depersonalize. We needn’t (and shouldn’t) accept inappropriate behavior, but it’s good to remember that our kids are emerging into independent people, and they’re merely testing their limits. Often they contradict adults just to be able to assert their ability to think independently. They also prefer peers over their parents, and it’s nothing personal. If you can be there for them when they need you and then watch them go off with an encouraging smile, they’ll be grateful for your understanding (even if they don’t show it). So hang in there. They’ll be back before you know it.