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Parenting our Teenaged ChildrenDr. Karen Davies

Our children enter adolescence, and a new adventure of parenting begins! During thesenext few years, our children are making their passage from the world of childhood intothat of adulthood. It’s a time that can be full of energy, optimism, and the belief inlimitless possibilities. It can also be a time of struggle, uncertainty, and considerableconflict. This can be conflict between parents and their adolescent children, or conflictwithin the adolescent themselves, as they begin to grapple with some of the largerissues in the world.

Over the course of their adolescence, the child’s world expands enormously, and inthese days of massive access to information, and the amazing speed of transfer ofinformation, adolescents are becoming greatly aware of the world around them,including much that is fascinating and beautiful, and much that is quite terrible.

These are the years for young people to strive for increasingly greater amounts ofindependence and responsibility, and individual decision-making. Many adolescentslook more to their peer group than their parents for some of their discussions anddecision making, as they understandably experience their peers to be more similar tothem. These are also important years for adolescents to begin to explore the possibilityof more intimate relationships. The emergence of strong sexual feelings presents awhole new world to discover and explore and make some important decisions about,and for parents to lose sleep over!

For parents, one of the toughest parts of adolescence is to watch our children make‘mistakes’, particularly when we are certain that we could protect them fromexperiencing the unpleasant consequences of such mistakes. Yet, even as youngerchildren learn from trying, sometimes failing, and trying again, so too do adolescents.The parent who can resist the temptation to say “I told you so” conveys to their teenagedchild a basic trust that he or she is quite capable of learning well from their mistakes.One of the biggest challenges of parenting adolescents is to find that ever-moving bestbalance between ‘letting go’ and ‘holding on’. Rules and consequences are in a semipermanent state of change, but it is important that parents continue to providereasonable and fair guidelines that allow all members of a family to live within anatmosphere of trust and respect.

Adolescents continue to need the presence and security that their parents can bestprovide, but they also need many opportunities to try new things on their own, and thendraw their own conclusions about their experiences. Certainly, it can be enormouslyhelpful to begin to learn and interact with the larger world out there with the security ofhome and caring parents safely in the background.

If children have come to adolescence with a pretty solid foundation of belief in theirown capabilities, belief in their fundamental value and importance in the world, anda reasonable ability to identify and trust their own thoughts and feelings, the passagethrough adolescence is going to be dramatically easier. Not that it will occur withoutincident, but it is far less likely that these adolescents will find themselves dramaticallyoff the general course in life that they have chosen.

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Keep talking with your adolescent children – not at them, but with them. Try to listen towhat they have to tell you, and remember that they too are still trying to work out theirway in a much more adult world.