We don’t let our six-year-olds cross the street by themselves. We obsess about when they’re old enough to walk to school or to stay alone in the house. When kids are little, parents tend to feel their parenting responsibilities quite heavily.
Unfortunately, many of us have thrown up our hands when it comes to teenagers. And I don’t think that this is because we’re ineffective parents. I think it’s because we honestly believe that nothing will work. By the time they’re 14 or 15 they’re bigger than we are, they’re hardly home, and what influence can we have anyway?
With schools providing sex education, career counselling and peer group counselling, it’s easy to feel that we have little to offer. What can we do that the experts can’t? But that’s a cop-out, and we parents need to grow a backbone. Besides, who has more of a stake in how your kids turn out? The experts, who may never see your kid after this school year, or you, who has to deal with unplanned grandchildren, credit card debts from 1-900 numbers, or kids who want to live with you when they’re 42? You do! So don’t leave it to the experts, as well-meaning and well-researched as they may be.
I once heard a story of a desperate 14-year-old girl who came to a beloved teacher for advice. She had been dating a much older boy who now wanted to have sex. She went to her parents to ask their opinion. (Hint: when a teenager asks you whether or not she should have sex, she’s looking for you to give her an excuse to say no. If she wanted to do it, she wouldn’t ask you! She’d wait until you were gone and use your bed.) These parents, having been told by the sex education counselors that a child’s sexuality should never be interfered with, asked her if she loved the boy. That’s when she went to her teacher. She was trying to find a responsible adult to give her a reason to refuse.
Another teen I know came from a home where she was allowed to do whatever she wanted. Dinner was prepared, but she could heat it up and eat wherever she wanted. She had a TV and a computer in her room. She had her own telephone line.
This girl, though, spent most of her days at a neighbour’s house where the kids weren’t allowed to watch TV and had dinner together as a family every night. She even helped with the dishes! It seems that what she craved was not more freedom and more gadgets, but simply family time.
We’re throwing in the towel too early. In one of the largest scale surveys ever done of teenage attitudes, researchers in 2005 asked 600,000 teenage girls and their mothers about everything under the sun. They found that girls who were close to their mothers, and who knew their mothers disapproved of them having sex, were far less likely to be sexually active.
But 35% of girls whose mothers disapproved of them having sex didn’t know their mothers felt that way! These mothers had never communicated such an important fact to their daughters.
Several other recent studies have shown that what teens really want is that communication, something which can only come with spending time with our kids. The Institute for Youth Development in Washington studied high risk teenagers in the States, performing comprehensive interviews to figure out what motivated either bad or good decisions. Parental involvement turned out to be the key variable in making sure kids stayed on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, most of these kids believed their parents didn’t care very much. One teenage boy complained, “I almost never eat with my parents. My dad is always working. Always. My dad is either at work or on the Internet.” The boy got the message loud and clear. He was on his own.
We’re not finished parenting when our kids hit 14. Kids still need us to be parents when they’re 16, and 17, and increasingly even into the very confusing college and university years. We need to pick our battles, but let’s at least stay on the battlefield. Kids may not admit it, but they want us there.
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