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Physical changes, hormonal changes and constantly changing moods and thought
processes of a teenaged child can be quite scary. The way teens seem to rebel
and try to find faults with everything their parents do such as their values,
political thoughts, lifestyle and attitudes may repel parents and parents may
want to just let them go their own ways and not bother about them. While parents
need to learn that they cannot control their teenage child’s lives, they also
need to strike a balance by deciding where they will draw the boundaries.
Parents may leave some choices to the adolescents, discuss some decisions with
the adolescents while they stand firm and use their parental authority that
certain decisions can only be made by them.
You may need to ease the transition of your teenage children from the protected
home life to the rough world but you do not have be there forever. There is a
time when children don’t need much direct intervention from parents but they may
have to follow certain rules of the house until they are adults. Most children
learn some of the skills they need to live life, by the time, they are a
teenager. You need to find the fine line between responsibilities and freedom
you can give to your growing adolescent, according to his or her age and set the
‘no negotiation’ areas in cases of hazardous habits such as smoking, drugs and
violence.
You may have a long dinner table talk with your teens to decide when he or she
can drive and how far he or she can go while driving, chores that will be the
duty of their teenager, foreign language your child want to learn or career
choice of the child. Clothing and makeup can be topics where there can be lot of
tussles between you and your child but you can have long talks with your child
to see where you both can compromise. You need to let the teenagers some of
their own decisions, so that they can develop decision-making skills but
independence of the child should only be proportional to their responsible
attitudes. Poor judgments or dangerous behaviors may be excused or put curtails
on adolescent’s freedom using your parental authority depending on the intensity
of the aberration and what they did to correct the situation.
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