Parenting Adolescents

Parenting adolescents - a parent's adventure

While it is true that the adolescent years is a journey from childhood to adulthood, parenting adolescents can also be seen as the same journey. Hormonal changes, struggling to be independent, discovering their own identity, and peer pressure all make teenage life difficult for the concerned individuals, but it is equally daunting on parents who often hear such phrases as "you don't understand" or "leave me alone" blurted out from the mouth of an otherwise contented adolescent.

Parenting adolescents is also a struggle on how to enforce limits without restricting an adolescent's sense of freedom. Many parents are sometimes caught off-guard with these changes which leave them in a battle of their once cuddly little baby turned alien. Parenting adolescents needs creativity, patience, and courage in order to effectively guide a child into adulthood, taking into account instilling values, helping in social relationships, and seeing new ideals, goals, and an emerging independence are better off seen as an adventure rather than a cumbersome task.

Fostering a good parent-adolescent relationship is very important, and parents need to establish a friendly, kind, warm, and loving approach to a teenager. Experts agreed that parenting adolescents involve three major areas, which are vital to a good parent-adolescent relationship - monitoring, connection, and psychological autonomy.

The practice of monitoring has a role to play for successful parenting. Studies show that teenagers, whose parents took genuine interests in their daily activities (but not to the point of prying on their private lives), are more likely to stay out of trouble. This is also true for parents who know most of their friends, as well as their activities outside school. To be effective in this area, parenting adolescents needs to come out as caring instead of intrusive.

Parenting adolescents requires a sense of connection to which the teenager sees as positive and consistent, and illustrates the mentioned approaches. Teenagers with healthy relationships between their parents are more likely to be successful at social interactions, possess a higher level of self-esteem, are more cooperative with other teens and adults, and struggle less with depression.

When parents encourage psychological autonomy in their teenagers, they learn to genuinely respect the emerging independence that accompanies different ideas and beliefs completely different from their own - and to express unconditional love are among the ways to help teenagers cope and solve problems with minimal guidance.

Parent-teenager relationship is crucial especially in the adolescent years when a child begins to find his niche in the society and learning to cooperate with a diverse community.