Teenage Parenting: Part 1
Effective teenage parenting is based on four very important points.
- Expressed love in the family
- Understanding the roles each person plays in the family
- Understanding how fulfilling roles is essential to harmony in the family
- Following through on roles, via the parents being leaders
In teenage parenting it is not enough to love the teenager. To have the best chance of family success parents need to move beyond their own fears and express their love. Although they are bigger, teens are just big kids trying to figure life out. They need to have that safe place they can always run to. They may not show it but they definitely appreciate knowing the parent or parents are there for them. Expressing love does not mean you can’t be angry with your teenager. You may even hate them sometimes and can tell them such, but expressions of anger should never be expressed without the clear message you love your teenager.
The understanding of roles is only second to love in importance with teenage parenting. If you notice, however, three of the top four points of effective teenage parenting revolve around roles and the following through on roles.
Why are roles so important in teenage parenting? It is because families are not things. Families are an accumulation of roles acted on by parents and their children. In other words, lets say dad’s roles are to go to work, be a great husband, be a leader in the family, and make house payments then one day dad decides to stop working and start drinking instead. He is not fulfilling his role in the family and it’s not hard to see where the family is headed if he doesn’t quickly turn around and get back into his role.
In teenage parenting, not only the dad and mom need to have roles. The teenager needs structure to guide them. Going over what their roles are with them helps clarify for them and the parents when the child really is doing well or not.
Important roles for the teenager:
- The teenager has specific chores
- The teenager does well in school
- The teenager is respectful in and out of the home
Obviously, we can add other roles as are necessary in a particular family. You may or may not have noticed under “Important roles” we didn’t say “should” do chores or should do well in school. This was on purpose. The problem with should is there is no follow through. Think of all the things you should do. You should clean out your closet, should wash the car, should dust the house. Should is the ticket to doing nothing. It may seem like we are quibbling but trust the Doc here leave should out of your conversation and out of role making and your results will be a thousand fold better. Good luck with your family.
In the next addition to teenage parenting we’ll get more in depth about how to pull together what we talked about today.
Dr. Robert Bocknek
The Problem Solving Expert for Parents and Families
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Dr. Robert Bocknek is “the Problem Solving Expert for Parents and Families”.
See more from Dr. Robert at Takebackthehome.com and now at Keyboard-Culture-Parenting.com.
You can contact him at bocknek(at)takebackthehome.com
More on Topics: Family, Roles, Teenage Parenting
Tags: Family, Roles, Teenage Parenting
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under the category Dr. Robert Bocknek, Family, Parenting, Teenage Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
