When your kids are hitting the mid to late teens, the art of knowing when to let them spread their wings, plays a major role in what makes a good parent. With each year from 15 years on, your teens will want more and more independence. This can be a miserable time or a great time depending on how you handle it.

I would like to talk about a few points that will help bring it to an empowering time rather than a miserable one. Before we make these points, we need some ground rules. First you must accept  independence as a natural occurrence. The second thing is the parent needs to evaluate, within themselves, why they would or wouldn’t allow a teen to have more privileges. The third part is that for a parent to allow more independence, the teen needs to exhibit a few important characteristics.

Let’s first talk about independence as a natural occurrence.

What makes a good parent is to recognize that raising children, as all encompassing as it is, is an ever changing dynamic. When they are babies, raising children is about being responsible for another being. While that part never goes away, as they get older it is about teaching them valuable lessons about how good people behave and responsibility and ethics, while, at the same time, being loving.

Sometimes, we as parents don’t want to let them out because after all our hard work we want them around just so we can watch our accomplishments. We can get frustrated that they want to “leave us” all the time and hang out with their friends rather than us.

What makes a good parent is fighting this frustration and turning the emotion into a positive one. We can do this by acknowledging that it isn’t about them leaving us. It is about us having done a great job that they feel strong enough to go out and explore the world. So first, congratulate yourself that you accomplished that, then, make sure that when they go out that these young entities aren’t going to get themselves into trouble.

In part 2 of “What makes a good parent and knowing when to let go” we are going to discuss the points in how to successfully deal with letting go.

Sincerely,

Dr. Bocknek

The Problem Solving Expert for Parents and Families

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Dr. Robert Bocknek is the problem solving expert for marriage, parents and families at www.takebackthehome.com and www.keyboard-culture-parenting.com.  He can be reached at bocknek@takebackthehome.com. He is author of the “Take Back the Home course” and the “Learning how to Learn course” which can be seen at www.takebackthehome.com.

     

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 2:55 pm and is filed under the category Dr. Robert Bocknek, Family, Parenting, Parenting Tips, Teen 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.