Parents such a proud occupation. I mean, who really knows how to do this? Trust self-appointed “experts”? I don’t think so. The most they can do is think. Ultimately, each parent should create their own best experience with each child.
Personally, I believe in parents with humility – without arrogance (appreciating the truth and wisdom excessive: “I know all the answers!”) and ambition (depending on self-esteem about the child’s overachievement: “I expect my child to make me proud!”)
Humility recognizes three hard facts of parenting life:
- Parents “know” as much as they want.
- Parents do not “control” as much as they would like.
- Parents don’t get it as “correct” as they would like.
And these practical realities become more apparent after the child enters a more complex transition adolescence. Now, the push for more independence and freedom of action and the demand for greater differentiation of individuality and freedom of speech will also give strength to the growth process. It was easier to raise a close and similar child.
How much do parents really know?
Start from the beginning. By birth or adoptiona stranger is given their primary care. Now they must understand the individual “hand” of innate human traits they have been dealt, and then learn how to play that hand for healthy development. Starting from ignorance, many things need to be discovered and then they need to be present with the developmental changes that occur.
Every parent is behind this growth curve and therefore constantly trying to follow them. They understand a girl or a boy at one age to be surprised and challenged by the other. Parenting is a continuous learning process to create relevant knowledge.
If your teenager complains, “You don’t understand me!” or “You have no idea what my life is like!” instead of defending yourself, listen. This can be a good time to study. Always remember that when it comes to understanding your teen, your best teacher is the teen himself.
In fact, the process of raising a teenage child is like the short-sightedness of the blind. Most of what parents know about parenting is from what they grew up with, while their teen never grew up that way. The parenting process is more experiential than deliberately planned, with lots of trial, error, and recovery on both sides of the relationship, and that’s okay.
How much control can parents really have?
With the child, the parents acted in the time of Command, when the little girl or boy, who were mainly located in the family circle, believed that the parents had enough power to “make them” or “stop them”. When a child becomes a teenager, parents soon realize that they have entered the Age of Consent, where the teenager knows that the parents cannot make or stop them without the teenager. cooperation: “My choice of what to do or not to do is up to me, not you!”
So, parents and teens now understand that parental consent depends on the teen’s consent to get what they want. Parents do this by expressing care and communication to provide a convincing argument, and sometimes provide or maintain the conditions and resources that the adolescent depends on to encourage compliance. A parent’s job is to establish and enforce a family structure of rules and expectations in which a teenager can grow up safely and responsibly if the young person chooses, which most teenagers choose to do.
Parents also realize that with their worldly and socially active teen, even in the best of circumstances, they have less influence on their teen than other powerful forces beyond their control. Consider, for example, the dictates of an adolescent’s innate nature, social changes, cultural forces, random influences, peers. to convinceand personal choice. Parents have no control over these.
The older the teenager gets, the less power the parents have because independence is a process of liberation. All this being said, parents are usually the most powerful people in a teenager’s world, and it is out of respect for that power and a desire to validate that power that a lot of teen cooperation is given.
Essential teenage reading
How right can parents really be?
Raising a teenager is more difficult than parenting a child, because the young person in a family of peers is active in the expansion of the offline and online world of activity outside the sheltered family and fights with honor to grow up more freely and away from parental authority.
Now “should I or shouldn’t I?” The question of parents becomes more difficult for them. Out of love for their teen, they want to make the “right” decisions, but sticking to that standard isn’t easy. Consider just a few of the common questions they face.
“Should I:
- give or keep?
- Doubt or believe?
- Be fixed or flexible?
- Sustainable consumption or surrender?
- Pursue or surrender?
- Keep or let go?
- Speak up or shut up?
- True or false?
- Wait or not?
- Insist or retreat?
- Agree or disagree?
- Question or omission?
- Meeting or avoiding?
- Allow or forbid?”
All of these recurring questions and many more are judgment calls that parents must make on a regular basis, which is often difficult because of the risks involved in whatever decision they make. The invisible work of a parent, especially with a teenager, is all the counseling hours it takes. The consequences of their decisions are known only after the fact, sometimes in their favor and sometimes not.
At the same time, the impatient teenager is more sure of what he wants to do than the parents are concerned about what is reasonable. What is the teenage rush? “If I’m going on this big spring trip with my friends, I have to book right away!” To this extreme demand, parents may say, “If you must know right now, the answer is no.” However, if we have time to think and talk with you about the risks and trade-offs, it can create an opportunity.” When making decisions, parents should not allow themselves to be caught up in the extreme oppression of today’s teenagers.
When it comes to judgment, most parents have a mixed experience because they lack perfect judgment, albeit deliberately. However, this uneven course is par for the course on parenting, because how a young person grows up depends partly on, and partly in spite of, what parents decide.
Blending is the best most parents can do from their difficult task—the human combination of strength and weakness, wisdom and folly, sensitivity and selfishness, good and bad decisions. And for the most part, the young man turns out mostly well, always finishing his care with some unfinished business to complete the task of growing up. Now the young man has to do his own parenting: what habits need to be corrected and what skills still need to be developed.
At a time when they feel like they know less, are less in control, and are often less sure of what the right decision is, maintaining humility helps parents not feel overwhelmed as their child navigates their teenage years. In most cases, just a full faith effort will be enough.
