The following post is a draft for the WSJ mom blog... I was asked to write an entry and I decided to work on the intro of my seven steps article. I changed things up a bit! I will let you know if it is posted.
I love working with teens. I started volunteering with middle school aged kids right out of high school. By the time I got my fantasy job of teaching art to sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, I had three young daughters at home. I remember thinking how I could not wait until they were teens. After all, what is more difficult than living with two toddlers? The answer is living with three teen daughters aged thirteen, fourteen and eighteen. Healthy relationships are hard work. Keeping up healthy relationships with my daughters is so much more difficult than I had expected. There are many ways to hurt a parent-teen relationship, especially a mother-daughter one.
Having a daughter graduate from the high school where I currently teach has changed the way I think about teens. I realize that the kids who talk to me about their interests, offer me respect in my classroom, and act like wonderful people may not so behave at home with their parents. While parents see their teen children at their worst, I see them in the classroom at their best. Talking to my students is easy, sometimes easier than talking to my teen daughters (and I am not sure why). Today I asked my students the one thing they would like their mother to stop doing. The number one answer is nagging, with yelling at a close second. Teens dislike their mothers asking too many questions, looking through their things, comparing them to siblings, or over-managing their lives. I also asked what they wish their moms would do for them. The most popular answer surprised me: “I wish my mom would make me a lunch.” Teens want their mothers to let them use the car filled with gas, to listen to them, and to take them out for coffee and shopping. Teens need a healthy relationship with their mothers. Unfortunately, as a mother, my attempts at connecting with my first daughter did not work out so well.
I have come up with my own personal list of things to do and don’ts. I realize now that my experience as a teacher of teens did not help me as a parent because I did not follow my own advice.
1. Touch your teen. Hug and kiss them just like you did when they were young. Hold on to them as much as they will let you. If nothing else, reach out a hand and just touch them.
2. Do not react; especially do not react in anger. Do not escalate a conversation into an argument. Listen and wait. Ask questions, but not too many. The most successful way to converse with a teen is calmly and with interest.
3. Keep communication open. It sounds a lot like number two but is more about just talking to your teen. Do not leave notes in order to avoid an argument. Do not leave lists of things to do. Do not reschedule their lives without having the conversation. Always be honest in your communication, but open.
4. Ask for help if you feel overwhelmed. If you think your child needs therapy, then you should go first. Ask school councilors for assistance with making decisions. At the very least talk to your parents, your spouse, your best friend or your teen’s best friend’s parents about how overwhelming it is to be the parent of a teen.
5. Do not try to control your teen. That time in your life is over. They are now in control and the more you try to hang on to being in charge the more trouble you are in. This does not mean you cannot have rules, but expect them to broken.
6. Trust your teen to make good decisions even though they may not. Hopefully the past fourteen or fifteen years had some kind of impact on the moral decisions they make with all the peer pressure they face. Instill confidence in them that that are well behaved and then cross your fingers and pray they are.
7. Challenge them to be a better person but never give them an ultimatum that you think that they cannot possibly refuse because they may surprise you. If you throw out a final warning like, “if you leave, then do not come back!” then you may have just kissed your teen good-bye.