Parenting the Teenager
As your child goes through the stages of adolescence, your job as a parent is to create enough structure, restraint, and responsible demand to help provide a safe and healthy passage through a complicated and risky period of growth. No matter how hard your son's or daughter's childhood may have been for you, the hardest part of growing up — adolescence — comes last.
Although you may spend less time with your teenage son or daughter than you did when he or she was younger, you spend much more time thinking about your child as he or she begins to venture out into the larger, and more dangerous, world outside of family.
FACT
Adolescence wears the magic out of parenting. As a parent you will likely become more and more disenchanted with the abrasive teenager, and your teenager with you. This is how it should be — conflict over freedom wears down the dependence between you until by the end of adolescence you are each willing to let the other go.
Although it can be confusing to both child and parents, adolescence is an orderly process. Certain changes, tensions, conflicts, and problems tend to unfold in a predictable fashion. For example, a more negative attitude and more limit-testing come early in adolescence, followed by intense preoccupation with self and urgency for freedom by mid-adolescence. The desire to act all grown up and the anxiety about true independence is typical of late adolescence. And the last phase of adolescence — trial independence — tends to be plagued by a sense of relative incompetence and a lack of direction.
None of this means that you are destined to experience agony when your child enters adolescence. About one-third of children seem to go through adolescence without a ripple, smoothly navigating the separation from childhood, the experimentation with becoming different, and the departure into independence all within the tolerance limits of their parents. These are the “easy” teenagers.
Another third tests some limits and breaks a few rules, but it's nothing that firm and understanding parents can't correct. These are the “typical” teenagers. Finally, however, there are a final third who push extremely hard against parents, who must take hard stands in response. There can be significant family conflict as a result, and sometimes counseling for the family can be helpful. These are the “challenging” teenagers.
Most families don't get more than one “easy” teenager, so don't expect the same smooth passage for all. If your first child grows slowly through the teenage years, you are likely to have another who is more adventurous and in more of a hurry.
