Parenting Teens

With the exception of a select few, my magazine reading has fallen woefully off lately. Same old, same old. Too much to do. Too little time. However, I was browsing the online site of one of my favorite women’s magazines, Family Circle recently, and came across this letter on teenagers and lying. It has some really good advice on how to handle one particular lie, at least-teens and friends of whom you disapprove.

Q: My teenage son lies to us all the time. The other night he said he was going to one friend’s house, but he actually went to another kid’s house—a bad kid we don’t want him to hang out with. When we asked him where he had been, he lied right to our faces!

A: All teens lie, particularly when their backs are to the wall. If your son thinks he’ll get grounded by telling you the truth, he’s going to stick to his story with punishing intensity. He may even turn the tables and accuse you of never trusting him. Rather than get sucked into a discussion about who can trust whom in your family and who’s lying to whom, stay focused on the behavior behind the lie. Before you even broach the topic of good and bad friends, make it clear that you must know at all times where to find him. Explain with no equivocating that if he lies about his whereabouts again, he’ll pay the consequences. (You and your husband need to figure out what those consequences should be.)

When things have cooled off, try to find out a little more about the kid you think is bad; rather than forbid the friendship, which is guaranteed to backfire, ask your son what he admires in this young man, what they have in common. Suggest he invite him over, and then try to observe what they’re like together. Until you’ve given their relationship the benefit of the doubt, you won’t be able to reach a compromise or to teach your son that friendship is built on respect, shared values and the freedom to be oneself without fear of ridicule or criticism. Your goal is to help your son decide if this relationship fills the bill.

I pretty much agree with this wholeheartedly. Particularly with the advice about inviting the friend over and trying to get a good picture of who he is and what your teen sees in him. Sometimes, we judge our teens friends on what we hear from other teens and even parents, without making an attempt to get to know them for ourselves.

What do you think about this advice? Would you handle this problem a different way? Let me hear from some of you about your experience with your own teenagers.

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Early this morning, I sat down to clean out the Inbox on the email account that I use most often. Like everyone else, I have the best of intentions. I mean to clean out that box every two days, or when I get a certain number of items in it-whatever standard I set. Then, I get sidetracked with something else and the junk emails and the emails I saved because I planned to reread them pile up. Hundreds, sometimes thousands. This morning, when I was cleaning out that Inbox, I reminded myself that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Now, what, you may be asking in complete confusion, does all this have to do with parenting teenagers!? Good question. For some reason, doing this reminded me of all the things (both big and little) that I mean to do with my daughter, or to talk about with my daughter. I started thinking about those things like a gigantic Inbox, with all of them piling up and not being cleaned out. That got me thinking about the fact that my daughter will be going away to college in a couple of years and I’ll have a lot less time with her-a lot less time to tell her things I want her to know, and a lot less time to spend doing things with her.

Have you parents of teens out there thought about this kind of thing? When your child is young, it seems as though you have forever to do things with them, to take them places, to tell them about things. Other things-like jobs, housework, etc.-get in the way and you put off doing these things. What kinds of things, you ask.

Well, in my case, it’s a lot of little things. I’ve been meaning for the two of us to go and have a manicure and pedicure together. Silly, right? But both of us enjoy these things and I’d like, just once, for it to be a shared experience. I’d like to take at least a weekend (preferably a week) trip together. Just drive to a larger city (maybe Atlanta, since we live in Georgia) and just hang out together. Do things like go to museums, go to the zoo, shopping-anything we’d both have a good time doing. Or, conversely, maybe just drive through the countryside looking at old houses and stopping at antique shops, since we both like those. At any rate, just a length of good, quality mother-daughter time without anything else getting in the way.

As far as the talks, there are lots of things I’d like to tell her about her grandparents, great-grandparents and other family members. Family has always been very important to me. My daughter knows this and has, for the most part, inherited that importance of family from me. But I still find myself thinking of things that I mean to tell her about family members and then forgetting. I’d like to have deeper, more meaningful talks with her about what, at this point, she sees her life being like.

I’ve had talks with my older sister where we mentioned questions that we would have liked to ask our mother before she passed away, or things we wish she had told us. I know my mom had the best of intentions for things like this too but, just as it does with us, other things get in the way and time just seems to slip away.

Anyway, I’ve resolved this morning that I’m going to do something about all this. I’m going to make a list of things that I’d like to do with my daughter. When I think of some little thing related to family that I’d like to tell her about, I’m going to write it down, rather than relying on my memory. And I’m going to make time, at least once a week, to either do something extra with her, or to just sit down and talk with her.

In the past, I’ve visited a website called 43 Things. You can create an account there and make a list of things you want to accomplish in your life. It’s a neat little site where they give you tips on getting started making your list (if you’re having trouble coming up with ideas) and where you can compare your lists with those of others. I’ve decided it’s also a good place to make a list of things I’d like to do with my daughter. Check it out and start your own list. Point your teen to it as well and urge them to begin making a list and setting goals for themselves.

If you’d rather not do it online, do it on paper. Think about all those things you’ve wanted to do with your children and make some time to actually do them. They grow up so fast.

teens, teenagers, email, goals, plans, parents, parenting, parenting teenagers

My 16-year-old daughter, S, had a party this past weekend. Normally, when she has people over, it’s only one or two at a time-which is how mom prefers it! However, she has redecorated her room, and she got a Wii for Christmas, and all sorts of things were going on at school. She was feeling the urge to have one of those gatherings where a lot of people come over and hang out. She has these very infrequently mind you, because I usually end up exhausted and with a headache the next morning-sort of like a hangover, but without the benefit of a drink.

Anyway, including S, there were twelve teenagers ranging in age from 15-17 at our house on Saturday night. They took over three rooms-the den (where the gaming was going on), the living room (which served as the movie viewing room), and the dining room (food and music). I’m a veteran of several of these get-togethers by now, and I know what to expect-fairly subdued muttering and comments from the movie room, loud talk and noise from the food and music room, and an absolute din from the den (gaming room), where people are yelling about the cool graphics, “wow, did you see that” or complaining at the top of their lungs that someone else is cheating.

My fiance (R) and I bear up well under all this knowing that, at least, the next day will be fairly quiet all day. We get along with S’s friends pretty well. We even get brownie points as cool parents for our geeky hobbies-R for his Lego collection and his love of video games, me for my Star Trek and Star Wars collection and for listening to groups like The Fray, Nickelback, and Hinder. There are some of her friends, though, that just bug me!

There’s E, who talks endlessly about boys and who she’d like to go out with next and what she’s going to wear. These kinds of girls are common among teens, I suppose, but really-can’t she think about anything else at all?! Or maybe it’s just that I’m getting older and have less tolerance for this kind of thing. Or, maybe, if I want to delve deeply into my psyche, it’s that I’m jealous that I can no longer wear junior size jeans and talk about who I’m going to go out with next?

Then there’s S’s friend, K, who has every video game system ever released, and a seemingly endless collection of games. Everyone in the crowd considers him the authority on all things gaming. But, really, does he have to be so overbearing about it? Interrupting other people’s games to tell them what they’ve just done wrong, telling someone who’s just been killed by a drug overlord how he could have avoided being ambushed, grabbing the phone to call tech support when he wants to prove a point and win an argument.

There’s T, who’s the sports fanatic of the group. He only wants to play sports-related video games and keeps tuning the radio or the TV to ball games over the loud objections of everyone else. By the end of the evening, he’s usually somewhere with headphones on, listening to the latest scores, and eating an entire bag of Tostitos and two jars of salsa.

Then, there’s my own personal favorite, M, who’s the reader of the group. She starts out the evening talking, eating and playing games. Then, before the evening’s half over, she has managed to find some relatively quiet corner and is absorbed in the book that she takes everywhere.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I know my daughter’s friends pretty well. Most of them she’s had since elementary or, at least, middle school. I try to make it a point to get to know them a little. Aside from making these get-togethers go a little more smoothly, it’s comforting to know who she’s spending her time with when she’s away from me.

I won’t have that luxury a lot longer. When she goes away, I won’t always be able to meet her friends. It helps that I at least know the kinds of people that she’s drawn to as friends.

teens, teenagers, parents, parenting, friendships, Wii, The Fray, Nickelback, Hinder, school