Parenting Teens

Char over at Weary Parent has come up with a good Group Writing Project and Contest for parenting bloggers. She has challenged us to write about some advice that our parents or another influential adult gave us as teens, that we really took to heart.

I’ve received lots of really good advice from my parents over my lifetime. The advice I’d like to share was never really spoken, at least not that I remember. But it has been modeled for me over my entire life. It began when I was a child, but really began to sink in during my teen years.

That advice is to put family first. Both my parents have done this for as long as I remember. I know that my father worked jobs that he didn’t like-in fact, he downright hated them at times-because he had his family to support. He sacrificed doing things that he wanted to do, jobs that he might have enjoyed more, to work at jobs which gave him enough money to support a wife and three children. He’s retired now, but is always ready and willing to help us out with projects around the house, taking us somewhere if we have car problems-even offering us money if he feels we might need it.

My mother, who passed away four years ago, also sacrificed for her family. We were poor when I was growing up. I can remember many a time when my mother did not buy things that she, herself, really needed, to buy things for her children. No matter how tight the budget was, we always had our new school clothes and anything else we needed (and even things we just wanted), before she thought about buying things for herself. We went to the doctor for very minor illnesses, when she could have used the money to buy things which would have made her life easier. Even at the end, she thought more about how the rest of the family was reacting to her illness than about herself.

Since I’ve been a parent (and, particularly, now that I’m the parent of a teen), I’ve been trying hard to instill in my daughter that putting family first brings much richer rewards to one’s life than putting job or anything else first. We make trips to visit family and to family reunions sometimes at the expense of missing other things. We do this because we love family and we love seeing family. I bend my own schedule into a pretzel to be able to accomodate her activities and other family obligations.

More than any other piece of advice I could give her, I hope that my daughter retains this strong sense of family. It has brought wonderful richness and rewards to my life, and I know that it will to hers.

family, family relationships, advice, teen advice, parenting advice, teens, teenagers, parenting teens, parenting teenagers, Weary Parent