A Teacher's Tips for Parents Dealing with Teenagers

Rolling eyes, slammed doors, one-word responses - is it really possible that the lovely child you so dearly love has morphed into a new being who actually behaves this way? It seems that somewhere around age 12, an alien being takes possession of your child's body and mouth, creating a person who looks familiar, yet behaves in quite unfamiliar ways.

But all hope is not lost; around age 18 or 19, the person you know and love will return, a slightly more mature version of the eleven-year-old you used to know. In the meantime, having a few tips to help both you and your teen endure the intervening years can come in handy.

Five Tips for Parents

High school teachers spend hour after hour with teens. As a result, some of the skills and experience that teachers acquire can prove useful to parents as well. With this in mind, here are a teacher's tips for parents dealing with teenagers.

Give Them Limited Autonomy

Being at a developmental age much like that of the terrible two's, adolescents want to assert their independence as they attempt to determine who they are apart from their parents. Fully aware that they lack the financial means for true freedom, teens nonetheless need to feel that they have some control over their own lives, that their parents will no longer dictate every aspect of their daily being.

While it's wrenchingly difficult for parents to relinquish control and the desire to micromanage their teens' lives - after all, until this point, parents have been the sole arbiters of what's right and wrong, good and bad - it's important to allow teens a modicum of freedom . This doesn't mean foregoing all rules and consequences - teens need these and secretly want them - but rather this entails giving them the room to do things without you, make some decisions on their own and face the consequences, both good and bad.

Dropping off your pre-driving teen at the mall or the movie theatre, for example, to spend time with friends, gives them freedom with the limitations of location and a specific time set by the parent. For older teens, allowing them to go places on their own shows your trust of their judgment, while setting a curfew places necessary constraints.

Give Them Choices

Similarly, teens need the opportunity to make some decisions for their own lives. Serving both to instill sound decision-making ability and to give them a sense of self-mastery, giving teens choices about events in their own lives augments their feelings of capability as well as their sense of maturity. The caveat once again is that parents need to set the parameters.

Presenting teens with choices among two or three alternatives that are equally acceptable to the parents teaches teens to weigh their options, while also lending them a sense of control over their own lives. This acknowledges respect for them as individuals as well as esteem for their opinions and feelings.

Choose Your Battles

As almost every parent of teens knows, parents could conceivably argue with their teenager every day of the week, every week of the year. To avoid that exhausting and unproductive scenario, it's better to choose your battles.

Rather than express disapproval over such things as hairstyles (or hair colors!) or slang expressions that have little to no meaning for most adults, which in the grand scheme of things are actually quite minor, hold your fire for the genuinely important issues. Under the category of "important" are the behaviors that have genuine moral value for the parent.

For example, merely ugly clothes don't warrant comment, whereas clothes that bare inordinate amounts of skin might. Silly slang expressions can be overlooked, while vulgarity may not. Similarly, a parent might consider a teen's dimwitted friend a harmless diversion, but might need to intervene when a teen associates with self-destructive friends or those blatantly disrespectful to the parent.

Choosing your battles is all a matter of perspective. If the situation violates parents' moral values, it may be worth the fight.

Welcome Their Friends

When children are very young, parents know all of their friends, often having arranged these friendships themselves via play dates and gatherings with their own friends who have children. However, as children grow up and form friendships on their own, parents may no longer be in the loop.

While teens may still maintain some of their earlier friendships, it's a good idea for parents to keep abreast of their teens' current friends. To varying degree, these friends wield influence and a wise parent wants to know the nature of the influence.

The best way to stay informed is for parents to welcome these friends into their home. The goal is to provide the place where teens want to gather, ensuring that the parents always know where and with whom their teens are associating.

Welcoming need only entail a friendly greeting (by name) and sincere small talk, expressing genuine interest. Then leave the teens and their friends with access to television and/or music, and food. This small amount of effort reaps huge benefits in terms of peace of mind, as well as peace between parents and teens.

Be Their Parent, Not Their Friend

Finally, keep a firm line between parents and teens. While building a rapport based on mutual respect and understanding is the core of a peaceful coexistence, teens still need parents - and firm but loving parents at that. After all, they already have friends.

Although parents may serve as confidantes - and being permitted to operate in this capacity is a tribute to parenting skills - maintaining the role of parent, with all its inherent authority, is essential. Indeed, as stated earlier, teens need rules and consequences. Providing these is intrinsic to parenting not to friendship. So, the last of a teacher's tips for parents dealing with teenagers is to be their parent - combining love and discipline - not their friend.