Teens Making Bad Choices: Is Bad Parenting Always to Blame?

Lack of parenting is often the reason some teens make bad choices, but there are some very good and effective parents who find that their teen has made some bad choices.

Parents can control much of the world of very young kids, but when the teen years hit it is difficult to know all the ways they may manifest themselves. The brains of teenagers are not completed matured. The prefrontal cortex won't be mature until early- to mid- twenties. This contributes to mood problems, bad choices, and misinterpreting "where parents and others are coming from".

Today's teens have been raised in a far more challenging culture. Parents, schools, and our culture often underestimate the intelligence of kids but overestimate their emotional maturity. This makes for a hazardous culture that often require super-human emotional strength to resist some of the bad choices. No teen - no matter how intelligent or mature - has the kind of strength required to get past some things, and all teens are at a higher risk of making bad choices than they ever will be in their life. Kids with learning problems in schools, kids who have self-esteem problems in spite of having parents who've tried to help them have more self-esteem, and any number of other kids are likely to make a bad choice at any time. One bad choice often leads to another, and before we know it we have a teenager in trouble of one sort or another. Teen years are uncertain years for a lot of kids, and even one bad-apple, new friend, can contribute to one bad choice that has bad consequences.

If parents keep their children too isolated and away from the world they deny them a normal childhood and normal socializing experiences. When children have those normal experiences that have them in the high-risk culture in which they've grown. When a kid acts up the parent can do one of two things: kick him out or let him stay and decide to fight (and I mean FIGHT) to keep him from straying further over the next few years. When a kid and parents fight that kid has more than enough "emotional support" from the wrong people, who agree with his side of things, outside his family.

Bad parenting never helps a child grow into a solid, sensible, teen; but its fairly clear to anyone who knows teens well that many, if not most, bad choices teens make are not the result of bad parenting