Negotiating the Rapids: Parenting an Adolescent

If you’re looking for a thankless job, try parenting an adolescent. They may thank you eventually, but it probably won’t be for a decade or two. Parenting an adolescent is heart-wrenching, stressful and wonderful. You have all the responsibility for them, and your authority over them is slipping through your fingers.

Parenting an adolescent is the process of getting them through the transition from childhood to adulthood, and preparing them for adult life. You have to help them negotiate the emotional, physical and social transitions as they get ready to fly free from the family nest.

The changes a child goes through on his way to adulthood interact with each other, so it’s artificial to separate them out, but it does help you to develop strategies for parenting an adolescent.

Emotional changes

Often, the first indicator a parent has that his child is entering adolescence is that they become very emotional. It happens a couple of years earlier in girls than boys, and the emotions are different. Boys tend to become aggressive, and girls cry. Their emotions are labile and out of control. Hormonal changes, new social pressures, and changes in cognition all combine to create emotional soup. It confuses the child, and she doesn’t know what to do.

You can help your child through this transition by being patient with him. Give her extra grace and empathy, and you can also teach him how to manage strong emotions. For instance, you might teach your fourteen-year-old boy to go for a run when he’s angry, or you might teach your 12-year-old daughter to monitor her cycles and decrease stress on the days before her period.

Physical changes

The physical changes of adolescence can be summed up in one word: sex. They go from being children to fully sexually functioning adults. It’s normal, but when you’re parenting an adolescent, this is probably the biggest transition to get them through.

Adolescents are usually physically mature enough for sex a few years before they are emotionally mature enough for it, and that creates problems. They have all these raging hormones driving them toward sexuality in a highly sexualized culture…and they don’t know what to do with any of it.

The best things you can do to help your adolescent through the physical changes are to talk openly and frankly about sex, including the urges they feel, and to keep the communication lines open. That means you have to be able to hear things you don’t want to hear, and to listen with respect and without judgment. It also means you must listen to a whole lot of drivel before you hear anything important. They will test your willingness to listen before they confide in you.

Social changes

During adolescence, the child’s social focus moves from the family to her peers. This is particularly frightening for parents because those peers have poor judgment. And so does your kid. The judgment centers of the brain don’t fully mature until the late teens or early twenties. Peer pressure can lead your adolescent to make unwise choices and engage in dangerous activities. And to be perfectly honest, you may not be able to do anything about it.

When you are parenting an adolescent, your role changes, and you have to learn new parenting skills. You’re beyond time outs and discipline issues. Your role now is to guide this fledgling adult through the teen years, and then to let them go.

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