They say that parenting gets easier as they get older… I wish! As any parent will tell you, the challenge of being a mom or dad as your children get older doesn’t get any less – it just changes. Those early years of lack of sleep, toilet training and non-stop demands for attention give way to boundary-pushing, making poor choices, romantic explorations(!), and the 1,001 other joys of growing up. As the teenage years begin, so do the opportunities for defiance and opposition: “It’s not fair!” and “I hate you!” become part of the daily routine of family life as children stretch their wings and strive for greater independence. They want freedom – and parents are stopping them from having it! The challenge becomes how to give your child enough freedom to learn how to handle it, without so much that they have room and opportunity to make really bad choices.
I suspect that, if we are honest with ourselves, those teenage years might also coincide with our own desires as adults for an easier life for ourselves. And this is where we need to be careful. It is tempting to justify giving our teenagers freedom by their need to experience the world independently. After all, that makes sense, right? It makes it easier to justify our decisions to let our teenagers go out, stay out, and be online at all hours – giving us more freedom as adults, as well as less stress and conflict at home.
But in our more reflective moments we know that maybe this is not the best thing for our children – and they are still children.
Just because our teenagers long for freedom does not mean that freedom should be without boundaries or consequences. These are the years when our parenting perhaps matters as much as ever. It is the time when we teach our children how to not only make good choices, but also how to deal with the consequences of those choices. Most importantly, it is how we parent during these teenage years that contributes so much to their eventual understanding of how to be a good parent themselves when the time comes.
When your teenagers are parents themselves, and they look back on how you parented them during these important years, what lessons will they have learnt? Will how you parent today serve as a good model for how you would want your grandchildren to be raised?
Intentional Learning 