Parenting Teens

Connection, Monitoring, Autonomy

More Parenting Information

Parenting Teens  -  What Makes A Family Strong?

Rules & Boundaries  -  Rules, Boundaries & Older Children

Enjoying the Teen Years  -  I Love You Just The Way You Are

Simple Actions to Connect & Strengthen Your Relationship with Your Teen

There are three major areas that are crucial to the parent-teen relationship -- connection, monitoring, and psychological autonomy.

First, a sense of connection between a teenager and parent provides a backdrop against which all other interaction takes place.  If the parent-child connection is consistent, positive, and characterized by warmth, kindness, love, and stability, children are more likely to flourish socially.   Adolescents who describe their relationship with their parents as warm, kind, and consistent are more likely to initiate social interaction with other adolescents and with other adults.  They are more likely to respond to others positively and with greater empathy.  They are more likely to be self-confident in their relationships with others, and to be more cooperative with others.   Also, teens with these kinds of positive relationships with their parents on the whole struggle less with depression, and have higher self-esteem.  Relationships characterized by kindness and devoid of unkind words or acts appear to be important to healthy adolescent development.

In addition to the sense of connection between parent and teenager, the monitoring process is crucial to successful parenting.  Teenagers who report that their parents take a genuine interest in their activities are more likely to avoid trouble. Teens whose parents know who their friends are and what they do in their free time are less likely to get into trouble than their peers.  In the context of a warm, kind relationship, parental monitoring of teen activities comes across as caring rather than intrusive.   Teenagers whose parents monitor them are more likely to avoid activities like lying, cheating, stealing, and using alcohol and illegal drugs.  Parental monitoring of adolescent behavior inhibits not only the opportunity for delinquent activity, but negative peer pressure to be involved in such activity as well.

Finally, parents need to encourage the development of psychological autonomy in their teenage children.  Psychological autonomy is nurtured in children when parents genuinely respect their teen's ideas, even when the ideas are contrary to their own.  Encouraging independent thinking and the expression of original ideas and beliefs, validating feelings, and expressing unconditional love are ways to nurture psychological autonomy.  The opposite of psychological autonomy is psychological control, which is characterized by changing the subject, making personal attacks, withdrawing love, or inducing guilt to constrain intellectual, emotional, or psychological expression by the adolescent that is incongruent with the parent's way of thinking.  Adolescents who report that their parents are likely to use techniques associated with psychological control are more apt to struggle with depression and to exhibit anti-social behavior.

The combination of connection, monitoring, and psychological autonomy may sound simple, but the simplicity of the directions can be frustrating to navigators when they are lost.  Translating general ideas into specific behaviors, and then into patterns of interaction can be a challenge, especially if one or both parties are already entrenched in less productive patterns of interaction.  The task of establishing a warm, caring, positive, relationship characterized by kindness with a teenager whose favorite phrases are "you just don't understand" and "leave me alone" can be daunting.

While it is true that one of the main developmental tasks of adolescence is to separate from parents, and that peer influence takes on greater and greater importance during teen years, there is still no substitute for the parent-teen relationship.

It's important to spend time with teenagers.

Parents who wish to enhance their connection with their teenager often find that choosing leisure activities wisely can do much to further the cause.  In addition to the opportunity to spend time together amiably, engaging teenagers in fun activities that foster sportsmanship, service, creativity, intellectual development, etiquette, honesty, and respect for each other brings all of those aspects into the parent-child relationship, providing an enjoyable forum for both teenagers and parents to practice those skills with one another.

Engaging in recreational activities with teenagers is a way to connect regularly in a pleasant setting.  Regular, positive interaction is crucial if discipline is to be effective.  When the parent/child relationship is built on a foundation of warmth and kindness, it can withstand the unpleasantness of discipline.  Parties to relationships void of such a foundation often either disengage or become conflicted in the face of the uncomfortable consequences imposed by discipline.

Spending leisure time together also gives parents a leg-up on the monitoring process.  First, it cuts down on the amount of free time kids spend without supervision.  Second, discussions about friends and other leisure activities tend to come up easily, and can be discussed in a relaxed atmosphere.  Often, parents get a chance to know their teenager's friends through recreational activities, either by attending school or team performances in which their child is involved with friends, or by allowing a child to invite a friend along on a family outing.

NEXT:  Rules & Boundaries