Parenting Teenagers Requires Consistency and a Good Sense of Humor

I recently mentioned to a friend that we were getting together to celebrate my youngest child’s 20th birthday.  “You are no longer the parent of teenagers,” she said casually. Wow. Until she pointed it out, it hadn’t occurred to me. I immediately wondered if we should change the theme of the celebration.

We survived 13 years of parenting teenagers.

Adolescence.  That period between childhood and becoming an adult. The stage of life that social scientists, educators and, most importantly, pop culture have told us is a parent’s worst nightmare.  Those awkward, hormone rich, “my parents are idiots” years where we can expect to be at each other’s throats as our once sweet and innocent baby begins the task of figuring out his or her identify and independence from the family.

When my oldest hit that magic 13th birthday, a friend who had older kids gave me some advice.  “Don’t worry,” she said. “She’ll come back around in a few years.”

Adolescence is a relatively new and very Western culture phenomenon. In many places around the world there is no such thing. The line between childhood and adulthood begins to fade as soon as the child is able to start contributing to survival.  

With the industrialization of the United States, a number of factors came into play that allowed us to separate the “tween years” as an official stage of development:  Labor laws that protected kids from working; the strength of the post-war economy; better nutrition and health; our focus on education.  At no time prior did we have young people, living under the roof of safety and security of the family, whose primary contribution was to “grow up” and go to school.    

With the advent of movies and television, the message that teenagers are their own unique force to be reckoned with lest they wreck your house, home and sanity is almost a constant. Since James Dean’s “Rebel Without a Cause” we have been told that through their language, their music, their dancing and their anti-authority, anti-parent focus, we will lose our sweet, innocent babies to the horrors of the teen years.

In reality, it’s not that all that bad.

The key to successful parenting of teenagers is to start early, be really consistent and have a really good sense of humor.   

Starting early means you can’t suddenly expect teenagers to follow rules, or tell you the truth or treat others with respect if they didn’t learn it as toddlers or older children. Teenagers are really just older versions of those same children you parented.    

Being consistent means your reactions and your expectations as parents have to be solid and predictable. “Just this once,” in whatever form it takes, means you are giving permission for that behavior to continue.   

Most important of all, however, is humor. You can’t survive parenting teenagers without it.   

One of my all-time favorites was the time that my then middle-school-aged daughter came down from her room, ready for school, with a generous layer of blue eye shadow on each eyelid. It was a blue I hadn’t seen since the 1970s. My husband looked at me with a raised eyebrow over his cup of coffee. I asked her if there was a cocktail party scheduled for that day at school and did we need to send some hors d’oeuvres? She promptly stomped back up the stairs and came back down as the fresh faced 13-year-old I knew and loved. I was able to laugh about it then. She can laugh about it now.

Don’t get me wrong, we had our share of bumps and stumbles. The emotional outbursts. The off-the-scale irritation with a sibling. The frustration at being told “no.” Trying to show their individuality by wearing, doing and saying exactly what everyone else their age is.

Most of it, though, was awesome. Watching teenagers and young adults develop into the adults they will be is pretty cool.

The teenage parenting milestones are amazing. The first middle school fun night. The first group activity with boys and girls together. The first crush. Making the team. Having a teacher recognize him or her for a great decision. Learning to drive. Their first job and that first paycheck. Conversations about current events or politics or their burgeoning belief systems.  

Some of those milestones come with pain. The mean girl drama. The first break up. The worries on that first time they take the car out by themselves. A party invitation that didn’t come. The party that they went to and shouldn’t have. The burdens and worries that you know they are trying to handle on their own as they make their way to adulthood.  

And then there are the decisions. We know that the prefrontal cortex of the brain – that which brings us decision making skills, impulse control and the ability to weigh consequences – doesn’t finish forming until we get to be about 25- or 26-years-old. To say that teenagers make decisions like they have “holes in their heads” is not all that far off. My now adult children look back and laugh at some of their choices in fashion, music and things that they did with friends and say, “How could you have let me do that?”

There were times that I was so angry with one of them, I couldn’t see straight. At all times, I loved them with every cell of my being and knew that they were doing the work they needed to do.

We were lucky, as parents of our teenagers. We got to witness what theorists now know is the strong connection to family that remains for most adolescents, despite their focus outward.  

In today’s culture we know that puberty starts earlier than it used to and that the teen years last longer into what some are now calling the “adultescence.” Regardless of how long it takes, those teen years are over in what seems like the blink of an eye.