Raising Teenagers: Top Ten Suggestions, part I

Since 1985,  I’ve had the pleasure of working with teenagers  as a teacher, principal and parent. My wife and I raised four children—three boys and a girl— all in their 20’s and 30’s now. By observing parents with their children, and sometimes bumbling through raising our own, I’ve learned a lot about raising teens. Here then,  are my “top ten suggestions.” 

10) “Build fences.”  There are two opposing tendencies we are tempted to veer into as parents, depending on the issue: to give our children too much freedom, or the opposite, to micromanage all facets of our children’s lives. Teenagers absolutely need rules and structure, but they also need space, a chance to try things and learn from their mistakes.  Threading the needle between those two extremes is THE challenge of being a good parent of teens. 

The best advice I ever heard on this came from a mother of five well adjusted kids (I didn’t say perfect). The key, she told me, was to build “good fences” as a parent.  “Teens are like bucking broncos. If we try to ride them, they’ll buck us. But if we build fences,  they will eventually move in the direction we want them to move, under their own power.” 

Here’s what I think she meant: Suppose our child breezily announces he is going “out” on Friday night. It’s perfectly reasonable to ask “what are you going to do? and “who will you be with?” But we’ll quickly get into an unfruitful argument with our child if we by ask too many specific, probing questions, or if we begin to legislate it’s OK to be with child X but not child Y.   When we “ride” the bronco, it’s going to buck us, or lie to us, or try and parse words to retain as much freedom as possible.  Instead, we should make sure we’ve established a consistent time our children must be home every night, and establish the practice of being there to greet them at the door. The curfew time is the “fence” which doesn’t change, and as long as they respect that fence, we can then give them a little space on the exact details of their activities.  

9) We should insist our children “finish what they’ve started”—About half way through baseball season, my 12 year old son told me he “hated baseball,” and begged me to allow him to quit. That killed me inside, because he was good at it (and I enjoyed the accolades he received), but he already knew what my answer would be: “We’re not quitters in this family. When the season is over, you never have to play baseball again—that’s your call and I’ll respect it. But you gotta finish out the season.”  I believe insisting our kids   “finish” is a critical lesson for them, especially in a culture of instant gratification. The instinct to run from hardships or unpleasant things is natural, but if it becomes an “option”  for how they handle hard situations, it’ll affect their high school academic careers, their future job performance, and perhaps most importantly, their relationships, even their future marriage. Though “domestic tranquility” is good for our families, it’s not more important  than developing virtuous children, which sometimes means we have to help them deal with difficulties rather than run from them. It’s too common in high schools today that parents  immediately want to yank their kids from difficult classes, change difficult teachers, or change schools altogether if their child is “unhappy.” Pushing through unpleasant situations is an important skill to teach our children—the “struggle” and “powering through it” makes our kids healthier and tougher.

8) Insist on variety of activities.  One of the more pernicious forces in teen culture today is club sports, which tells athletes (and parents) that students must “play their sport year-round if they want to compete for college scholarships.”  Doing so divorces kids’ participation in other school activities, other athletic programs, and in healthy extracurriculars by sucking up their time and energy (to say nothing about the family’s time and energy, traveling to different venues all over the region). Many of these kids, as the years wear on, often feel disconnected from their peers, unhappy that all their eggs are in the proverbial  “one basket,” and even begin to grow weary of playing the sport they once loved as a younger child. I know many students—especially girls—who played a sport year round since they were 7 or 8 years old, only to completely lose interest in that sport in their junior or senior year. 

We don’t want our children to become specialists! Instead, we should aim for “wholeness” and “balance.” We should invite our children to become involved in a great variety of activities—athletic teams, yes, but also academic clubs, fine arts activities,  and church/religious organizations. Variety is the spice of life, and our kids will be happier over time with this “renaissance” emphasis. 

7) Set rules about cellphones/smartphone usage— I suggest three: First, if my wife or I call our kids, we expect them to answer! If they don’t, and we try again a bit later and  they still don’t answer, they’re going to forfeit their phone privileges for a few days. Second, at social functions, including family dinner, no cell phones! Third, cell phones, Ipads and all  other technology must be holstered in the charging station in the kitchen by 10 p.m. each  night, or when they get home on weekend nights. 

The reasons for the first two rules are self-evident. I insisted on the kitchen charging station because it kept our kids from taking their technology to bed, which would deprive them of sleep—doctors say the blue light emitted by tech devices stimulates our brains and disrupts our natural sleep cycle, and teenagers already get too few hours of sleep. Second, for boys, the temptation to view porn is overwhelming, and for girls, the temptation to fixate on social media or to engage in the latest gossip is unhealthy. 

“But Dad, I need my phone because I use the alarm clock to wake me up!” my son protested. I went to the store and bought him a $7 alarm clock.  He wasn’t impressed.

6) Help your child prioritize school. The teenagers’ “job” at this time in their life is to do their best in school. Next to faith and family, school should have priority over everything else. That’s easy to say—most of is would agree in theory—but in practice, not so much. 

How sacred is school time? How often do we parents take our kids out of school for an early start to vacations, or hunting expeditions, driver's license tests or hair appointments? How often do schools ask kids to leave school early—or miss it altogether—for ball games? How many times do academic organizations (like science and foreign language associations) schedule competitions on school days to improve participation rates? How frequently do we let our children miss school because they're a little under the weather? The answer to all of the above is "too often." My advice: Make it the truly rare exception that your child misses school for voluntary reasons, and insist that unless they have physical signs of illness (a temperature, nausea, an infectious disease or illness) that they “power through” if they’re feeling a little under the weather. 

(To be continued)