How To Have A Better Parent Teen Relationship

If you’ve got a teenager in your family, chances are you’d like to improve the parent teen relationship. When the relationship between parent and teen is positive, the relationship can flourish and wonderful things can happen. What are some parenting helps for teen and parent relationship? There are three major keys.

Show Interest In Your Children’s/Teen’s Activities

If you truly want a better parent teen relationship you will need to be genuinely interested in what’s going on in their life. If they get the impression that you don’t give a flying fig who they’re with or what they’re doing, they are much less likely to open up to you when it really matters. On the other hand, if you’ve shown a healthy interest in them and their friends, they sense that you have a respect for them. That will translate into a respect for you, in return. What better boost could there possibly be to a parent teen relationship than mutual respect?

Have Healthy Rules And Boundaries

Though some teens may protest at having rules and limits, the facts show that teens do much better with them. Rules and limits give teens a sense of stability – like the fence that shows the cows where their field ends. The cows may like to stand near the fence, but they know that’s the limit. When the world of a teen can be changing and shifting at a dizzying speed, having steady, predictable, firm limits are like having fences that define the boundaries for them. They don’t have to make so many decisions about right and wrong, and they can lean on the “family rules” as an explanation why they can’t do something they really shouldn’t.

In many families, the children and teens help determine the family rules and consequences, which can help with buy-in from the rank and file. Better than an “order from on high,” rules they helped create are “their” rules, not just their parents’ rules. After determining good rules, the children and teenagers should also help determine fair consequences. When they help determine the rules and consequences, the argument about them is over. They can’t claim that either is unfair, and the parents can just be the ones to enforce the consequences. Helping set the rules and consequences can help parents and teens avoid a power struggle when teens choose to break the rules – which they likely will, once in a while.

Allow Teenagers To Have Their Own

Teenagers need to be allowed and encouraged to be themselves. They should have their own opinions (however silly they may seem to us, the all-knowing, wise ones) and their own perspective on world issues. They should feel free to think and express opinions different than ours. In fact, these kinds of discussions with our teens and adult children can be interesting and invigorating.