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.

There are many teen parenting programs in the community. If you’re looking for one, check through your local high school, or even junior high school. Ask about a program through your local sheriff’s station or police, through their community outreach program. Sometimes the YMCA or Parks & Recreation will have a program to help with parenting teens. Often local churches offer support to families. All have ideas in common for helping the teenager be safe and improving the parent teen relationship. Let’s take a look at suggestions from programs about parenting teens.

Learn About The Dangers Facing Our Teens

If you think that teenagers have just the same problems that you had as a teenager, think again. The world has changed – there are more drugs available, sex is much more talked about in the schools and media, and there are fewer limits on appropriate behavior. Things we wouldn’t have been caught dead doing is commonplace now.

If you ignore these topics, it won’t make them go away. Your kids will still think about them and wondering about them. They hear a lot at school and from the media, and believe me, they are curious. If you talk to your teens about these issues openly early, they are much less likely to cave in when confronted by pressuring friends or acquaintances. Programs about parenting teens will often go into details about the dangers of drugs, including tobacco and alcohol, and even danger of sex. Pass information along to your children – before they become teens is not too early to begin talking about them.

Know Their Friends

It is important to get to know your teenager’s friends. You may have a feeling for which friends are “bad news.” Of course, they know the friend better than you do, but if you don’t know the friend at all, your “gut instinct” won’t win out when it comes to concerns you express to your teenager.

It’s best if you have a friendly relationship with your teenager’s friend’s parents. Communicating with each other is the best way to be sure you know what your kids are up to and at whose house. The parents can help each other keep track of their kids without appearing nosy to the teens.

Know What To Watch For

While teenagers tend to change quickly anyway due to increased hormones running around in their bodies, if the changes are drastic or last a long time you should investigate. Some of the concerns would be sleep problems, extreme weight loss or gain, personality changes, sudden changes in friends, issues with school like attendance, grades, and getting along with teachers, talking about suicide (even in jest), signs of substance abuse (even tobacco), and police run-ins.

Respect Teenager’s Privacy – As Long As There Are No Signs For Concern

In order to help your teen grow up, you need to give them some privacy. And as long as there are no red flags, this is appropriate. But if there are issues – like above – you may need to invade their privacy to take a look around their space. In a nutshell, as long as there’s no problem, you shouldn’t expect to know all their conversations (cell phone, texting) and activities all the time. However, you still need to keep your teen safe – know where they’re going, who they’ll be with, what they’ll be doing.

Programs for parenting teens are available in most communities. Take advantage of the great advice they offer – and remember, it can be fun if you don’t make it too hard!