Teen / Parent Relationships Perhaps the only thing more difficult than being a teenager is parenting one.

While hormones, the struggle for independence, peer pressure, and an emerging identity wreak havoc in the soul of the adolescent, issues of how much autonomy to grant, how much "attitude" to take, what kind of discipline is effective, which issues are worth fighting about, and how to talk to offspring-turnedalien challenge parental creativity, patience, and courage.

If adolescence can be conceptualized as a journey from childhood to adulthood, parenting adolescents can also be thought of as a journey.

Although teenagers will make their own choices, a good home life can increase the odds that kids will avoid many of the pitfalls of adolescence. Particularly, a kind, warm, solid relationship with parents who demonstrate respect for their children, an interest in their children's activities, and set firm boundaries for those activities may directly or indirectly deter criminal activity, illegal drug and alcohol use, negative peer pressure, delinquency, sexual promiscuity, and low self-esteem.

There is not only growing consensus that some parenting techniques are better than others, but also contribute to the development of emotional stability and social responsibility in children.

There are three major areas that are crucial to the parent-adolescent 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.

Source: http://www.focusas.com/Parenting.html