Help Wanted, But Not Requested

Reprinted from Caught in the Middle: Educational Reform for Young Adolescents in California Public Schools

Parents Should Be There

Parents often think they are not wanted when their children reach the adolescent years. Wrong! Parents are still needed – and wanted – but in a very different way. Gone is the need for the openly demonstrative and caring parent-child relationships of childhood. In its place are the demands for freedom and privacy and, ironically, the need for even more support and caring; however it should be support, love, and caring offered in a very private manner – never in public. To say that teenagers seem to send mixed messages is one of the greatest understatements of all time. Parents have to be sensitive to their teenager’s need to be more independent and accept this as part of the teen being a normal, healthy adolescent. If parents want their teenager to be self-sufficient and able to make his/her own decisions eventually, they need to give their support where it has always been given, but in ways that are non threatening.

	Family rules and limits must be set, even as the teenager pushes against these limits, and new limits need to be negotiated along with the ability to accept new responsibilities.
	Parents need to work at keeping lines of communications open, understanding that discussions will probably take place more easily if the topics center on the immediate interests of the teenager.
	Parental support should still be given at school functions or other activities in which the teenager is involved, even though parents and teenagers will most likely go their own separate ways at the event.

A Buffer – And Maybe More

It may seem more difficult to set limits for teens, because they constantly challenge those limits. Parents need to discuss the limits set by the family and change them as their teenager matures and is able to handle more responsibility for his/her own actions. At the same time, family rules may serve another purpose – that of helping the teen withstand peer pressure by being able to say, “No, I can’t do that; my folks would kill me,” or “That’s not allowed in my family, and I wouldn’t be able to drive the car if I did that.”

There may be times when a teenager needs to understand that it is okay to be different from his/her friends. He/She needs to talk with his/her parents about what the family believes is important, about values that have always been upheld and why. He/She needs to realize that it can show strength to not go along with the crowd if it is against his/her values, and that his/her friends will respect him/her for doing that about which he/she feels strongly.