The Five Basics of Parenting Adolescents

1. Love and Connect

Teens need parents to develop and maintain a relationship with them that offers support and acceptance, while accommodating and affirming the teen’s increasing maturity.
 

Strategies that work

• Watch for moments when you feel and can express genuine affection, respect, and appreciation for your teen.

• Acknowledge the good times made possible by your teen’s personality and growth.

• Expect increased criticism and debate, and strengthen your skills for discussing ideas and disagreements in ways that respect both your teen’s opinions and your own.

• Spend time just listening to your teen’s thoughts and feelings about her or his fears, concerns, interests, ideas, perspectives, activities, jobs, schoolwork, and relationships.

• Treat each teen as a unique individual distinct from siblings, stereotypes, his or her past, or your own past.

• Appreciate and acknowledge each teen’s new areas of interest, skills, strengths, and accomplishments, as well as the positive aspects of adolescence generally, such as its passion, vitality, humor, and deepening intellectual thought.

• Provide meaningful roles for your teen in the family, ones that are genuinely useful and important to the family’s well-being.

• Spend time together one on one and as a family, continuing some familiar family routines, while also taking advantage of ways in which new activities, such as community volunteering, can offer new ways to connect.

Key message for parents

Most things about their world are changing. Don’t let your love be one of them.

2. Monitor and Observe

Teens need parents to be aware of—and let teens know they are aware of—their activities through a process that increasingly involves less direct supervision and more communication, observation, and networking with other adults.

Strategies that work

• Keep track of your teen’s whereabouts and activities, directly or indirectly, by listening, observing, and networking with others who come into contact with your teen.

• Keep in touch with other adults who are willing and able to let you know of positive or negative trends in your teen’s behavior, such as neighbors, family, religious and community leaders, shopkeepers, teachers, and other parents.

• Involve yourself in school events such as parent-teacher conferences, back-to-school nights, and special needs planning meetings.

• Stay informed about your teen’s progress in school and employment, as well as the level and nature of outside activities; get to know your teen’s friends and acquaintances.

• Learn and watch for warning signs of poor physical or mental health, as well as signs of abuse or neglect, including lack of motivation, weight loss, problems with eating or sleeping, a drop in school performance and/or skipping school, drug use, withdrawal from friends and activities, promiscuity, running away, unexplained injury, serious and persistent conflict between parent and teen, or high levels of anxiety or guilt.

• Seek guidance if you have concerns about these warning signs or any other aspect of your teen’s health or behavior, consulting with teachers, counselors, religious leaders, physicians, parenting educators, family and others.

• Monitor your teen’s experiences in settings and relationships inside and outside the home that hold the potential for physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, including relationships involving parental figures, siblings, extended family, caregivers, peers, partners, employers, teachers, counselors, and activity leaders.

• Evaluate the level of challenge of proposed teen activities, such as social events, media exposure, and jobs, matching the challenges to your teen’s ability to handle them.

Key message for parents

Monitor your teen’s activities. You still can, and it still counts.

3. Guide and Limit

Teens need parents to uphold a clear but evolving set of boundaries, maintaining important family rules and values, but also encouraging increased competence and maturity.
 

Strategies that work

• Maintain family rules or “house rules,” upholding some non-negotiable rules around issues like safety and central family values, while negotiating other rules around issues like household tasks and schedules.

• Communicate expectations that are high, but realistic.

• Choose battles and ignore smaller issues in favor of more important ones, such as drugs, school performance, and sexually responsible behavior.

• Use discipline as a tool for teaching, not for venting or taking revenge.

• Restrict punishment to forms that do not cause physical or emotional injury.

• Renegotiate responsibilities and privileges in response to your teen’s changing abilities, turning over some areas to the teen with appropriate monitoring.

Key message for parents

Loosen up, but don’t let go.

4. Model and Consult

Teens need parents to provide ongoing information and support around decision making, values, skills, goals, and interpreting and navigating the larger world, teaching by example and ongoing dialogue.
 

Strategies that work

• Set a good example around risk taking, health habits, and emotional control.

• Express personal positions about social, political, moral, and spiritual issues, including issues of ethnicity and gender.

• Model the kind of adult relationships that you would like your teen to have.

• Answer teens’ questions in ways that are truthful, while taking into account their level of maturity.

• Maintain or establish traditions including family, cultural, and/or religious rituals.

• Support teens’ education and vocational training, including through participation in household tasks, outside activities, and employment that develop their skills, interests, and sense of value to the family and community.

• Help teens get information about future options and strategies for education, employment, and lifestyle choices.

• Give teens opportunities to practice reasoning and decision making by asking questions that encourage them to think logically and consider consequences, while providing safe opportunities to try out their own ideas and learn from their mistakes.

Key message for parents

Parents still matter; teens still care.

5. Provide and Advocate

Teens need parents to make available not only adequate nutrition, clothing, shelter, and health care, but also a supportive home environment and a network of caring adults.
 

Strategies that work

• Network within the community as well as within schools, family, religious organizations, and social services to identify resources that can provide positive adult and peer relationships, guidance, training, and activities for your teen.

• Make informed decisions among available options for schools and educational programs, taking into account such issues as safety, social climate, approach to diversity, community cohesion, opportunities for peer relationships and mentoring, and the match between school practices and your teen’s learning style and needs.

• Make similarly informed decisions among available options for neighborhoods, community involvement, and youth programs.

• Arrange or advocate for preventive health care and treatment, including care for mental illness.

• Identify people and programs to support and inform you in handling parental responsibilities and in understanding the societal and personal challenges in raising teens.

Key message for parents

You can’t control their world, but you can add to and subtract from it.