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Tips for Fathers of Adolescents Print E-mail


Keep in mind that being the dad of an emerging teen will probably raise your blood pressure a few points. You'll have ample opportunity to experience frustration, disappointment, and resentmentand your teens will be experiencing the same things.

Pre-teens and younger teens are well served by having established boundaries. When a parent suddenly becomes lax or quits caring about the rules, this confuses and disorients a teen just as he or she is struggling to find appropriate independence.

Set clear standards for behavior, communicate your values consistently and monitor your younger teen's whereabouts, friendships, and online patterns. You'll be helping him or her by staying involved and by maintaining your standards. Even if your teen complains, experts agree that he or she will be grateful to encounter those boundaries.

Older teens are en route to adulthood. Many of them will need to learn through their own experiences, including experiences that you'd greatly prefer they avoid. Realize that you can't possibly monitor or control every aspect of an older teen's behaviorespecially once he or she has a driver's license, works at a steady job, or goes off to college.

This doesn't mean changing your values! You can continue to communicate your own beliefs, values, and hopes. If you made mistakes when you were their age, this may be a good time to admit those to your older teen, explaining where and how you went wrong and what the consequences were. Be vulnerable and open, not "preachy."

Older teens will be watching how you actually live much more than listening to what you recommend. If you live a sexually active lifestyleif you drink alcohol in social settings and to relaxyou can expect your older teen to follow your example rather than listening to your advice. Older teens are watching for consistency When a parent sends one message but lives another, they notice the difference.

Choose your fights carefully. Instead of arguing with older teens about their taste in music, clothing, entertainment, and so on, allow them more freedom in these areas as they become older. Make as few rules as possible, but enforce those rules clearly and consistentlyotherwise, your boundaries are meaningless.

Save your energy for the things that matter most: learn to overlook the less-important issues so that you can invest your strength where it's most needed.

When a divorced person remarries, he may be hoping to gain some help with the difficult task of parenting. Experience confirms that older children and teens are often highly resistant to new authority figures in their lives. Regardless of the marital status and life experiences oft heir birth parents, children of all ages may harbor the secret hope that their birth parents will re-unite and re-form the original family. Stepparents, especially those who try too hard to assert control or build a relational bond, may find their best efforts resisted and opposed by their partner's children.

In the early days of a remarriage, it's usually wisest to let the birth parent continue to set, monitor and enforce the boundaries for children of all ages. This allows older children and teens the chance to adjust to the presence of a new adult in their livesand to readjust their expectations about the family they now live in.

Stepparents can be very useful and can successfully exercise leadership within a newly forming family. However slow and steady wins the race. Trying too hard, coming on too strong, making too many changesthese and other tactics can backfire, causing problems as the family attempts to unify and grow strong.

If you are a birth parent who is getting remarried, expect to continue your present load of parenting duties, at least for a while. Gradually allow your new partner to witness, participate in, and eventually suggest changes to the parenting style in your home. Doing it in this way allows your children the time and space they need to adjust to a new parent.


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