Parenting teens – five tips to stop you losing your shit
God parenting teens is thankless.
I don’t even have the really troubled kind. The ones that genuinely do cause their parents all sorts of pain. I just have your run of the mill, bog standard, self-involved, uncommunicative, bone idle variety. Now before I’m accused of being mean:
- Yes I still love them
- Yes they have some lovely moments and characteristics
- Yes listening to them with their pals and the bants is hilarious
- Yes they can and do give incredible hugs and sometimes sage advice
- Yes I gain insights into the male mind (I have boys) and it explains so much about men
- Yes I’m sure they will develop into wonderful adults eventually….
But good lord they excel at driving their mother mad.
Every stereotype ever made about teens is made for a reason: because they’re all true! They really do just want money, lifts and food. They grunt. They smell. They make a mess and are incapable of seeing the mess they make. And they are hideously embarrassed by their mother…
I listened to a podcast yesterday on how parenting and business leadership required the same skills. I picked up some tips from this podcast and added in a few of my own on navigating this particular life phase.
Tip 1: Have the lowest heartrate in the room
Apparently the trick to parenting is to always have the lowest heart rate in the room. Accept that you cannot make people (especially teens) do anything, you can only set expectations, outline consequences, guide and give them the freedom to decide for themselves and thereby grow in the process. Don’t get worked up about it. Lower your heart rate. Great advice. Putting it into practice isn’t easy. I’d call that a work in progress in our house.
Tip 2: Know the difference between need and want
The other tip according to this podcast is it is fine to WANT them to do something, but you shouldn’t NEED them to do it. For example, you may WANT them to enjoy the roast dinner that you have prepared for a welcome-back-from-boarding-school-family-meal instead of him sloping out the house saying, ‘yeah well I’m like meeting mates so I won’t be here. Can we have it tomorrow instead.’ But you shouldn’t NEED them to eat that meal with you.
However keeping your heart rate the lowest in the room at this point may prove challenging. Particularly when the other teen chose the enormous (and expensive) piece of beef for roasting because he was starving at the time and well… meat …but now doesn’t feel like eating because he’s eaten two family size bags of crisps and a bag of haribo.
About 10pm one will slope back into the house after begging for a lift or Uber money and declare himself to be starving and why isn’t there anything to eat besides leftovers, and the other will come downstairs finally hungry and decide he wants six eggs, not the cold leftover roast that no one has eaten. Meanwhile I will have eaten alone concentrating on keeping my heart rate the lowest in the house, wanting them to be eating with me but not needing it….
Tip 3: Be a pot plant
You need to be there but also not be there. It’s called pot plant parenting apparently. Just quietly be in the room in case food/money/a lift is required but don’t actually BE with them. Well, not for longer than it takes to hoover a meal.
Tip 4: Be just the right amount of interested
You should be interested and involved in their lives but not too interested or involved. Like a few weeks ago when parents were invited to join in the boys’ rugby training session and I gamely did that, having never played rugby in my life and funnily enough was appallingly bad. Well that went from being involved to too involved in a single game of touch. Had his father done the same, that would have been acceptable. Playing golf with their father is also acceptable. When I suggested I learn how so that we could play together, you could hear their eyes rolling back in their heads. God forbid I suggest going for a walk…
You should ask about school and be interested in their answers. In case you’re wondering, the answer will always be: ‘It’s fine.’ They may go so far as to tell you about a particular lesson or test but then someone will send them a meme and they don’t finish the story but later when you ask how they’re getting on with maths, they’ll say, ‘I told you! You never listen.’ Focus on the heart rate…maintain cheery interest.
Tip 5: this to shall pass and you may miss it
They will beg, plead, charm, nag, yell, slam doors, sulk, argue, debate, lie and downright defy to get what it is they want – and if you give it to them, all those toddler training years of please and thank will be erased as though they never happened. You might get a grunt if you’re lucky. And if you ask them to do something in exchange, like take the bin out, brace yourself for ‘yeah, I’ll do it later’ (they won’t) or ‘why do I always have to do everything?’
They will play gangsta rap really, really loudly while they’re taking hideously long showers, will steal your phone charger, will sigh and eye roll at your choice of music and will cut your song off just at the good bit to play their god awful music selection without asking if that is cool. They also can’t listen to more than 20 seconds of a song. They will never, ever, ever change the toilet roll. They will leave empty food cartons in the cupboard or fridge. They will absolutely, definitely open a bottle of milk or loaf of bread if there is already one open and then complain when things are off. They will steal your alcohol and eat the chocolate you cunningly hid but they managed to find, yet can’t see the missing rugby boots that are right in front of them.
You may wonder if it will ever end.
But remember those sleepless nights of babies or the never ending toddler tantrums and the incessant ‘but why mummy’ stages – well they all ended and I bet you look at pictures of those little cherubs now and go, ‘they were so cute and ickle.’ One day I may wish that I had piles of laundry to do or have someone who needs me to give them a lift or look at eggs going bad in the fridge as no one has eaten them all at midnight leaving the shells discarded on the countertop. And I may wish that I could go back in time and really savour every moment.
Bonus tip:
Wine. It’s very good for lowering the heart rate and helps you savour every moment.
