Grow With Your Teenager

Teenage years are the most critical years in a person’s life and parents would do well to understand this fact and deal with teenagers accordingly.This is the time when teenagers exhibit symptoms that they cannot understand.This is the time their bodies are undergoing a lot of changes which they are not able to keep up with. Teenagers tend to become critical of their appearance and tend to be severe on themselves.This is the time when they are comparing themselves to the best looking adults and are harbouring hopes of looking like them when they grow up.This is the time when they start taking a particularly deep interest in all aspects of their bodies. As any parent who has had the opportunity to raise children from teenage to adulthood will testify, once kids become teenagers, parenting is a whole new ball game. Teenage is the time when kids are on the cusp of adulthood and they get confused whether to behave like kids or to behave like adults.This is the time when teenagers begin expressing their own opinions in anger.This is the time when they no longer obey your every word.This is the time when they want answers to why their personalities are changing so much and they become prickly and critical about themselves.

Young teens tend to become insecure about a whole lot of things. They start getting the feeling that they are not measuring up and that no one cares about them. Most parents are afraid of this time in their kid’s life and they silently wish that there was a button which could be pressed and kids would directly become adults by just pressing that button. But, the fact of the matter is that teenage years are unavoidable. Neither the parents nor the kids can avoid these years. For both of them, these years are an important time of growth.

Teens need to comprehend the process of physical, spiritual, emotional,social and economical change so that they can easily move towards being compassionate and responsible adults. During this time, parents should make a special effort to understand their children, their many demands,their way of looking at life, their opinions, why they are so formed, how they can be changed, etc. Parents would do well during this time to give equal importance to their teens as they give to adults. It is during this time when teens would like to be treated as adults and their opinions considered and respected.

As parents, it is the responsibility of the parents to walk alongside their children through the difficulties of their teen years.This is the time when teens require a solid foundation on which they can grow and establish reasonable goals for themselves in their lives. It is for the parents to help their teen built the right self-image and inculcate good relationships, correct values and beliefs. In order to do all this, parents will have to go back a few years and picture themselves to be in the shoes of their teenage children and start thinking the way they think. In short, they have to grow with their teens.