The Most Important Thing I Know About Parenting Teens

Posted by Alex Sharp Oct 29, 2008

I never thought I would meet parents when I taught 11th and 12th grade; very few parents came to Open House, and an even fewer number came to parent-teacher conferences. I got to know parents at football and basketball games, at assemblies, and on field trips. Sometimes parents would come up and ask me for letters of recommendations for college, but usually I just met them during chance encounters.

During those times, parents would almost always talk about their sons and daughters as children. They would point out other teenagers and say, "We've known them since pre-school!" or "I remember when...". Parents seem in awe at how much their children have grown, and how independent their children have become as they prepare to join the adult world.

What I took away from many of those conversations is that parents see their kids with a sort of triple-vision: they see the child of the past, the teenager of the present, and they look for hints of the adult of the future. In some ways, this complicates the relationship of the parent and the teenager, because to the teenager, the parent is a static character; always the same mom and dad.

One time, I watched a teenager act ugly and speak with exasperation toward his mother, who was a teacher in our school. She listened patiently, and then when he calmed down, said, "Thanks for telling me everything I've done wrong. Good thing we both know I've done a lot of things right."

To me, that is the most important thing I know about parenting teenagers: parents do a lot of things right. Don't let teenagers say otherwise.