The Dilemmas of Parenting Teenagers
How do you know when you have grown? Is it when someone irritates you and you notice the feeling and don’t need to react? Is it when you try to see someone else’s perspective even before they ask you to?
I spent many years inside my volcano of emotions. Feeling the lava bubbling and powerless to contain it. I actually had no desire to contain. Feeling righteously correct felt good. I reveled in feeling morally superior. That’s why people love to have enemies. We love to have “a bad guy” to direct our negativity at. It is simple and rewarding: “I am good and correct and you are not!”
Over the years, I have become more attuned to my inner state and recognized the complexity of others' experiences, often unrelated to me. We all live side-by-side with our own simultaneous stories.
I have also begun the journey of learning how to pull myself back before I make 101 assumptions.
Yet, my greatest challenge lies in interactions with my 15-year-old son. The swagger of a teenager can grate on one's nerves if taken personally. When you hear that what you have to say isn’t interesting and your genuinely caring insights are dismissed, it can feel heartbreaking (or worse) like betrayal.
Parenting a teenager is a delicate dance. We aim to instill respect, humility, confidence, awareness, and analytical skills – a balancing act of seemingly contradictory traits. To make them productive members of society.
How do I teach my son that he has so little experience and he is best off being humble and respectful while also teaching him to feel confident in his unique perspective? How do I teach this tic-tok watcher, who thinks tic-tok is an official source that he may not know everything? How do I gently remind him that his knowledge may be limited without sounding condescending (even when I really want to be)?
The dilemmas of parenting teenagers…
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