by Michael Grose ©

Australia's No 1 parenting educator!

What's with teens today?

Last week I took a phone call from a journalist from the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, who wanted my opinion on the current state of play with teenagers in Australia. I’ve given him background information before so I was happy to help.

I gave him some essential tips about successfully raising teens, but more about that later.

He told me that there’s been an increase in the number of school suspensions of teenagers due to anti-social behaviour including: drug-taking, videoing of fighting and bullying behaviours, racism, and sexual activity at school.

He wanted to know if Australian schools were experiencing similar problems.

My initial response was that these types of behaviours, while relatively new to Hong Kong, are not so unusual here.

Schools for some time in Australia have had to develop strategies to deal with a range of behaviours that would quite frankly, shock the pants off people of past generations.

Parents and teachers in Hong Kong are now facing a similar set of circumstances that parents and teacher are experiencing in many western countries.

That is, teenagers today courtesy of modern media, the internet and other circumstances see things, know things and do things earlier than teens in the past.

And they are now growing up at the speed of light. Generational bracket-creep is a fact of life.

Everyone knows that forty is the new thirty for older generations.  Now eighteen is the new twenty-one, sixteen is the new eighteen and thirteen is the new fifteen for young people.

The journo was a little shocked. I could sense that he felt more than a little powerless . After all, he was a parent himself so his interest in the topic was both personal and professional.

So what do we do about young people? How should parents raise young people today?

Well, we don’t put our heads in the sand, cross our fingers and hope for the best when kids move into adolescence.  There is plenty of evidence that effective parenting makes a massive difference to young people’s outcomes, as does keeping young people connected and engaged at school.

Here’s a quick rundown of the main tips I gave this journalist for parenting 21st teenagers:

1.      Build relationships with young people. It’s a fact of life that having a decent relationship with your teenager will give you some leverage. That means you need to work hard to develop relationships with teenagers. Ideally these relationships have been developed in childhood, but if they haven’t it’s not too late. There are a number of things you can do. Check out Bringing out the Best in Teenagers for more information.

2.     Be their parent, not their friend. This may seem like a cliché but being their parent has real meaning. Be willing to set some boundaries rather than lower them, particularly around areas such as going out, parties and  the use of alcohol. In fact, it means saying no to alcohol, before the age of eighteen. More on this topic in my Blog.

3.     If you can’t stand the heat..........There’s a great deal of heat, not to mention hormones, involved in raising teens so you need to be willing to engage them in robust conversations, challenge their views and support them as they grow up. You need to enjoy the thrust and parry involved in raising a young person.

4.     Talk with other parents. Talking with parents of your young person’s friends is vital. Young people are highly connected through social media, and other communication technology, yet parents are frequently disconnected from each other and raise their kids in isolation. Teens tend to gang up on parents, saying things such as ‘everyone else is drinking at the party.’  ‘Is that right? I’ll just check that one out for myself’ needs to be your attitude. Check with other parents. Better still. Draw strength from other parents so you can set some limits on their behaviours.

5.     Attend to their mental health. Young people live with a type of pressure not experienced by  any other generation of teenagers. Increasingly, schools are attending to the emotional and social wellbeing of young people and their efforts need to supported by parents.  Get some ideas in my Unwinding ebook.

The challenge for parents is not merely to survive their young person’s adolescence (although that’s a worthy goal), or even to get their young person through high school unscathed.  These are no longer the end games for parenting teens. 

The real task is to prepare teenagers for the years between 18 and 25, because negotiating the next steps after school are becoming the trickiest years of all for teens. That’s why it’s doubly important that you stay in the parenting game with your teens so you can effectively guide them through the abundance of freedoms they face and myriad lifestyle choices that they are required to make. 

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Michael Grose is a leading parening educator, renowned author of seven parenting books and runs parenting seminars around Australia.  He is also the 'Body & Soul' Parenting columnist of the Herald Sun, reaching 6 million readers every Sunday!  For more information about Michael Grose plus great parenting advice and resources visit www.parentingideas.com.au . 

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