What I want for my teenagers is for them to have respect, take responsibility and be resilient.
The difficulty is how to teach teenagers resilience in the age of instant gratification. The answer is to let them fail; they need to learn to pick themselves up. Life is not perfect and too often as parents we try to keep our kids in a perfect world, like driving them to school just because it is raining. This can be so hard as a parent: we want everything to be just perfect for our precious progeny, but for them to be happy they need to know what it is to struggle and achieve.
We no longer would tell them what to do. We would ask them what they were doing.
The shift to asking also helped us listen, and respect the choices they made. This was a massive step in how we parented, and we did not get it right all the time.
The other thing we do is help our kids have downtime. Dinner time is about sharing food and sharing conversation...continue here.
-- Naomi Simson
