Test yourself with these examples:
– Your daughter is sleeping with her boyfriend. What would you do if she became pregnant? Who would you first turn to? What organizations might be your best support?
– Your son is going around with a group of friends and you know that at least two of his friends smoke cannabis. What would you do if the police come knocking on the door one day? Who could best advise you in this situation?
– Your daughter fails an important exam. She is devastated and won’t be consoled by you? Who could you turn to for support?
– Your son’s girlfriend has finished with him. He says he doesn’t care, but he’s become very moody. He isn’t washing or eating very much. You are worried he might be becoming seriously depressed. Who could you turn to? Who might be the best person to talk to your son?
Preparation is one of the unsung skills of confident people.
• Meet regularly with other parents of teens – even though you may moan and groan together sometimes, make sure that the majority of your contacts enjoy being parents most of the time. You can either do this informally with friends or neighbours, or formally by joining a parenting network group. (Your library or the Internet will have details of groups in your area.) The test of whether a group or friends are truly supportive of you is whether you can feel free to share your successes as well as your problems. Try it out by telling someone how pleased you were with a good decision you made or how well you responded in a certain crisis. (Tough medicine, I know, for people who lack confidence!)
• Start and finish each day doing something that you enjoy. How many times do you go to bed feeling stressed and harassed and then wake-up feeling even worse? Get in the habit of making both getting up and going to bed relaxing and self-nurturing experiences. Try taking an aromatherapy bath instead of a shower; listening to your favourite music instead of the depressing news; reading a chapter of an uplifting novel before reading the paper, or pampering your body with luxurious creams before ‘throwing on’ your clothes in the morning.
• Start a new learning activity. Have you ever glanced at your teens’ homework or curriculum and felt woefully aware of how out-of-date some of your education and skills have become? (And, yes, they do rub it in!) Try counteracting the depressing effect of this reality by learning something new. This should be a stretching activity, but an enjoyable one. (You have enough of the daunting kind of challenges in your everyday life!)
• Don’t ignore your own emotional hurts – you can expect plenty during this time from your teenager. By this age he or she should know the tender spots on your Achilles heel. And, unless they are unusually saintly, they will attack you there either because you will not give them what they want or simply because they have some axe to grind with the outside world. Our confidence can never be solid while we have emotional wounds festering inside us. Get into the habit of giving yourself a small treat or getting some extra support as soon as you can after you have been hurt. For example, if you get put down for being your age, immediately ring a good friend who you know will give you some sympathy. Or, should 90% of the meal you spent an hour preparing get left without comment, treat yourself to a 20-minute break listening to your favourite CD.
Your confidence will be even more vulnerable to these kinds of hurts if you are harbouring emotional wounds from other sources as well. For example, we are less likely to stay strong in the face of a taunt or rejection from our teenager if we are still smarting from a quarrel with our partner or disappointment at work, or indeed the put-downs we ourselves received in our teens. If you suspect that this area is a particularly difficult one for you, try my book or audio tape Emotional Confidence, which could help.
• Make time to continue doing an activity that you are good at. In spite of the fact that our teens often seem to be strangers passing in the night, looking after them is still incredibly time-consuming. It is so tempting to give up our free time to running a taxi service for them or because we are tired, just vegetating in front of the telly. Make the time to carry on doing at least one leisure activity which boosts your confidence simply because you know you are good at it. This will counteract the effect of having to live in the uncomfortable state of not knowing whether you are doing the right thing by your teen or not. (Aren’t we so often working for long-term benefits in an atmosphere of short-term angst?!)
• Join an Assertiveness Training or Confidence Building class. I can’t tell you how often I have worked with parents of teens on such courses. Not only will they give you ideas on how to cope and techniques to help you stand up for your rights, I can assure you that you will also have fun and make long-lasting friendships.
Rule 2: Ensure Your Wisdom is One (But Only One) Step Ahead
Adolescence is a time when human brains and bodies go through important phases in their growth. Teenagers begin to develop the ability to think more broadly and deeply. The world that they perceive is much more complex than he or she has yet experienced, and the choices it offers (like ours!) no longer appear simple. The lists of available options are bewilderingly endless. Additionally, this is also the time when academic pressure is hotting up; curricula are more seriously challenging and teenagers are being exposed to a wider range of ideas, people and cultures.
Not surprisingly, therefore, teenagers feel more secure if they think that they can rely on at least one parent to be a reliable source of wisdom on the issues which are of central concern to them and their development at this age.
But of course, I am not suggesting that you need a degree in adolescent development before you start parenting a teen! On the contrary, be assured that a ‘know-all’ parent can be severely damaging to fragile confidence. Children of any age must never feel outclassed by our ‘superior’ adult knowledge or feel that their behaviour, progress or health concerns are merely being judged as typical or atypical of a certain theory or set of statistics on adolescence.
‘I didn’t want to hear about “typical adolescent problems” or “other girls” or “you’ll grow out of it”. I didn’t want to be treated the same as all-the-other-girls but as Anne in her own right.’
Anne Frank
I am convinced that parents who do have some forewarning of what they and their children might expect during the teen years do cope better and are able to be more supportive to their children. During the course of reading this book, you should pick up most of the crucial ‘basics’ in terms of confidence building, but there are some other areas of knowledge that I believe would also be helpful to explore.
In the following Top Tips list I have inserted some questions to ask yourself and discuss with your partner or friends. I haven’t included any answers for two reasons. Firstly, they would probably be out-of-date by the time this book is even printed. Secondly, I am hoping that this book is going to be read by parents from many different countries and cultures around the world and many of the answers could be different for each one of these.
If the questions raise some doubts in your mind (or cause a few heated arguments at home!), this is a sure sign that you may need to do some homework yourself. In my Further Help section at the end of the book, I have recommended several good books and Internet sites, which could help. Alternatively, your local youth service or school should be more than happy to advise you. You may also find some of the answers by looking in teenage magazines, or watching their programmes on TV, or picking the brains of friends or relatives.
But don’t forget that the key to living up to this rule (or any other for that matter) is humility! In this field no one can claim to be an expert for long. It is all too easy to become out-of-date. The lifestyles of teenagers and the issues which concern them change fast and furiously. What was a priority for one child may no longer be relevant for the generation which is only a couple of years behind. Your first child could sail through puberty without an apparent care in the world, while your next child could start exhibiting every symptom of adolescent