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Q: My nearly
20-year-old daughter has finished one semester and wants to quit college to
work in retail. She is dating a nice boy, who lacks focus as well. She ignores
our advice to press on with college, wanting to work and spend time with her
boyfriend. My husband’s ready to charge her rent and health insurance if she
stops attending school. How can we help her realize what she’s throwing away?
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A. In short, you can’t. There are some lessons that adult
children—and she is an adult—have to learn the hard way. You can’t continue to
manage her life for herself. What you can do is let her make her own decisions,
even though you see the path she’s selecting as far from ideal.
However, you can inform her that since she has chosen to leave
school, she will need to start paying rent. I think most health insurance plans
allow for you to keep adult children on until around age 26, and that would be
a nice gesture on your part if you can afford to keep her on your insurance for
a few years. The realities of rent/board, car upkeep (payments, insurance,
gas), and her other necessities (phone, share of cable TV, etc.) will eat up
her paycheck faster than she imagined. That will be a bigger reality check than
any lecture you can give her.
I would consider enacting a “lease” agreement with her, in
writing, what chores she’s expected to do around the house and what amount
she’ll pay each month (and the due date) for room and board. Leave nothing to
interpretation--will save both of you much grief in the long run. Then back
off, remembering that what she does at 20 isn’t necessarily what she’ll be
doing at 25. Let her discover for herself how "fun" working and
paying her own bills. She's old enough to fail--or succeed--on her own.
The headline screamed the warning: “Teen Stress Rivals That
of Adults.” American teens report experiences with stress that follow a similar
pattern as adults, according to a new survey released this month by the
American Psychological Association (APA). In
fact, during the school year, teens say their stress level is higher than
levels reported by adults in the past month. For teens and adults alike, stress
has an impact on healthy behaviors like exercising, sleeping well and eating
healthy foods.
The sobering news for parents is that the findings from Stress
in America™: Are Teens Adopting Adults’ Stress Habits? suggest that unhealthy
behaviors associated with stress may begin manifesting early in people’s lives.
“It is alarming that the teen stress experience is so similar to that of
adults. It is even more concerning that they seem to underestimate the
potential impact that stress has on their physical and mental health,” said
Norman Anderson, CEO/executive vice president of APA,
in a press release.
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The study found that stress levels during the school year
far exceeds what teens believe to be healthy and tops adults’ average reported
stress levels. Even during the summer, teens reported their stress during the
past month at levels higher than what they believe is healthy. Many teens also
report feeling overwhelmed (31 percent) and depressed or sad (30 percent) as a
result of stress. More than one-third of teens report fatigue or feeling tired
(36 percent) and nearly one-quarter of teens (23 percent) report skipping a
meal due to stress.
“Parents and other adults can play a critical role in
helping teens get a handle on stress by modeling healthy stress management
behaviors,” said Anderson. What can
you do to help your teen (or younger child) reduce stress?
- Don’t overemphasize grades. Yes,
doing well in school is important, but much of the time we drill the
mantra “get good grades” at the expense of all else. We need to remember
that grades don’t matter as much as our child’s health and well being. That
grades are only part of the picture of his growing up. That grades can’t
replace characteristics like honor and trust and respect and kindness.
- Don’t project your fears on your kids.
Sometimes, it’s our own fear of being labeled a failure as a parent that
propels us to push our kids too hard in school, in sports, and at home.
When you find yourself becoming too agitated about the results, step back,
take a deep breath, and realize that it’s probably your own fear talking.
- Don’t live your child’s life. This
goes along with “don’t project your fears.” We should remember that our
children will likely pick a different path than perhaps we would have for
them—and that’s okay. It might be a career that we think has no potential
or for which they might not be ideally suited. It could be the decision to
drop a sport they previously enjoyed. We need to let them live their own
lives, no matter what that might look like (with the caveat that we still
need to step in when there’s real danger involved or laws being broken).
- Don’t forget to allow for fun.
Sometimes, our teenagers get so involved with classes, college
applications, extracurricular activities (for those college applications),
that they forget there’s more to life than school. Sometimes, we’re the
ones pressuring them to do more homework, more studying, more classes,
more volunteering. Make sure you encourage them to have fun, to relax, to
do nothing, and to spend time with family and friends.
- Don’t forget to listen. Teenagers
still need parents, and really listening to what they’re saying—and not
saying—can clue us in to how they’re handling everything. Much of the
time, they act like they can shoulder the world, but in reality, they
still need us to help them with boundaries.
Above all, remember that you need to take care not to be
constantly stressed, either, as that’s not an example for our children to
emulate. Take breaks, pull back, let go, and enjoy your children. Reduce the
stress in your own life to help lower the stress in theirs.
Until next time,
Sarah
How happy are you as a parent? That’s a question that has
been bouncing around social media and the Internet lately, especially since new
research from sociologist Jennifer Glass indicated that being an American
parent doesn’t mean you’re happy.
Her research
seems to contradict the widespread belief that being a parent makes you happier
and wealthier. “If you go ask parents, they’ll tell you, ‘Being a parent is
great. I love my kids. It’s best thing I’ve ever done,’” said Glass. “Then you
go to the empirical data, and find that all types of parenthood have negative
effects on happiness and mental health.”
Glass posits that parenting produces fewer emotional
benefits than other adult social roles. “Employment and marriage provide you
with money and social status,” she said. “Parenthood doesn’t provide you with
either of those and exposes you to more stress, which either cancels out or
exceeds the emotional rewards of having children.”
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What Glass’s research says to me is that we’ve turned child
rearing into something difficult, hard, and downright burdensome to mothers in
particular. We’ve become parents who are so concerned about everything we do as
we rear our children that we’ve forgotten to enjoy them, to relax, to not sweat
the mistakes (theirs or ours).
In short, we’ve made parenting all about what we do as opposed to who we are. What we do has less impact than who we are.
Parents who accept the fact that children will misbehave sometimes, that they
will choose to do the wrong thing despite our best efforts to steer them to the
right thing, will be happier in the long run. Why? Because we know that it’s
not entirely up to us how our kids turn out—our children have a very real part
in that.
Mothers and fathers can have a more relaxed, happy and
playful parenthood when they stop living like every decision they make will
make or break their child’s future. Yes, we still need to have a care in how we
raise our children, but we can also relax and stress about the mistakes we make
along the way. We can have fun with our children and not stress about the
misbehavior (although we do need to discipline them for those wrongdoings).
Live your life as a parent by realizing it’s not all up to
you how your child turns out and you will have a happier parenthood, one that
is filled with joy, fun, wonder, and above all, love.
Until next time,
Sarah
Can you handle the truth about parenting?
Most parents want to believe that if they do everything
right—are the world’s best parent—then their kids will be perfect. We want to
know that what we do, or what we don’t do, is of utmost importance in forming
our children into responsible, respectful and resourceful human beings.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is that no matter how good a parent you are, your
child is still capable, on any given day, of doing something despicable,
disgusting and depraved.
That’s the cold, hard truth that we don’t want to face.
That’s the reason why good kids can come from truly horrible homes. That’s the
reason why kids from good homes sometimes go off the rails and do terrible, bad
things.
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So what’s a parent to do when faced with the cold, hard
truth? The right thing, of course.
The right thing is not enrichment classes, team sports,
individual sports, after school activities, good grades, etc., etc., and so
forth. Those simply teach a child skills. The right thing is much harder than
the helping a child excel at something.
The right thing is teaching our children the value of human
life, the value of responsibility, the value of respectfulness, the value of
being thoughtful, kind, considerate, compassionate, and reverent.
The right thing is making our children feel bad when they
misbehave, so that they will choose a better path. The right thing is to make
our children responsible for their actions by levying appropriate punishments
for misdeeds.
The right thing is realizing that, while we should do our
very best to raise our children to be upstanding citizens, our kids have the
final say in how they turn out. In other words, as parents, we don’t raise our
child. The child raises the child. We simply provide the framework for him to
do so.
Parents should do the right thing not for the immediate
rewards, but for the intangible future. What will you do?
Until next time,
Sarah
It’s apparent you’re a Parent Detective if you…
- React
to anything out of the ordinary in relation to your children with thoughts
of “Why is she doing that?” and “I need to find the reason behind his
behavior.”
- Spend
more time trying to uncover the whys of your children’s wrong behavior
than dealing with the misbehavior itself.
- Frequently
give your kids a “pass” because of “extenuating circumstances,” because they
must be tired, worn out, upset, etc.
If you find yourself doing any of the above on a regular
basis, you’ve been playing Parent Detective. A Parent Detective is one how
searches for answers instead of solving problems. She’s more concerned with
what goes on behind-the-scenes than with the “crime” in front of her. This
means she also tends to ignore or not seriously address any misdemeanors, which
turns what started out as petty misbehaviors into major problems.
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The main problem with this type of parenting is that you
spend way too much effort worrying about things that aren’t worth the time. It
doesn’t make you a better parent if you understand everything about your
child—it makes you an ineffective parent because you’re constantly assessing
the why and forgetting about the what.
The what is what’s
most important. We should be more concerned with the what of our children’s behavior than the why. Sure, we need to point out the heart issues, but that doesn’t
mean we give them a pass on the misbehaviors because we know the reasons. So
many times, parents simply focus on finding out the why that they forget to address the what.
Here’s an example of a Parent Detective in action. Your
preteen daughter starts “forgetting” do her daily chore of giving the cat fresh water. A Parent Detective would start worrying what happened to make her
forget. Is it hormones? Is it too much schoolwork and not enough fresh air?
Maybe her diet needs adjusting….
As the questions pile up, what do you think happens to the
missed chore? Nothing. The daughter continues to forget, the mother continues
to remind her, and nothing changes.
Now the parent who’s not playing detective would simply
address the problem: the constantly missed chore—by giving the girl an offer
she couldn’t refuse, namely a consequence so big she wouldn’t dare not do the
chore. And suddenly, the daughter who had acted so surprised every time the
mother said she hadn’t refilled the cat’s water has no trouble at all doing
that simple job each morning.
So make it a resolution for 2014 to stop playing Parent
Detective. You’ll be much less stressed about parenting, that’s for sure!
Until next time,
Sarah
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