Navigating through the teen years with your children can be equally difficult for parents and adolescents.
Bill and Pam Farrel share how as parents you effectively shift your parenting style to match every stage of your child’s life. They are the parents of 3 active children and join us to share encouragement from their book .
As children enter into their adolescent years, it’s important to transition right alongside with them by making a few changes to our parenting styles.
“What happens is you pass on those traits, year after year, and you help them take ownership of those traits. One of the things that are really important for a parent to do, as your kids enter that tween and teen year, is to change the way that you parent.”
Bill and Pam explain the shift naturally takes place as our children grow up.
“When your kids are younger, you are very hands on – you are the decision maker. Then you shift a little bit to giving them choices as they enter into, what we call the ‘Oasis years’ that would be like 8-10 or 11.
Then between 10, 11, 12, there is one question that will really help parents navigate those tween teen and college years and that is simply, ‘Tell me why I should say yes?’”
We are reminded that there are major internal and external changes going on inside of our teenagers that are important to remember. Asking our teenagers, ‘What were you thinking?!’ is not the best approach to take while navigating through the teen years.
“Teenagers go through intense change when puberty hits and because of the hormonal changes and physical changes, there seems to be some indication that the body kind of borrows from the brain to do development – so they don’t think is clear as they used to and they don’t think is clear is there going to.”
Instead, Bill and Pam suggest that we need to give our teens the power to start making their own decisions, as difficult as it may be.
“It takes our teens a lot longer to get to the right decision that we would get to very quickly, but what happens, we just lose patience and we start making too many decisions for them and it actually stunts their growth.”
