Teens and Parental Authority

Physical changes, hormonal changes and constantly changing moods and thought processes of a teenaged child can be quite scary. The way teens seem to rebel and try to find faults with everything their parents do such as their values, political thoughts, lifestyle and attitudes may repel parents and parents may want to just let them go their own ways and not bother about them. While parents need to learn that they cannot control their teenage child�s lives, they also need to strike a balance by deciding where they will draw the boundaries. Parents may leave some choices to the adolescents, discuss some decisions with the adolescents while they stand firm and use their parental authority that certain decisions can only be made by them.

You may need to ease the transition of your teenage children from the protected home life to the rough world but you do not have be there forever. There is a time when children don�t need much direct intervention from parents but they may have to follow certain rules of the house until they are adults. Most children learn some of the skills they need to live life, by the time, they are a teenager. You need to find the fine line between responsibilities and freedom you can give to your growing adolescent, according to his or her age and set the �no negotiation� areas in cases of hazardous habits such as smoking, drugs and violence.

You may have a long dinner table talk with your teens to decide when he or she can drive and how far he or she can go while driving, chores that will be the duty of their teenager, foreign language your child want to learn or career choice of the child. Clothing and makeup can be topics where there can be lot of tussles between you and your child but you can have long talks with your child to see where you both can compromise. You need to let the teenagers some of their own decisions, so that they can develop decision-making skills but independence of the child should only be proportional to their responsible attitudes. Poor judgments or dangerous behaviors may be excused or put curtails on adolescent�s freedom using your parental authority depending on the intensity of the aberration and what they did to correct the situation.