Roxane Lehmann, Ph.D.

Last week I took part in a panel discussion aimed at reducing teen drinking and drug use. One of the questions dealt with how we can underscore the important role of parents in preventing teen risk-taking without blaming them if their children use or begin to use.

Truth be told, how we parent does matter. Study after study supports this notion. So when our teens mess-up, we often do feel that we are to blame. After all we’re in-charge. Aren’t we?

Pondering this question caused me to think back to how my parenting job changed over the course of my kids’ growing-up years. When my children were very young, I was in-charge. I decided what they got to do, when they’d do it, and who they’d do it with. I was their manager. But my parental control shrank as my children got older and became teens. It had to.

Attempts to maintain tight control – with too many restrictions, warnings, and punishments – can keep teens from learning how to make good decisions for themselves. Plus this type of micromanaging can invite rebellion, causing teens to dedicate all of their energies to out-maneuvering us and eluding our checkpoints.

On the other hand, becoming too hands-off also puts teens at risks. In fact, the more teens feel that they’re truly on their own without their parents’ supervision and guidance, the more susceptible they are to all the major risks – to drinking, drugs, early and unprotected sex, anxiety, depression, and even suicide.

So while we’re still responsible for our children when they become teens, we’re no longer in-charge. At least not totally.

When parenting teens, it makes more sense to think about our power (and responsibility) in terms of influence rather than control. This means our job description needs to change. It’s time to give up our job as our kids’ managers and become their consultants. And not just ordinary consultants – we need to be proactive consultants.

As a proactive consultant, you still make rules, set limits, and enforce consequences – especially when it comes to your teen’s safety and health. But as a proactive consultant you no longer make all the decisions. Instead your new job is to stay connected to your teen and keep the conversations going so that you can collaborate with them and guide them – by helping to manage the risks you can’t eliminate and by helping to train their brains so that they can learn how to make good decisions for themselves.

There is a huge body of research showing the relationship between parenting styles and teen behavior. (A good overview of the protective effects of good parenting can be found here.) But it is not a perfect one-to-one relationship. We cannot be with our teens at every minute. At the end of the day teens will make their own decisions – including decisions about whether to drink or use drugs. Our job is to influence our teens’ decisions by making it harder for them to make bad decisions and easier for them to make good ones.

Parents who think, talk, and act like proactive consultants (termed an authoritative parenting style in the research literature) have lots of influence over their teens’ decisions. The next blog post will take a more detailed look at how these parents go about their job.

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The countdown of days left for holiday shopping has begun. I, however, have typically paid more attention to another kind of count at this time of year. Not wanting to buy a lopsided number of presents, I’ve focused on the gifts per child count. And surely, some of my concern about present parity had to do with a worry about appearing to play favorites.

Jeffery Kluger, author of the new book Sibling Effect, claims that 99% of parents have favorites and that the other 1% is lying. But I have a hunch that in a good number of these cases something else might be going on.

Do you worry about playing favorites? How about your parents – did they have a favorite child?

How we were parented matters because we bring our growing-up experiences with us when we raise our own kids. If we think our parents got something wrong, we’re determined for it to be different for our kids.

My mother ran our household, and she ran a tight ship. As different as my siblings and I were, my mom believed “fair” meant treating all of us the same – the same rules, expectations, punishments, and rewards.

As you’ve undoubtedly guessed, I was determined to do it differently. I strived to take my kids’ individuality into account and to give each of them what they needed.

Both my children were equal parts bright, curious, and independent. Both had potential to be difficult. But their needs were definitely different. And although I can honestly say that I did not have a favorite, truth be told, one of my children was much easier for me to parent than the other.

My daughter’s ability and curiosity were expressed through academics, dance, and art – even at a very young age. And she seemed to have been born with more than her fair share of delayed gratification and self-regulation. Thus, before she was four, she’d convinced me that the best thing I could do for her was to stay connected to her while staying out of her way as much as possible. Although doing both those things simultaneously could have been hard to do, it wasn’t difficult for me because I had a good model for doing it: I could pretty much raise her the way I wished that I’d been raised.

My son, on the other hand, was impulsive and loved the adrenaline rush that comes from trying new things and taking risks. I used to joke that he must have been hiding when delayed gratification was handed out. Although it took me a bit longer to figure out his needs, by the time he was seven he’d convinced me that the best thing I could do for him was to stay connected to him while staying in his way as much as possible. I didn’t have a good model for doing this, and my son proved to be much more challenging for me to raise than my daughter.

In fact, in almost every family there is one child who is more challenging to raise than the rest – especially during the teen years. When this happens, it is not about favoritism. And it’s usually not about the parent or the teen. It’s about the goodness of fit: how well a particular parenting style meets the needs of a particular teen.

The next posting will explore what parents of teens need to know about goodness of fit.

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