Survival Guide for Parents of Teens – Part One

Teens are great. They are becoming adults and exploring the world. They are going through many changes both physically and mentally. They often are driven by over-active hormones that they don’t understand. As a parent of teens I will share some experiences in this series of articles that I have found helpful to make these exciting years a positive experience and not a battle ground.

Music

A teen recently told me that he and his father fell out over music. I have been there and know what he means. My father never liked pop music. He would always ask us to “turn down that noise”. When we were in the car he would always choose the channel on the car radio. We would sit there and sulk as that was not the music we wanted to hear.

Different problem today

Now we have a different problem. All the kids have MP3 players or iPods. They can be with us in the car yet they can be totally in a world of their own. We are sharing a physical space but we are not together in any real sense of the word. I decided that it was not making for a good family for us all to be sitting there on a long journey and not sharing anything. We could each have been sitting on a train with the other seats being occupied by complete strangers.

Steve’s secret

Steve has lovely kids, now in their early twenties and all through the teenage years he enjoyed a special relationship with them. And he told me the secret of this and I have tried it with my own family and it seems to work. This is what he told me. When you are in the car together let them choose the music. It may not be what you’d like but it will give you an opening into their world. If you don’t like a track just tell them and discuss the reasons why. When I tried it I even found I liked some of their music.

Ipods

Steve also advised that I get an adapter to plug the iPod or MP3 player into the car cassette player. This way you really give them control of the play list and you can engage them in conversation about their choices. This has brought us closer together in many ways.

Shared likes

I found that they liked the tracks of the ancient rock band “Queen”. They thought it was really cool to have a Dad who knew all the words to Bohemian Rhapsody! I got serious street cred with their friends that day.

The serious point

The world teens inhabit today is nothing like the world when I was that age. We need common things to share to be able to communicate in any meaningful sense. Music is a great leveller. It can be a starting point for many other conversations. All parents want their teenage children to become adults with whom it is a pleasure to spend time. Young adults that we are proud to say are our offspring. My wife and I do not want little clones of us and our likes and dislikes. I want to love them as real individuals in their own right.

It works

Try it – I have found it works. You may even discover that there is some new music out there that you quite like. And we have found that in a true spirit of sharing that they now like some of my music. And there haven’t been too many times when I have had to grit my teeth to avoid shouting “Turn that rubbish down”. Honest!