Good luck Parents

Monitoring what you think is going on:
I am assuming that most parents want to think that they are closely monitoring their children, especially their teenagers. I have recently asked my mother if she felt that she monitored her children well at all stages of our youth. When my mother replied that she felt that she became better at monitoring us with each one of her children reaching their teenage years, I about fell over in my chair. I am not suggesting that her parenting was negative in anyway or she didn’t monitor us, but her perception on what good monitoring was conflicted with my high school memories. I was the youngest of four children, I caught on fast how to provide a response that my mother would accept and yet I could still do what teenagers do without having consequences. In my family it was a rule that we had to be home for dinner. Catching up on the day was typical table talk however, as us children grew older so did our ability to sensor what we discussed. As learned in class, it is found that adolescents who did not eat dinner with their parents five or more times a week had statistically higher rates of smoking , drinking, marijuana use, fighting, and initiation of sexual activity. I can see the truth to this but I am pretty sure that at least one of us four children was up to one or all of these things throughout our teen years.

This brings me to my point, how do parent really monitor what their children (teens) are doing? Do some parents just luck out and have that “good” child who devotes all of his or her attention on education and school based clubs? I would say that I was an average child growing up, if I found interest in things such as sports activities, my mother would enroll me into the programs carrying the rule that I would be required to stick them out until the end. When I hit high school the only things that seemed important to me was my friends and whatever we were planning. I am not suggesting that all teenagers are out smoking marijuana and drinking but I do feel that no matter how much you monitor teenagers, most are in their autonomous state of thinking. My belief is that parents do need to monitor their children but finding that way to can be tricky. Monitoring to closely can create more deception and monitoring to little bring on countless risk factors. Additionally, I can remember parents of my friends whose parenting style of monitoring was to play the friend roll. In high school, I would always wonder why my parents were not “cool,” and accepting as my friends parents were. Reflecting back to it now they were still being sneaky, they were usually the kid(s) that were raising the bar of rebellious behavior.