4 Things To Assist In Getting Your Teenage Children To Open Up To You

Our teenagers' lives are often a closed book to parents and however hard we might try they simply will not let us open this book and read what is inside. But how are we going to protect our children and guide them into becoming self-sufficient and self-confident adults when we do not know what they are doing, where they are going, who they are spending time with, what they are thinking and how they are feeling?

Well, here are four tips which might help to open that closed book at least enough to get a glimpse inside it.

Tip 1 – Begin when your kids are young. It is a lot easier to keep a relationship moving along than it is to start it up in the first place and this is especially true with our kids. If we begin from the day they are born and build a strong and close relationship with them then life will be fairly easy when they reach those difficult teenage years. However, if we keep our distance, or simply do not have time to get close to them when they are young, then it is going to get increasingly difficult to do so as they grow older.

Tip 2 – Find common ground. All of us have things which we like to do on our own but it is also important for partners to share interests and to have some things, like gardening, cooking or hiking which they enjoy doing together. This is not only the case with partners though and should also extend to parents and their children. Accordingly, seek out something, and preferably two or three things, that you and your children can enjoy doing together as a family and that will give you a common interest to talk about.

Tip 3 – Make time to listen to your children and maintain an open mind. During their teenage years children frequently form opinions very quickly and frequently without a sufficient understanding of the issues at hand. This in turn means that they will often come out with comments that you find concerning or which you simply neither like nor agree with. Nevertheless, take the time to listen to what they have to say and try not to be judgmental. It is of course to tell them that do not agree with them or do not approve of something provided you go on to explain why and do not turn what you are saying so that becomes an attack on them.

Tip 4 – Spend time with your children. One of the main concerns for many teenagers is that they cannot spend sufficient time with their parents and this is frequently seen as a case of their parents not caring enough about what they are doing or how they are feeling. One major result of this is that teenage children also frequently feel unable to talk to their parents if they have a problem and want help.

Nowadays many of us lead very busy lives but were we talking about a client instead of our own kid you can bet your bottom dollar that we would find the time needed for that client. Well, our kids are far more important than any client and so it really should not be too hard to make some time each day, or at the very least every week, to devote ourselves solely to our kids for a while.

There are many different ways of ensuring that we spend sufficient time with our kids and frequently it is just a matter of organizing ourselves better. One simple way to achieve our aims is to make sure that the whole family sits down to dinner each evening and that this becomes a time to both eat and talk. Another way to spend time with your teenagers is to drive them to school each morning instead of letting them ride the bus. One more idea is to play sport as a family once or twice a week. There are numerous ways to spend time for your kids if you put your mind to it.

Parenting is not easy and this is especially true when it comes to providing help for troubled teens but always remember that hundreds of thousands of parents are already been down this road and are only too willing to let you have some parenting advice if you just ask for it.