Are you helping your teenager build decision-making muscles, or will they be as weak as children when they leave home?
Teens need to be allowed to make more and more decisions, but as they do they will naturally make mistakes. It’s a messy process! The real problem comes when parents don’t allow them to make decisions. That may be easier and less stressful on the parents, but it isn’t doing the kids any favors. In fact, it leaves kids weak and unable to make good decisions after they leave home.
Here’s how I see it. In the younger years, parents mostly need to stand in front of their kids to prevent them from taking a dangerous course of action. As they grow older, parents should gradually move along side their kids, encouraging smaller decisions. But when the teen years come around, parents need to mostly get out of the way when it comes to decisions that aren’t of a permanent or life-altering nature. Getting out of the way will be a first step toward strengthening a teenager’s decision-making skills for the rest of their life. Continue reading “Decision-Making Muscle Building”
Most of us tend to parent the same way we were parented. Even those of us who vowed, “I’ll never do that to my kids,” often fall back to imitating what we saw from our parents. The problem is that the world has changed. Our parents would have been horrified by what our kids casually experience and discuss amongst themselves today. Things are different, and your kids are changing every day as well. Are you keeping up?