Kids & Parenting

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The Great Divide Between Parents and Teens
By Dan Blankenship

If there is one thing I have learned while raising two teenage daughters, it is that parents and teens don’t always see eye to eye. In fact, quite often it is true that this gap in understanding can cause a great deal of stress to permeate the household atmosphere. Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of homesteads out there where teens and parents seem to understand each other perfectly, never arguing over parental authority or decision making. It’s just not the norm.

Parents have experienced the pressures, pitfalls, and emotional distresses that are often a part of the teenage experience. But parents also understand what an exciting and rewarding time teenage years can be. It is a time to figure out who you are and what is truly important in your life. It is also a time when social pressures can keep a person’s stomach tied in knots from day to day. Parents, more often than not, have their children’s best interest at heart when they actively play the role they have been given.

With my own daughters, my advice, my rules, and my opinions are often met with resistance that is hard for me to understand. I guess it is the “you’re just trying to control me” or the “you don’t understand” thought process that I vaguely remember possessing when I was their age. Funny how those days of presenting my case to my parents have been magically erased from my memory banks. It must be the onslaught of parenthood that removes such useless memories. I’m joking, of course.

I’m fully aware most teen/parent disagreements begin with the belief that someone in the relationship is being treated unfairly. That is to be expected. Most all relational disputes start off that way. In most of the cases under my roof, my teenagers were asking for their privileges to be expanded or completely revamped to a level I found almost comical. It’s then that the arguments for their expanded horizons begin to fire off like fully-armed, verbal machine guns: “But Jessi gets to stay out that late” or “Kim saw that movie, and there’s nothing bad in it”, and my favorite, “I’m sixteen now.”

Parenting is not an easy job. It is virtually impossible, sometimes, to convince your child that you have rules and advice inspired by your duty to keep your child from harm wherever possible. And often enough, it is hard for a teen to see the parent’s rules as nothing more than unnecessary limitations placed upon his or her human experience.

As a learning parent, I find it best to try and explain the limitations I have set, why I have set them, and when limitations may be increased. But I am human, and I make mistakes, sometimes setting limitations that are a bit stringent; sometimes I do the opposite.

There are hundreds of books on the market that give instruction about parenting, but very few that give instruction on how to be a teenager that helps a parent through this process. Maybe there needs to be some manuscripts written. That way, teens might relate a little better to the struggle parents go through.

If I could offer one great piece of advice concerning raising teens, it would be this, read Ephesians 6:1 (KJV) which says, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.” That simple verse says a lot for both teen and parent.

If a parent is living for the Lord, the child will be doing the same by following the parent’s wishes. So parents must consistently examine their relationship with the Lord as they make the effort to raise their teens. And teens must make an effort to understand the concerns of their parents, where they originate from, and the fact that parents make mistakes too. This understanding may not eliminate the great divide between parent and teen, but it can begin building one of the swinging rope bridges, maybe.

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