Parenting Your Teen - Trust

Does this sound familiar? "If everybody jumped off a cliff, would you?” I used to hear that from my parents. I guess that came from fear that we'd be dumb enough to follow the pack anywhere, anytime. I didn't get their fear then, but I get it now. Raising teenagers can be pretty challenging to say the least.

The majority of teen-agers are good people, but they sure get a bad rap. Some families seem to go through the teen years with little struggle and others find teen years tiring and emotional.
Trust
Parents get stuck sometimes because they see trust as an either/or situation. The teen lies, breaks curfew, experiments with drugs or does something that’s damaging to trust. The parents feel they have lost all trust in their teen.

If we view trust as a matter of degree instead of all or nothing, we may not feel so let down.

Put trust on a scale from 1 to 10: 1 being the least amount of trust, 10 the most.

For example, if your child comes in late, well after his curfew, your trust may be reduced from 9 down to a 3; that’s 6 trust levels.
Trying to get back to a high trust level will be difficult if you try to go from a 3 to a 9 all at once.

So talk about and agree on what changes and/or behaviors need to occur to go from a 3 to a 4, then from a 4 to a 5, a 5 to a 6 and so on.
In this way, everyone is involved; parents have a way of monitoring their teen’s progress and the teen has something to work toward. The incentive is, the more trust you have, the more freedom you get.

Show you have faith in them. Often, they doubt themselves and what they can do. Having an ally in the form of a caring, supportive adult can help kids achieve things they never dreamed. Letting them know you believe in them is the first step to teaching them how to believe in themselves.