My Teenager is Falling in Love 

With big changes in physical appearance and emotions, teens ride on a social roller coaster that, all of a sudden, includes the opposite sex! Encouraging and supporting your children at this time will help them become more socially responsible and aware.
 

By Lynette Balota

Teenage years are a time of great physical and emotional change. This is the time when your child begins to understand his or her own sexuality. Girls and boys start looking at each other in a different perspective. They begin to notice members of the opposite sex and become concerned about how they appear to the other. By this time, being attractive to the opposite sex becomes an important value. This is a normal change for your teenager. That’s why it’s difficult to stop your teenager child from the emotional roller coaster of falling in and out of love.

Encourage Social Development
Teach Responsibility
Keep Communication Lines Open

Encourage Social Development

Because a teenager’s social world is very important to him, it can be difficult to ask him to concentrate on his homework and not go out with friends. Encourage him or her to mix with the opposite sex by going out in groups instead of on single dates. This way, your teenager can learn proper social etiquette in a safe environment and begin to understand some of the differences between men and women. This will help prepare him for more serious relationships when he gets older and will teach him to be comfortable with friends and acquaintances of both sexes.

Encourage your teenager to bring friends home instead of going out all the time. In this way, you get to meet his friends and know them in a non-prying manner. This may help you feel better about the company he keeps. You also get to share in his world and this will help narrow the generation gap between the both of you.

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Teach Responsibility

As a parent, you can help develop good time-management skills so that he can balance the time he spends on his school responsibilities and on his social interests. Set rules and guidelines. Work out some negative consequences if these rules are not adhered to. Even though he is no longer a young child, he is still under your parental care and you need to let him know that, within your household, there are still rules that he has to abide by. You can win his co-operation by getting him involved in goal-setting and problem-solving rather than by exerting your authority over him and insisting that he obey your rules.

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Keep Communication Lines Open

Instead of insisting that your child live by your expectations, try to talk to your child to find out what his ideas are. Use current news to initiate conversation with him. For instance, if you read about a molest case, ask him what he thinks about such incidents. What do his friends have to say? Discuss why people do things like this. From there, you can change the topic subtly to find out how much he knows about human sexuality, or you may have an opportunity to teach him about human sexuality. You may be surprised to learn that he has sensible values and really knows what he is doing.

Often, parents worry that their teenagers will not be able to behave appropriately sexually but parents won’t talk about their fears. Instead, parents end up trying to “investigate” how much their children know and how involved they are. Make sure that your children learn about sexual issues from you rather than from wrong sources. Of course, that means that you have to be comfortable talking about sex…which most of us are not. The solution is to recognise and resolve our own hang-ups so that we become comfortable with the topic of sex and then take responsible for our children’s learning.

As an adult, you are more aware that your child that teens tend to fall in and out of love. There are different types of love which your teenager will experience. Yet, a teenager may find it hard to accept that what he or she feels is merely infatuation or a crush. There is no point insisting that he accept your view. Let him know that you’re interested in what he is going through without seeming to pry too much and without sounding too judgmental. I understand that this is sometimes difficult because communication is tricky and can be easily misunderstood. My point is that you should keep communications lines open so that your teenager can feel free to talk to you when things don’t go right and be open to your advice.


Extracted from Families Today
Issue No 3/96

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