Effective Parenting: Tweens and Teens

Nerve racking and hard to deal with. When your child becomes a Tween, which is a pre-teen usually between the ages of 11-13, they begin to get lost in the puberty era. This is the hormonal flux that engulfs their very being and every fiber within their existence. These can be especially discouraging and enlightening depending on how the child was raised up to this point.

During this tween and teen period the attitudes will become more frequent, the temper tantrums will return with a vengeance, and the bad elements will become a popular obsession. This aspect is usually only true with children in public schools as they are not as closely watched as those tweens and teens in private academies or those that are home schooled.

So, how can parents survive these years? This article provides tips on effective parenting to take the worry and the guess work out of it.

Effective Parenting: Continuing the Bond

To ensure that you and your child do not grow apart it is important to always remain close. By this, I mean to continue a healthy relationship where bonding is evident in a consistent manner.

Many parents today consider there tweens and teens to be mini-adults. Parents give unlimited space and feel as though it is allowing much needed privacy but in actuality it gives the children a sense of loneliness as if the parents "do not care." This increases the risk that teens and tweens will look for other relationships to fill this void.

Usually the types of relationships that appeal to teens and tweens who lack parental guidance and control will often find solace in those that are controlling, obsessive, wrought with jealousy but hidden in 'devotion'. This gives a false sense of security to the children that these 'relationships' will never end. The more lonely or abandoned the child feels the more of a need for this type of constant contact with harmful influences will transpire.