Advanced parenting: The Teenage Years

It’s nice to read that there are still some good things going on out there. I have a friend who has a 13, almost 14, year old daughter. This daughter approached her mom and let her know she was thinking about having sex with her boyfriend and asked for the appropriate contraceptives and STD preventatives. This mom asked her friends for advice on things she should talk about with her daughter to help her be prepared for this advanced step into becoming a woman. The advice given was amazing and ran the gamut from preparing for the emotional and physical let-down to asking how she is prepared to deal with the consequences should the contraceptives not work to how to make sure to keep things discreet so she doesn’t develop a reputation in her school for being easy.

This morning, my friend posted an update. She showed her daughter the post and all the responses and they had a great discussion. A while later, the mother heard her daughter talking/arguing to herself in her room, then playing her guitar for some calm. Later on, she came back to her mom and said that it was a lot to think about, more than she had realized and decided she wasn’t ready after all and had more thinking to do.

To me, this shows that it is possible to raise children to be critical thinkers, to raise them to have trust in us as parents, to be the kind of parents our children *can* trust so they can talk to us about these things and make informed decisions for themselves. It is a rough world, with more and more good and bad information being available via all kinds of forms of technology. Ask yourself – would you rather your child come to you and ask you about serious things such as this? Or just go to google and find out god only knows what? I see this as a step in taking parenting back from the internet. It made me so happy for this mother/daughter team and steps up my resolve to be that kind of a parent for my son.