4 Things To Get Your Teenage Children To Open Up To You

Teenagers' lives are often a closed book to parents and however hard we may try they simply will not let us open this book and take a look at what is inside. But how are we going to keep our children safe and help them to develop into self-confident and self-sufficient adults if we are not sure what they are doing, where they are going, who they are seeing, what they think and how they feel?

Well, here are 4 tips that might help to open that book just enough to take a glimpse inside.

Tip 1 – Begin when your kids are young. It is much simpler to keep a relationship rolling along than it is to start it up initially and this is particularly true when it comes to our children. If we begin literally from the day they are born and build a close and strong relationship with them then life will be reasonably easy when they reach those difficult teenage years. But, if we maintain our distance from our children, or simply do not have the time to get close to them when they are young, then it will become increasingly difficult to do so as they grow older.

Tip 2 – Find common ground. All of us have things which we enjoy doing by ourselves but it is also important for partners to share interests and to have a few things, like cooking, gardening or hiking which they enjoy doing together. This is not only the case with partners however and should also extend to parents and their children. Accordingly, find something, and preferably a number of things, that you and your children can enjoy together and which provides you with a common interest and something to talk about.

Tip 3 – Take time to listen to your children and maintain an open mind. During their teenage years children often form opinions very quickly and often without a sufficient understanding of the issues at hand. This means that they will sometimes make comments that you find concerning or which you simply neither like nor agree with. Take the time however to listen to what they have to say and try not to be judgmental. It is of course to tell them that do not agree with what they are saying or do not approve of something provided you go on to explain why and do not turn what you are saying so that becomes an attack on them.

Tip 4 – Make time for your kids. One of the principle concerns for many teenagers is that they do not get to spend sufficient time with their parents and this is often viewed as a matter of their parents simply not caring enough about what they are doing or how they are feeling. One important result of this is that teenagers also often feel unable to talk to their parents if they have a problem and need some help.

Many of us lead busy lives but were we talking about a client at work instead of our own kid you can bet your bottom dollar that we would make the time necessary to spend with that client. Well, our children are much more important than any client and so it really should not be too difficult to make some time each day, or at least every week, to devote ourselves solely to our kids for a while.

There are many ways of ensuring that we spend sufficient time with our children and frequently it is just a case of organizing our time for efficiently. One easy way to meet our aims is to make sure that the entire family sits down to dinner each evening and that this is a time to both eat and talk. Another way to spend time with your teens is to drive them to school every morning instead of letting them ride the bus. Yet another suggestion is to play sport together once or twice a week. There are countless ways to make time for your children if you just your mind to it.

Parenting is not easy and this is especially true when it comes to parenting teens but always remember that hundreds of thousands of parents are already experienced these problems and will be only too willing to give you some parenting tips if you just ask for it.