Bringing up children remains a completely hit and miss affair. You just have to invent new rule as you are faced with your own teenage child. Don’t feel like the parent of a teenager? Well, yesterday’s 12 year old has definitely crossed the fence, so there has tongue in check strategies, with a lot of good sense thrown in to help you deal with the changes:

Forget the stages, some of them last 15 years. The length of this adversarial relationship is in inverse proportion to how mollycoddled and spoilt your children are. Children encouraged to be independent and responsible get out of this zone much faster.

Forget Quality time spending with your kids, because they want to be on their own, they don’t want your full attention. 

When you want to speak to them face to face, they’ll be on the phone with someone else. So don’t loose hope, get with the groove, use the telephone if you want to know what’s on their mind. Call them, even if you’re in the next room and you’ll get full disclosure.

Don’t use your over supervision, just get a system going to get them committed and focused. They’ll take care of the rest themselves. Help them, but don’t do it for them. Let them do it themselves, it might take a while longer finishing, but you’ll have kids who are curious and well informed and doing it themselves.

Don’t try to mould them in the way you want, because they are not the jellies, you try to give any shape, but they are temporarily small version of larger person you’ll know someday. Encourage self reliance, the primary edict being that they don’t come to the adult for every little thing. They then become adept at getting ready on their own, at making toast, getting their cornflakes and emerging unscathed on their side. They will also manage to spend some time on their own without falling to pieces.

Always keep in your mind that they’re going to blame you anyway for any act. Don’t be afraid that they’ll blame you for being bad parents; they are going to blame you for being any kind of parent. This is all part of their individualization in which one adult ego is trampled in to the dust so that one teenage ego may emerge.

They’ll tell you that being a ‘mommy’ is not your job. Being a mummy is being in what the Americans call a relationship, a lifetime roller coaster, one with enough ups and downs to put any self-respecting ocean tide to shame.

Without coddling them, or shielding them from the consequences of their actions, or finding excuses for repeated bad behavior, or indulging in gender inequality, the injustice of the last rankles for life. Be consistent, don’t issue horrific threats one minute and 10 minutes later, overload them with attention and promised treats. You would have got the picture by now. You can hug them in the morning and they’ll tell you in the evening that it happened once, last year. They’ll also yell at you, sometimes tell you that they love you, and tell you don’t understand them, but finally in the end, they will grow out of all this. One day, you’ll have an adult on your hands and the beginnings of a different relationship, but that’s another story.