Effective Families Are Built From the Ground Up
Written by Craig Rogers, Posted on , in Section Family Matters
Everbody knows what it feels like to try and get a job done when your hearts not in it. Some mindless task, it could be digging a hole, it could be doing your taxes, but whatever it is, it feels like it takes a billion hours to finish. Sadly, this is the feeling that many parents feel every single day as they struggle with their teenage children.
Raising teenagers is hard, even under the best circumstances. The teen years are a time of massive transformation, and no one gets out unscathed. The hormonal changes, the addition of previously unknown responsibilities, establishing identity, asserting independence, discovering love, discovering heartbreak, emerging mental health issues, balancing school with a social life, a home life, and maybe even a job. These are all the things that teenagers have to deal with. In fact, it's just a tiny sample of everything they've got to manage. Which, as a parent, it can be easy to dismiss because we have to do so much more. But it's important to remember, all of these changes are brand new. The tween years and younger are basically spent playing and, for most kids, with very few worries.
Parenting Teenagers Is One of the Most Difficult Things That Anyone Could Ever Do -- But You Can Do It
Some parents are bitter towards their kids, in a jealous kind of way. Some parents resent what little respect or understanding or appreciation they get from their kids. And they let their kids know by acting cold, by saying 'no', or through even more severe punishments.
This article is not trying to say that parents create the tension that causes problems in their families. Tension emerges organically in almost all organizing structures. Think of a building. The reason we have load bearing walls is because we need to distribute the tension and pressure resulting from the weight stacked on top of it.
All of a family's 'issues' are like the weight and pressure that bear down on the lower floors of a building. You have to make sure that the walls can bear the load. That the building has a solid foundation.
If a family is a building, parents are the foundation, the ground floor and even the next few floors above it. Parents have to carry the weight of making sure the building doesn't fall. The floors above it will do their job so long as the floors below do theirs.
