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Parenting teenagers is a game that has to be tailored to your teenager's character and evolve along with your teenager's development. But, one thing remains steady throughout: a focus on the relationship. Research is clear that the most powerful protective factor when it comes to parenting teenagers is the quality of their relationship with their parents. That means the better your relationship is with your teenager the more protected they are from the dangers of growing up. A good quality relationship with your teenager has characteristics like openness, trust, respect, empathy and understanding, support, encouragement, fun and quality time, adaptability, respect for boundaries, tolerance of idiosyncrasy and the ability to mend the relationship when things go wrong. This last point is where I find many parents. The relationship started to go wrong and somehow the parents weren't able to fix things again with their teenager. This leaves their teenager in trouble and more isolated at a time when they might need their parents the most.

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As a therapist it's my job to help parents understand what went wrong and how to make their way back to a healthy relationship with their teenagers. There are important factors to understand like generational and cultural differences between teenagers and parents and new challenges like social media and cyberbullying.  Important is a growing willingness on the part of parents to allow teenagers to learn from their own actions and to switch parenting stances from one involving lots of direct control and insistence on obedience to one where teenagers gain more and more experience in a role of pseudo-adulthood that is supported and limited by parents. This approach give teenagers lots of practice in exercising their judgement and experiencing the associated consequences while at the same time having regular access to their parents' knowledge, wisdom and emotional support. This allows parents to be seen more as allies and less as enforcers to be evaded. It also creates confident, self-reliant and emotionally wise teenagers.

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Another important and practical part of parenting is deal making and conditional support, the discipline side of the balance. Setting up these deals and conditions with teenagers is tricky. They tend to make lots of mistakes, break trust and act without consideration. It's my job as a psychotherapist to help parents navigate these difficulties and avoid predictable pitfalls that turn the relationship into a struggle for power that the parent is destined to loose. But good deal making and conditional support side step these issues and create a situation where teenagers learn a lot about responsibility and how, in reality, it is inseparable from freedom and privilege.

Below is a common list of symptoms that will help you determine if you're having difficulty parenting.