TACKLING THE NEW TEEN AGE
As an early childhood educator, I felt at home parenting my children through their early years. But parenting teens has felt so much harder.
There is so much to worry about when you have teenagers, and this modern age offers challenges that we never had to face when we were adolescents.
Yes, adolescence is still a time of enormous transition where teens are biologically driven to forge their own identities and values, but there is so much they are negotiating. I recently listened to the Mamamia Podcast Dick Pics, TikTok and Vaping: The Hectic Lives of Teenagers. If you have teenagers in your life, I encourage you to listen.
It is a podcast that illuminates the challenges many of our teens are facing while at the same time offering parents and carers informed strategies to support them.
In this podcast Dr Ginni Mansberg (a GP for 30 years) and parenting specialist and clinical psychologist Jo Lamble (both often appeared on the breakfast TV program Sunrise) talk about the book they have written: The New Teen Age.
It is a book that discusses things we likely know a little about, like the biology and brain structures of teenagers, teen hormones, sexual development and acne.
And it reminds again the importance of sleep, and nutrition, and why privacy, trust and independence matter to our teens. Helpfully, The New Teen Age is a resource for parents.
It offers advice for how to support our teens as they live their lives online, as they encounter cyber-bullies, gaming, sexting, and porn. These topics are not easy ones.
These are pervasive experiences we never had to face.
Take porn for instance. More than 90 per cent of teenage boys have seen online porn and more than 60 per cent of girls have seen online porn. Our teens are yet to learn that porn is not reality. Porn bodies are not normal. Porn sex is not safe sex.
The authors point us to Itstimewetalked.com which is a helpful website that offers resources to help parents and schools equip teens for healthy, safe and respectful relationships. We must not put our heads in the sand. Our children and young people are growing up in this new reality of pervasive porn. Taking away their phones isn’t the answer. They need our help to use their phones in ways that support healthy connections to others. Sending texts to our teens is a way to stay connected and to keep communication open. It is our connection with our teenagers, our capacity to listen to them and hear what they tell us that will keep them safe.
We don’t need to know all the answers, but podcasts and books like these offer us help to support our teenagers to resilience and independence.
Dr Ali Black is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of the Sunshine Coast ablack1@usc.edu.au