PARENT TRAP

What Kate knows for sure about teenagers

Teenagers are tricky old things. So tricky, in fact, I am limited in how much I can even write about our kids without being hung, drawn and quartered by them. So pretty much I am allowed to say nothing.

We have (fortunately or unfortunately, whichever way you look at it) four teenagers. And with them come four very different personalities, characters and outlooks. Broadly speaking, we have the activist one, the party one, the shy one and the academic one. What they all have in common, thank the Lord, is a great sense of humour. I’m not sure how we’d survive the teenage years without one.

But what such variance in personality types has taught us is how each individual needs to be parented differently. A one-size-fits-all approach does not tend to work.

While the black-and-white approach is good in theory, like most of parenting it takes a hell of a lot of grey to parent kids. Buckets of compromise, lots of time where expectations are thrown out the window and times when you may even ask yourself how this person is related to you.

It also bears remembering they are growing up in a different world to what we did. Playing Spotlight with the neighbours round the street until it gets dark and Mum calls you back for dinner (by shouting, not texting) is a million miles from where these kids are at. They’re more likely to be playing Fortnite, communicating through text and ordering Uber Eats. But the way we parent has changed too.

When I was a kid, my parents’ expectation was that we caught the bus to any school sport or we just didn’t play it. There was no-one on the sideline cheering us on. We carried our own gear.

These days, kids are chauffeured to and from their games, often with both Mum and Dad providing a sideline support squad or carrying the gear. Likewise, when I got to school-leaving age, what university I went to or what I did was up to me to organise. Whereas these days, it’s parents making all the phone calls, and escorting their teens in and out of potential tertiary institutions.

What I’m saying is, there’s more bum-wiping these days, more molly-coddling and more micromanaging. I know this because when we refuse to do some of these things for our teens because “it’s not how we were raised”, there’s an outcry about how harsh that is compared to “everyone else’s parents”.

Basically, no matter what the personality of your teen, two catch-cries remain the same – how hard done by they are and how everyone else’s parents are nicer than you. If you can take most of that stuff on the chin, you may survive. I can’t say for sure because we’re not out the other side yet. People tell me it gets easier. All I know is, with the pot pourri of personalities we have, it’s an interesting ride so far.