You Want to Do What?: Instant answers to your parenting dilemmas
Aimed at parents of 9-16 year olds, this A-Z of questions and answers covers every conceivable dilemma – from what age you should give your child a mobile phone, to dealing with internet chat rooms.When can your child legally get a job? When can they baby-sit the kid next door? Tackling the trickiest problems head on, Karen Sullivan explains when it is safe, appropriate, necessary or even normal for children to do certain things. As your children enter their teenage years and want more independence, the questions multiply.You Want to Do What? offers reliable guidance and information instantly. Karen draws on developmental, advisory, legal and statistical information to set out the facts and offer a reasoned solution. Her informed, no-nonsense, common sense approach to parenting allows you to make decisions quickly and with confidence. And if you need to say 'no' to your teenager, You Want to Do What? gives you the best reasons to explain why.
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First published in 2007 by Collins
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Text © Karen Sullivan 2007
Karen Sullivan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007254378
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780007556632
Version: 2017–03-16
For Cole and Luke, my teenagers
There is no one more persuasive than a teenager with an agenda, and certainly no one more capable of making a parent feel inadequate or behind the times. Conscientious parents regularly fall victim to the supreme negotiating skills of their offspring, and have to adjust their own beliefs, values and moral codes in order either to keep the peace or fall in line with current trends. After all, times change, don’t they? Perhaps the way we were brought up is outmoded, and children can and should be allowed different sorts of freedoms and liberties, different levels of independence and trust, and a different role within the family.
There can be no parent in the land who has not heard regular wails of:
The lists are seemingly endless, and from the word go, parents are put in the awkward position of trying to work out if their demands, expectations and rules are fair and realistic, or if they are, in fact, creating social lepers by denying their children the norms of today’s society.
There is no central database of currently acceptable thinking and practice when it comes to parenting. Indeed, most parenting manuals stop well short of the years when parents actually need the most advice. These days many parents are isolated and have less contact with others parents, the result of increased independence, and the fact that many parents work during the day. Couple this with frustration engendered by the impossible task of trying to glean information or make conversation with an adolescent – and it becomes obvious why we’re often working in the dark when it comes to parenting.
It’s no good relying on age-old wisdom handed down from our parents, either. Most of us will remember the irritation of being told that rules were rules, that things were ‘always done that way’, because: ‘that’s how I was brought up, so that’s how you will be too’. Many of us have chosen to forge our own path on the parenting front, and to make decisions based on our individual children and their capabilities, needs and demands, rather than create rules for the sake of them. But this too can be a minefield – one ill-chosen step off that path and a child could be in serious trouble, well out of his or her depth.
So how do we make these decisions? As parents we have a responsibility and, indeed, an innate desire to raise happy, healthy, responsible children, and to invest in them the skills, morals, values and common sense that will take them into adulthood. On one shoulder we carry the weight of this responsibility, and on the other, an overwhelming catalogue of adolescent propaganda.
