When children grow up as teenagers, it would be the most difficult years for any parent. Over at WebMD Jeanie Lerche Davis summarized 10 tips from three national experts to help parents with teenagers. The following two are my golden rules as well:

Choose your battles wisely. “Doing themselves harm or doing something that could be permanent (like a tattoo), those things matter,” says Kaslow. “Purple hair, a messy room — those don’t matter.” Don’t nitpick.

Let kids feel guilty. “I think too much is made about self-esteem,” says Elkind. “Feeling good about yourself is healthy. But people should feel bad if they have hurt someone or done something wrong. Kids need to feel bad sometimes. Guilt is a healthy emotion. When kids have done something wrong, we hope they feel bad, we hope they feel guilty.”

What do you think? Feel free to comment or email me.

10 Parenting Tips for Raising Teenagers [WebMD.com]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 12:17 am and is filed under 13-18 yrs: Teenager, Behavior, How-to Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.