Family Time

As a teenager friends and boyfriends are a pretty important priority but it's also important to make sure to have time with family, as well as time for family to get to know the friends in their teenagers life. Some kids grow up with the same friends since grade school and parents have known them and even their families for many years, but the new friends should be introduced and welcomed into the family as well.  It's important not only for parents to know who their kids are hanging out with but also as important for the friends to feel comfortable spending time with and getting to know their friends parents and siblings. It allows for better communication, less time spent worrying, less miss communication, and a better understanding of where everyone is coming from.  

Of course its not very cool to make your friends come to meet your parents, little lone hang out with them. It shouldn't have to be a set time that everyone has to sit down together, there should be casual invites to dinner or just allowing the teen to have their friends over often.  It may seem like more trouble to allow your teenager to have slumber parties that keep you up half the night and mess up the house, but these are actually opportunities to get to meet and know the people they hang out with. It would be worrisome if there your teen didn't want to bring friends around and kept secret friendship, that may indicate there are issues that the friend was not a good influence.  

It is so important to make sure you aren't making so many rules that as a parent you are pushing your teen away.  There have to be boundaries and rules but the harder it is for your teen to try and follow tons of rules, the less likely they are going to try to follow them. By this point in their life you have to have a bit of faith that your kids have learned from you how to make decent decisions and will even when they don't, they will learn.  

The forced family time isn't always well received but sometimes its got to be done. Say Every Sunday night is a sit down family dinner, and it sometimes has to be enforced. It won't kill the kid to have dinner.  Everyone's lives get so busy and it's hard to find the time where everyone can be together and no one ends up having to sacrifice something, but both the teen and the parents have to learn that giving up small things to spend time together will have a bigger impact overall. I wouldn't make my teenager skip a school dance or a friends Bar Mitzfah but maybe they can go to a slumber party an hour late in needed. It's important for parents to show their teenagers that they are willing to make compromises too, for example, if you have softball all summer almost every night of the week perhaps you need to skip a game here and there to show your teen that they are most important.   

Be there when your kids have a break up or get into a fight with friends. And teens need to learn that their friends can take a back seat from time to time so they can soak up some seemingly dorky family love, because there will be a time that your family will be there for you when your friends aren't able to. Family keeps everyone grounded and reminds us that there are people that will be there for us no matter what.