Children should be allowed to make decisions as they show they have the intelligence and are responsible enough to make those decisions.

IMO parents should do less determining and more guiding with an adolescent. Being an adolescent is about starting to make your own determinations and your parents are there to provide the bases from which to do so along with your own free will of course.

Why do I keep getting this msg "This site requires that you Connect with Facebook." I don't want to connect to Facebook

At the bottom of the comment box there is a place where you can check for your comment to go to Facebook. Just uncheck it before you hit the 'post' button.

I find that Facebook feed feature a little pointless to have.

But part of parenting is protecting your children. Yes, you should "guide" them, but protecting them trumps everything. I look forward to the day that I can talk to my children as equals, and am guiding them that direction, but I will be making all the meaningful decisions for awhile.

Parents need to learn to allow their children to fail as well I think. My mother was so over protective and my father was from the school of thought you should let him fall on his face that way he wont' do it again and we won't have to keep catching him. Thanks to my mothers constant rescuing I endured a lot of face crashes in my early twenties but I was lucky in that I learned quickly.

Thanks for the tip Pink

I don't disagree with that Hypno. It's definitely a delicate balance.

Part of being a teenager is asserting your own perceptions or at least determining what they are. I'd love to meet a parent that is convinced they have complete control over a teen/young adult.

Those that seem to be the most controlling seem to discover they never had control at all. I grew up in a controlled atmosphere, yet I rebelled at first opportunity. Maybe I was just more head-strong but I'd like to think my strength also saved me.

I think the more controlled an environment is, the more opportunity there is for it to go awry.

I realize that some cultures do in fact have parents decide who they are to marry. Having several friends who met and married under those conditions I can say that they do tend to have more in common, share a similar beliefs, and find they were perhaps fortunate to have people around them whose sole purpose was to seek their happiness.

I asked one of them if they had someone that their parents had selected were they then obligated---and in the USA the answer is typically no. In their countries of origin they would have less control.

"I think the more controlled an environment is, the more opportunity there is for it to go awry."

I can agree with that statement *cheeky*. The more you push some teenagers the more that want to go against what you believe in. The want to be their own person so much and sometimes coming down on them too often can make them turn into the wrong direction too often.

IMO, consistency is the key. As long as the kids, especially the teenagers, understand the boundaries, they are more likely to regulate their lives and operate within those boundaries. Kids are also going to rebel, and test the boundaries, but as long as the parents are willing to talk to the kids, these rebellious acts can be kept to a minimum.

*disclaimor* As always, this is in general. There are some people who are so strong headed and stubborn that no amount of cajoling, et al would get them to actually semi-behave.

I agree UnDave. Consistency is important. My parents were consistent and because of that I knew how far I could go before there was no turning back.

That consistency also helped me create my own boundaries as I approached adulthood. Even with such marvelous parents I tested that boundary to the extreme. The bottom line was knowing that nothing was unforgivable, and no matter where life took me that "home" was there.

As a parent I think it is important to be consistent and unfortunately many parents seem to lose it there. It is one thing to say "You are going to get it when you get home" and totally another to actually follow-thru on that promise when you get home. Kids know that "you are grounded" is meaningless if you let them off the hook early.

Parents undermine themselves when they aren't consistent. Later they wonder where they went wrong...and more often than not...it was those times they gave in when they should have been steadfast.

Somthing I've noticed, inconsistent parents also tend to blame outside forces for their children's missteps.

Yep...and I think it is becoming contagious.

"Owning" something especially when it was perhaps not "you" at your best...creates ethics.

When someone always tends to blame everyone/everything else rather than "own" it and move forward has become the rift in our society.

I think it's okay to raise them with your beliefs but to respect that as they get older and mature, they may develop ideas/beliefs separate from yours and that it doesn't mean it's wrong or that they are bad children. (An example would be parents who believe it's wrong for interracial couples to exist (ahem, my parents) yet the children see nothing wrong with it. (Sorry dad, I think racism is wrong no matter what!)

At some point, parents need to respect it when children develop their own point of view and beliefs.

Agree Yoga

Whoa......yoga did you grow up in my house?

Yes...My Dad, the baptist pastor had great difficulty explaining to me why one brother is not the same as another brother when it came to the subject of dating...and eventually he conceded albeit grudgingly.

"all brothers in Christ" ALL..meaning no color selection was made in that text.

As a former teenager, a current father and grandfather, I know that the older generation wants to impart knowledge gained through life experience. i also know that the younger generation can nod yes all day, and then go out and do exactly what they want to do. This is not a new problem, it has been recorded in both ancient Greece and ancient Rome. The best you can hope for as part of the older (wiser?) generation is take our advice into your decision equation. If my wife and i had listened to her father we would never had owned a home. We bought our first house for $24,500, put 1/3 down and had a 20 year mortgage at 6%. My father in law remembered when the same houses sold for $2,400, that the housing prices had to come down, and besides we should wait for the mortgage rate go down to 4%, like it was some years earlier. The house almost tripled in value, in the 7 years we lived there, and i got one of the last 9% mortgage for years when i bought my second house. mortgage rates went up to 17 1/2% in the next 6 months.

Yes, some parents are TOO preachy and in ALL the wrong manners. Sometimes they don't know when to stop.

Sometimes children just want to feel they'll be listen to about their problems, and teenagers have plenty. Tennagers don't want to feel preached to and told they're going straight to hell if they don't do everything by the good book.