How to Advocate for Your Adolescent Children

This post was written by Frankie Wallace.

No one ever said that parenting was easy, but when you’re a parent raising a teenager, the challenges you face can sometimes feel insurmountable. After all, your baby is growing up. Your baby is no longer a baby at all.

That reality can be difficult for many parents to recognise or accept, especially when your teenager is in trouble. You are likely to find every parental instinct activated. You may struggle to resist the impulse to intervene, to rescue, to make it all better, even when your child has neither asked for nor desires your help. That’s a parent’s job, right?

Well, not exactly. While it’s true that you will always be your child’s fiercest advocate and most loyal support system, by the time they reach adolescence, the forms that parental advocacy must take are necessarily changed. This article explores strategies for advocating for your teen without undermining their independence, autonomy, or development.

Recognise and Respect the Boundaries

You might not like to acknowledge it, but your teenager is on the verge of becoming an adult. That means that you’re not always going to be able to protect them from life’s hurts. Raising a healthy, happy, and high-functioning adult means letting your teen learn to make their own mistakes, overcome them, and grow. To do this, though, sometimes you’re going to need to step away, back off, and let them figure out how to handle things for themselves.

For example, if you have a teenager, the odds are that you are already well acquainted with your child’s rebellious phase. This is an important, and inevitable, stage of development, as your adolescent begins preparing for the life of an independent adult.

Nevertheless, this is also the stage in which teens truly begin to appreciate that their actions have consequences. Imposing and enforcing rules, such as curfews, schoolwork, and limitations on technology use, helps these junior adults learn that when you choose a behaviour you are also choosing the result. This is one of the most powerful ways that you can advocate for your child because you are preparing them for adult life, when the stakes suddenly get much higher.

Teaching Financial Independence

In addition to helping your teenager practice self-management by learning to assess the consequence of their behaviour, another important way to advocate for your adolescent is by teaching them financial independence. All too often, our children enter adult life without the most basic skills of money management.

To prepare your teen for a solid financial future, help them learn the dignity of work and the value of money. Requiring them to get a part-time job after school, set up a checking and savings account, and begin building credit with a low-limit credit card that you can monitor can help teens master the art and science of responsible spending and thrifty saving.

Teach Them to Be Tech-Savvy

It’s true, your teenager is probably far more skilled with technology than you are. That doesn’t mean, however, that you don’t have anything to teach them in this domain. In fact, teens’ tech skills are often precisely the things that can make technology so dangerous for them. It’s not difficult, for example, for teenagers to be doing things on their devices that their parents simply don’t have the tech skills even to see or understand.

So if you want to advocate for both the physical safety and the mental and emotional well-being of your teenager while they’re online, then one of the first and best things you can do is increase your own tech literacy.

Learn to access your teen’s favourite apps and platforms across a range of devices and ensure that your child understands that you expect to be able to see everything they’re doing online. This should include reserving the right to ask that your teen hand over their device for your review at any time and without any notice.

This may sound Draconian, but it’s necessary to help protect your child in the wild west that is the online world today. Above all, such measures provide a critical opportunity for you to talk with your teen and to reinforce vital lessons regarding the safe and responsible use of the internet.

For example, as you establish the rules for your teen regarding their use of the internet and your continuing access to their devices, you will have an ideal opening to discuss issues such as cyberbullying, catfishing, fraud, privacy, and safety. In this way, you’re not only teaching your teen how to protect themselves online, you’re also demonstrating that your rules are not arbitrary or punitive. Rather, they reflect your love and concern as well as the gravity of the issue.

The Takeaway

Advocating for your child when they reach those challenging teen years is a far different animal than when they were young. All your parental instincts to protect and to shield are still there, but now they must be tempered by the recognition that your child is growing up and must learn to stand on their own, with your love and support always there to guide them.

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