Happy Kids: The Secrets to Raising Well-Behaved, Contented Children (26 page)

Many of the teenage girls I have fostered have come to me already acting promiscuously as they search for the love and attention they were denied as children. Of course I try to change their behaviour, but I also have to be practical. I have to hand the contact details of our local family planning and STD clinics, and if necessary I make the appointments and accompany them. STDs in all countries are on the rise, and one recent study in the US found that 30 per cent of teenagers had contracted an STD within six months of starting to have sex. Likewise the teenager pregnancy rate is still running high – in 2005 in the UK, forty-one out of every thousand conceptions were to girls under eighteen. If your son or daughter is sexually active, you need to educate yourself, be aware and know what to do and where to go if you need help.

Don’t be shocked if your son or daughter announces he or she is gay. A recent study in the UK found that by the age of nineteen 5 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women had had a sexual experience with a same-sex partner, and 6 per cent of the adult population is gay. You may face a sharp learning curve to come to terms with your son or daughter’s homosexuality, but remember that he or she is the same person, the same child you nurtured; it’s just that they have different sexual and emotional needs to those you had probably anticipated.

Lastly, with all this talk of sex, it needs to be said that if your teen decides to remain celibate until he or she is older or married, that is perfectly normal too. There is so much pressure, particularly in Western societies, from peers and the media for everyone to be having continuous multi-orgasmic sex that parents can believe there is something wrong with their child when he or she hasn’t had a sexual relationship by the time they are eighteen.

The clock strikes midnight on the eve of your child’s eighteenth birthday, the day he or she becomes an adult in the eyes of the law. Will your child wake the following morning, having been endowed with the wisdom and experience necessary to successfully meet all the challenges of the adult world? The intellect, caution, diplomacy and plain common sense required to navigate the hurdles which face adults on a daily basis? No. Or at best, it’s highly unlikely. Your young adult will be the same person who went to bed the night before, with the same teenage impulsiveness and ideology, and this will remain true for quite a few years to come.

Even though your son or daughter can now legally hold a driving licence, drink alcohol, vote, fight for their country, sign binding contracts including credit agreements, in many respects he or she is still a child. They will still need the same guiding caution and boundaries as they did in their older teenage years – which can be a rather worrying prospect for parents whose children are about to go away to college.

Children and teenagers mature at different rates. One eighteen-year-old will have more of the ‘adult’ in them than another, and many young people well into their twenties will still need boundaries, support, direction and advice. In this chapter I am generalising about the average eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old.

During the older teenage years your son or daughter strove for independence and autonomy, oblivious to many dangers as they challenged the boundaries for their safety and reasonable behaviour that you, the parent, put in place. By the time your teen reaches eighteen he or she will have accepted many of your guidelines, and should now be able to be self-disciplined, and make reasonable decisions, much of but not all of the time. Your son or daughter will have found a new position with their new legal status, but there is one position you retain, and will do so for ever: the position of parent.

With that position comes the right to respect from your child, whatever his or her age; and the maturity of your young adult can largely be gauged by the degree of respect he or she shows you, as a parent and individual. This is a good yardstick. If your eighteen-year-old still challenges you as they did at fifteen, then they still have a lot of growing up to do. Continue with the boundaries for acceptable behaviour that were in place during the older teenager years, and encourage your young adult to more mature behaviour by giving them more responsibility for their daily lives.

In present-day Western society we often ‘baby’ our children for longer than is necessary, with the result that the child can get stuck in the teenager role. Taking care of more of his or her own needs, for example ironing and cooking, will give your son or daughter a focal point, as well as encouraging a more mature responsibility. But wait until they are calm before you introduce the subject. Don’t, for instance, shout in anger,
‘You can do your own bloody cooking in future!’
when your young adult has turned up his or her nose at a meal you spent a long time preparing. Simply suggest that perhaps in future he or she would be happier doing their own cooking (or whatever it is), and then let them do it. Teenagers and young adults often have no idea how much parents actually do for them, and giving them responsibility for looking after themselves will encourage appreciation and respect.

Even the more mature eighteen-year-old will not suddenly stop behaving negatively or unsafely on the stroke of midnight; indeed with the increased amount of options and choices that their adult status allows there will be more decisions for them to make and dangers for them to avoid. As well as maintaining the decisions he or she has already made – not smoking, taking drugs or having unprotected sex and drinking sensibly, etc. – your son or daughter should now add to this list not drinking and driving; limiting credit to what he or she can afford; holding down a job; committing to a relationship, etc.

You will have gradually been giving your teen more and more responsibility for his or her own decisions and you will be hoping that, having set boundaries for good behaviour (put in place using the 3Rs), you will have given your young adult a good moral code with which to approach adult life. However, your house rules still apply now your teen is an adult, so that if it wasn’t acceptable for Tom to stagger home drunk and throw up on the carpet every Friday and Saturday night, it still isn’t. And if you didn’t allow Claire to block the landline every evening, talking to her friends, then she still can’t. Likewise, it isn’t OK for your young adult to shout or swear at you when angry, have crack parties or display any of the other behaviour that was unacceptable during his or her teenage years. By now your young adult should have gained enough of a sense of safety, and consideration for others, to appreciate why certain behaviour isn’t acceptable, but when he or she forgets (which they all do), tell them.

If your young adult persists with the negative behaviour he or she exhibited as a teenager, it needs to be dealt with. The bottom line is that you are the parent, and it is your house. And while I would avoid uttering the phrase ‘While you are under my roof you will do as I say,’ it can be implicit in your rules and boundaries for acceptable behaviour. You do not have to live with someone whose behaviour is unacceptable and disrespectful, and it is surprising just how many parents with young adults do. One mother of a very challenging nineteen-year-old said,
‘1f my husband treated me like that I would divorce him, but I can’t divorce my son.’
Actually she did, by moving him to a bedsit round the corner, where he did a lot of growing up in a very short time. I’m not suggesting this as the solution to all such problems, but the experience of living independently can work wonders for some challenging young adults, as many parents whose children go away to college can testify.

As well as the basic house rules, which show consideration and respect for others, and which are already in place, there will be new areas where you will have to make new decisions now that your teen is an adult:

If you already have a young adult, there will probably be plenty you can add to this list, and there will be variations between households, but the point is that if the guidelines and expectations are clear to all, there will be less likelihood of misunderstanding arising and confrontation and scenes resulting.

Don’t be afraid to raise an issue because you feel it might sound silly or petty. If it is worrying you, then it needs to be aired. And don’t assume your young adult will instinctively realise there is a problem as an older adult might: they won’t – they haven’t the perception that comes with the maturity gained from years and years of real-life experience.

My son is a great organiser and he went into a profession which appreciated his skills of organisation. He returned to live with me at home after college, and I began to find that he increasingly tried to organise me, to an extent I didn’t find helpful. I was in my forties at the time and felt that I had managed my own affairs quite successfully so far, and while I appreciated his input and advice, I didn’t want to be told what to do.

Eventually, one evening when he was telling me I should change my bank account to one that he felt would offer me a better deal (and probably would have done), I diplomatically explained that, while I appreciated his advice, I had decided to stay with my present bank, with whom I had been with all my working life. He continued for a few moments more until I said, more firmly, that I hoped he could appreciate that ultimately it was my decision who I banked with. There was short silence, and then he nodded thoughtfully and agreed. After that we both felt more comfortable when I made a decision that wouldn’t have been his.

Similarly, a friend’s daughter went to a university that was close enough for her to come home for mid-term visits. My friend was obviously always pleased to see her daughter, but confided in me that she felt hurt when her daughter, having said a brief ‘Hi’, logged on to the computer and spent most of the evening chatting online to her friends. Eventually, my friend tactfully pointed out to her daughter that she would like to chat and catch up with her first before she caught up with her friends, many of whom she had seen at Uni earlier that day. Her daughter apologised; she genuinely hadn’t realised the slight she had caused her mother, and after that, when she came home mother and daughter chatted and caught up over a cup of tea before her daughter chatted with her friends online.

Both of these incidents are trivia on the scale of negative behaviour, but trivia can have a nasty habit of developing into an issue if left unchecked. Just as your young adult should feel comfortable enough to express any concerns or hurt feelings he or she may have in your relationship, so should you as the parent. Respecting each other’s differences and meeting on common ground is what makes families with young adults able to live together successfully.

Sometimes young adults, even with excellent parenting, go off the rails and land in trouble. It may be trouble with the police, taking drugs, an unwanted pregnancy, a sexually transmitted disease, unwillingness to find or hold down a job or any one of a number of things that you would have hoped your young adult would or would not have done. If your young adult does find him or herself in trouble, or doesn’t turn out as you had wished, remember it is the behaviour, not the person, that has caused the problem, just as it was when he or she was a child. Don’t yell,
‘You stupid idiot! Why the hell did you do that! You’re old enough to know better!’
They will know that what they did was ill advised or reckless. They will also know that they need your help and support, as much, if not more, than they did when they were little and got into trouble; it’s just they can’t always admit it.

At the age of twenty-one my daughter was prosecuted for being caught on public transport without a ticket. She had got to the train station in a rush that morning, and then found she didn’t have enough money for the ticket. There were plenty of options she could have chosen to overcome the problem – options that would have presented themselves to an older adult – but already late, she panicked and slipped past the ticket inspector and on to the train, only to be caught two stops up when an inspector boarded the train and asked to see her ticket. She said nothing to me at the time, but brooded on what had happened and hoped the problem would go away. Only when a summons arrived for her to appear in court did she break down and tell me. To make matters worse her act had been caught on the station’s CCTV and it appeared as premeditated fare evasion.

I didn’t need to lecture her or point out that she had acted foolishly – she was beside herself with worry and remorse. What I did was practical: I found a solicitor to represent her and then gave her support by accompanying her to court. It was a gruelling experience for us both, but with a good character reference and an honest confession by her about what she had done, the magistrates accepted it was a one-off error of judgement and fined her, which meant she didn’t have the criminal record that would have resulted had she been found guilty of fare evasion. I had considered my daughter level headed and reasonably mature, but finding herself in a difficult situation, she had acted as an impulsive teen rather than a mature adult.