All parents want their children to succeed. But knowing how to help them make smart choices and avoid pitfalls isn't always easy.
Parents play a central, but not exclusive, role in shaping the lives of their children and teenagers. Extensive research shows that parents are more influential in their children�s lives than anyone else, shaping their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Yet parents are neither the only influences nor the only ones with responsibility. Peers, other adults, genetics, the media, and various other sources also play important roles.
Ideally, all these influences can work together with parents to promote young people�s healthy development.
Some Ways Parents Affect Children and Adolescents:
1. Parental relationships and monitoring demonstrate to young people that parents are sources of support and security, which help adolescents as they form their individual identities.
2. Supportive, yet challenging, parental relationships are important for adolescents to find school more interesting.
3. High-quality family interactions have an effect on the quality of adolescent friendships. Parental warmth toward children helps children develop socially, and it helps kids be more well-liked by their peers.
As infants turn into children and children become adolescents, they begin to spend more unsupervised time with their friends and have increased exposure to sources of influence and information outside of their family, such as media and school�influences that parents often view as harmful to their children.
However, the importance of parents does not diminish as children age. While adolescents may go to their peers more often than their parents for advice, they still choose to go to their parents in time of real need or while making serious decisions.
Parents� Influence during Adolescence
Discussions about adolescent behavior often focus on negative actions, such as delinquency or early sexual behavior. One researcher said that this focus �treats successful adolescents and young adults as escape artists who manage to dodge the hazards of growing up, rather than focusing on the ways that young people acquire and master skills, construct positive identities, and learn how to negotiate social roles simultaneously in the youth culture and adult world.�
There are several ways that parents and parenting affect adolescents� positive and negative behaviors. For example, family cohesion and having strong attachments to parents help kids make better decisions about which friends they choose.
Ways Parents Can Help Encourage Good Decision-Making:
� Monitor their behavior
� Spend time together
� Pay attention to their friends which in turn help the children to choose their type of friends
� Communicate and be involved
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Abagaile Odalis is a family and relationship professional with 12 years of experience in this field. She has written two revolutianry books on how to
Seduce Women and the other to
Attract Men.
