Self-Confident Teens (Part 2)
Encourage Self-Exploration by paying attention to your teen’s hobbies. If your daughter is already an ace at computer games, ask her if she’s ever tried programming one of her own. Buy her some tutorial guides, or invest in a summer camp program. Encourage her habits in healthy ways by helping her set realistic goals for herself, and praise, praise, praise when she follows through. It doesn’t matter if she succeeds. It matters if she gives it her all.
If teens are a different species, than boys and girls are breeds of their own. Where girls may meekly follow their peers through bad decisions, boys gain a tremendous amount of bravado during the teen years. They may feel larger than life and make dangerous decisions without a parent to help guide them.
More than ever, teen boys need healthy role models. They need dads and moms to vocalize how they feel about drug and alcohol use, tobacco, safe sex. They need a parent to set stronger boundaries and enforce them consistently. Parents need to be flexible with some rules, and be willing to take their child’s opinion seriously.
Boys have a hard time fitting into this newly stereotyped world. While girls really are expected to do everything and be everyone, boys are boxed in. society expects them to be outgoing and athletic, intelligent, sensitive – but not too sensitive – and unrealistically sexual.
It’s very important that parents give their boys permission to say no to unwanted attention from girls. Just as much as we bolster the belief they don’t have a right to push a female for sex, we need to stand behind our boys too. Teen girls can be surprisingly aggressive and vicious when her attentions are thwarted. Boys need emotional support to wait until they’re ready for sex.
Boys also need our encouragement and praise when it comes to following their own interests. This includes interests we typically label “feminine” like the arts, acting, and music, even cheerleading is an option. For boys to feel self-confident, they need to feel positive about their interests and abilities. That’s much easier to do when parents respond positively to them too.