The Best Parenting Advice You Will Ever Get, Teen Edition

So, Lyz Lenz wrote this about how to parent babies and toddlers and I’m pretty sure I peed my pants laughing because I’m just that lucky not to have children that young anymore and if I did, I would certainly stop seeking parenting advice from anyone but her because, well, you just have to head over there and read her advice.

Ironically, something that happened to me today was that a local parenting magazine published an essay of mine that was essentially….wait for it…giving advice on how to choose a school for your child. You can find it here if you’re interested.

And so, after having my advice appreciated enough to have it published, I was feeling as though I ought to follow Lyz’s example and offer some tongue-in-cheek advice for how to parent your teenager. Please note that I am not nearly as hilarious as Lyz, but I figure I have to beat her to the punch because it’s only 11 more years until she has her first teenager and if I wait, well, you know. So, here goes.

On the subject of food: With all of the scary chemicals and things out there in our food supply, it is important to feed your teens only organic, fresh, “real” food, not things that are laden with preservatives or ready-made. While your teen looks huge, he is really still developing and who knows how harmful those genetically modified organisms and pesticides are? Plus, you are setting up eating habits for life, here. Of course, now that your child is a teenager (and they tend to run in packs), they can inhale $14 worth of organic grapes in approximately 49 seconds and, mouth stuffed, complain about being hungry. So, with the price of organic fruit, perhaps it just makes more sense to just head to Costco and buy the party-size bags of potato chips and 800-pack of fruit roll ups so that you don’t have to take out a second mortgage to give them enough calories to keep growing. The added bonus of this plan is that you can teach them the all-important life lesson of cleaning up all the wrappers they discard on the TV room floor so that when they get to college, their roommate doesn’t stab them in their sleep for being such a slob.

And, speaking of teaching them to clean up after themselves, you must remember that even though they say they don’t want anything to do with you, your teenager most certainly is craving boundaries. Yes, now that he or she is older, you can certainly begin to relax things, but you want to remain diligent for any sign that they are pushing things too far. The portion of a teenager’s brain that is responsible for impulse control is not fully developed yet and you have to stay on top of them. Except that they are very clever and know so much more about social media tools than you do, so this tactic is most certainly doomed to failure. And, also, teenagers are programmed to despise any idea that comes from their parents, so whatever you tell them they cannot do, they will strive to do. And if they think they will be punished for doing it, they will work really hard (harder than they do on their homework) to ensure that they don’t get caught. So, at this point it’s probably easier to pour yourself a glass of wine and say something like, “I trust you to make good decisions. I love you,” in hopes that a little guilt will go a long way.

Because your teen’s brain is still developing, it is vital that they get at least 10 hours of sleep every night, so you should impose an early bedtime and you should ban all electronics for the last hour before bed so that they get in the habit of doing something quiet that will prompt melatonin production. However, it is likely that your child will yell and scream because (a) he or she has homework that has to be done on the the laptop so you can’t take it away and (b) the homework will take hours and hours so a bedtime of 9pm is altogether unreasonable. Please realize you have no recourse at this point even though you know that while your child is doing homework, he will most certainly be listening to music or watching YouTube videos or texting friends or all three simultaneously and THAT IS WHY THE HOMEWORK TAKES HOURS AND HOURS. Also, you’re screwed because it’s a well-known fact that teenagers’ brains don’t produce melatonin until about midnight which means that even if you have the most well-behaved teen in the world (damn, your guilt trips are awesome!), she will be lying in the dark for three hours staring at the ceiling and waiting to get tired before she ever falls asleep. And unless she has a will of steel, she will probably develop some deep-seated neurosis about her insomnia and it might push her off the deep end. So, again with the wine.

I will only give you one more piece of advice and that is regarding driving. If you are lucky enough to live in a big city, don’t let your teen get her driver’s license. In our case, there is a bus stop one block away that will get her nearly everywhere she needs to go eventually. Driving is a risky business and with cell phones and GPS and friends in the car, there are too many distractions. I have heard way too many stories of entire carloads of teens ending up in tragic accidents to think that my child ever ought to drive. Of course, that means you will spend the rest of your days schlepping your children everywhere they need to go – three lacrosse practices and two games a week, ballet practice, the high school football game/dance, to the mall to hang out with friends – and you can’t implore anyone else to just “run to the store for me and get more chicken stock while I finish cooking dinner.” So, basically your life will suck until they leave home and maybe you ought to give yourself a break and send them to driver’s ed. Please be aware that most cities now require your teen to enroll in driver’s ed through some private company that charges a thousand dollars (no shit), and your kid will never learn to drive a stick shift which is important if she ever finds herself at a party where everyone but her is drunk and the only way to get home is to borrow someone’s car but IT’S A MANUAL TRANSMISSION! But, freedom. And so, go ahead and let your teen get a driver’s license so she can drive her younger siblings around and you can have more time to drink wine.

Thanks, Lyz, for letting me point out how utterly ridiculous it is to try to figure out the “best” way to parent your child – baby, toddler, tween, or teen. I think I’ll go to Costco and buy a case of wine so I can at least relax at night and know I took someone else’s advice about self-care.