Читать книгу You Don't Know Anything...! - Nadir Psy.D. Baksh PhD - Страница 21

Some of you have unreasonable expectations regarding your children, acting as if they have disappointed you and squashed your dreams. You feel they have embarrassed you by problems they cannot seem to solve or poor choices they have made. Statistics now prove what we have all assumed for quite some time: Our teenagers are unable to consistently use good judgment in making decisions. There is actually a segment of brain matter which remains immature and underdeveloped until at least the age of twenty-three, meaning that even the most responsible of your offspring will make a really bad decision some of the time, and some of them may make consistently poor decisions almost all of the time.

Your children should not be given responsibilities in areas where poor choices may impact the rest of their lives. They should not, for example, be left to watch younger siblings if those children need supervision; this includes babysitting other people’s children, where the teenager certainly must exercise good judgment and attentiveness at all times.

Many parents believe that the task of babysitting will teach their teenager the fundamentals of childcare as well as responsibility. This is not only dangerously faulty thinking on the part of the adult, but a careless disregard for human life. Ask any teenage babysitter and they will tell you that most of their time is spent raiding the refrigerator, rifling through drawers and cabinets, watching television, and talking on the telephone. Should an avoidable accident occur under the watch of your child, not only they, but you, will have to carry the legal and emotional burden for quite a long time, if not forever.

Every parent wants to get to the bottom of a problem, and when your child messes up, one of the first things you are likely to ask is, “What were you thinking?” The most frequent response to that question is, “I don’t know.” This infuriates parents, who expect their child to come up with a better explanation than that. This is generally when the parent banishes the teen to his or her bedroom to think up a better answer, promising they will not gain freedom from solitary confinement without one. The truth is, your child really doesn’t know what they were thinking, anymore than they weighed the possibilities of disaster, or anticipated the outcome.

However, if you insist on an answer to “What were you think-ing?” your teenager will come up with one that may satisfy you, not because they have been evasive all along but because they have the power of imagination and creativity and know this is the only way they will ever be let out of their room.

In fact, the realistic bottom line in their messing up is simply this: Your teenager cannot consistently make good decisions and, moreover, rarely thinks about the consequences of any decision they have made.