Relationships | Family Adventures

I’m Engaged! Again!

Getting married for a second time can be both exhilarating and overwhelming. There are the stresses of planning a wedding and making new changes in your life, and the joys of the prospects of spending the rest of your life with someone you love so much. Having children, especially older children, from a previous relationship can add another dimension to the picture.

While there are the regular wedding plans to deal with, like which engagement rings to buy, where to have the ceremony and where to honeymoon, there are the added issues of announcing the engagement to family members, and especially to your children.Kids can still be hurting from your divorce, or be confused. Older children, teenagers especially, can be frustrated with what they may see as having to accept a third or fourth parent into their life.

Decide whether it is best to announce your engagement to them with your partner present, or whether to do it by yourself. Do you think they will be excited, or angry? Should you talk with them as a group, or one-on-one? You know your children best, so think about it and come up with a plan to break the news.

Other family members also need to be taken into consideration. While it’s your decision, they will need to be told and you need to be prepared for a variety of possible reactions, both positive and negative. Decide beforehand how to tell them you’re engaged, and how to address specific family members. Above all, remember not to let any negative reactions get you down. This is big news for you, and you’re excited.

Your children make take it hard, and they have a right to. Help them to understand your thinking, and express your hope that they can accept the situation and be happy as well. Above all, be sure you’re marrying someone who will love your kids.

Filed Under: Relationships Tagged With: Engagement ring, Relationships

Teenage Waffling

Teenagers are a very strange place in their lives. Their development is marked by a shift from being a child to being an adult in far more than just the physical sense of things. In effect, your teen is waffling back and forth between the feeling that their life is controlled by others (whom they have got to manipulate, in order to get what they want), and the feeling that they are in control of their lives (and that they can essentially build whatever they want). Needless to say, this is one of the most bipolar times in a human being’s life. The good news is, even though our society allows (and even encourages) people to live in a state of adolescence until roughly their early thirties, you are only really going to have to deal with it on a regular basis until they are about 18 and go off to college.

The problem with teenagers being stuck in a period where they are part child and part adult is that they have a very schizoid method of dealing with life’s problems, and working out their own issues. At one moment, they are wanting you to stay out of their business. But in the next moment, they are blaming you (often loudly and venomously) for not being “there” when they need you, as if you are some kind of psychic who can just sense these sorts of things. Unfortunately, beating them does not help, however much fun that might be.

When it comes right down to it, in time the waffling is going to come to an end. Of course, by that point your kids will have long since left your home and started their own (and possibly had their own children, as well). So it really will not be something that you can just celebrate when they finally pass into the adult emotional stage of life (if they ever do). While a teen is in your home, you might as well prepare yourself for an awful lot of waffling between the extremes. It is just going to happen anyway.

Filed Under: Relationships Tagged With: Adolescence, Child

How Early Should the sex Talk Occur?

Every parent is eventually going to have to explain, at least to some extent, the nature of human reproduction to their children. Now, the schools usually do a pretty good job of this, and they have been known to start as early as the third grade. So your teen will probably already be well aware of all of the physical things well before they start to happen, and (at least hopefully) several years before they get into actually practicing anything that they learn about. But whether you like it or not, you are still the parent, and you are still going to have to answer a few questions about this fairly important issue.

The big questions that you are probably going to be asked involve what it feels like to have sex, and the emotions that go along with it. No matter what kind of a show your teen puts on for their friends, sex is a big deal, especially early on. There is definitely some fear involved, and there is also some excitement that comes to the fore, when it comes to most teens. This is perfectly natural, and should be encouraged within reason. After all, you want your kids to grow into having healthy sex lives, don’t you?

But how early should you get into these kinds of discussions? If you can find a unilateral answer to this, the book that you should write on the topic will sell millions upon millions of copies. Truth be known, there is no one age at which a sex talk is “right” to have. There is nothing formal or official about it. When your teen comes to you with a question, listen without judgment, and make sure they know about the big things: your opinions on adoption and abortion, the realities of STDs, how it won’t make you an adult, and anything else you consider important.

Filed Under: Relationships Tagged With: Sex education

To buy Your Teen a car, or Not?

At some point in your teen’s life, they are most likely going to want to buy a car. Unless you live in an area where having a car seems pointless (such as where public transportation is spot on), it is inevitable. And even in those kinds of cases, a lot of young people like to take long road trips- kind of hard without a car. So the question becomes, will your teen buy their own first car, or are you going to buy it for them? Let’s assume for the moment that money is not a major issue, and that you could drop a few thousand dollars for a basic starter car without breaking your retirement fund.

What does it teach your teen when you buy them a car? It teaches them that they do not need to plan out their own major expenditures, and that they can count on you to take care of things for them in life. But is there any upside to buying your teen a car? Doing so will give them a bit more independence, which will take some onus off of you having to ferry them and their friends all over the place. And in addition to that, your teen might also become useful for helping you with some errands.

Of course, allowing your teen to buy themselves a car is going to teach them a lot of lessons that will be useful to them later in life. The only bad thing about allowing your teen to buy their own car is that it could result in them picking a type with a poor safety rating. And while the type of teen who plans and saves for a long enough time to buy their own car is not too likely to pick a deathmobile, this is most definitely a time when you do need to exercise your parental oversight.

Filed Under: Relationships Tagged With: Adolescence, Traffic collision

Hitting Does not Help

When you have children, you have got to teach them how to be a productive, civilized member of society. And as they get into adolescence, their combination of high energy, intense hormonal changes (and their resulting instability) and emotional need to expand their sphere of influence beyond where it was as a child all combine into a perfect storm of aggression and aggravation. While they are not going to be as irritating as a small child typically is, and will know some of the social graces, they are frequently going to want to move outside of their boundaries. Even though their main period of testing is long since over with, they are going to test a bit more, just to see what you will tolerate and what you will do if your tolerance reaches its breaking point. From time to time, you are going to want to hit them, but this will not help anything.

Hitting people feels good when you are angry. If you can hit very hard, you might be able to cause your child enough pain that it will (at least temporarily) quiet them down. And if you hit them on a regular basis, you may even completely break their spirit, causing them to go along quietly like a drone. Of course, only a truly sick parent would actually do something like that. We are just saying this to make sure that you understand the ultimate futility of such an action. Drones do poorly in society, and they have terrible emotional problems.

After all, hitting a child basically just teaches them that might makes right. If you want them to think in that kind of meat headed fashion, you might as well enroll them in combat sports, and be prepared for bailing them out of jail after a lot of brawling. You should also prepare yourself for other, ancillary events, such as when your sons rape girls and when all of your kids end up stabbing somebody in a bar room fight. There is nothing good that can come out of hitting your children, so cool it.

Filed Under: Relationships Tagged With: Adult, Parent

Driving Lessons and Anger Management

DETROIT - MARCH 31: Fritz Henderson, the new ...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

When your teen is first learning how to drive, you are going to have to deal with a couple of things. For one, you are going to have to deal with the fact that your teenager thinks they know more about how to drive than they actually do, and believes that they have a substantially higher skill level than they actually do. The second thing that you are going to have to deal with is that you are going to get very frustrated at whatever they do, for a number of different reasons. The act of driving provides a lot of different things, such as a feeling of adulthood, achievement and a sense of independence that your teen has never had before. Plus, it is kind of a rush to take a large steel object, be in complete control of it and push it to a high speed. Deny it all you like, but that is a part of it.

You are going to get frustrated, and occasionally even angry at your teen while they are learning how to drive for two very big reasons. For one thing, they are taking over control of something that up until this point, you have had absolute authority over on all occasions. This is going to take a period of serious adjustment, whether you want to admit it or not, because power is one of those things which is very rarely relinquished by anybody on purpose. But as a mentor and guide in life, you know that your parental duties will sometimes force you to swallow your pride and take a side seat.

The second reason why you are going to get frustrated is because your teen’s driving skills are going to be a complete unknown until they actually get behind the wheel and start making things happen. This is a scary experience, whether they admit to it or not, and you are going to have to trust that they are not going to hurt anybody. This can be a scary experience for you, as well, unless your insurance is absolutely top notch.

Filed Under: Relationships Tagged With: Anger, Driving and Safety

The Transfer of Power

In every parent’s life, a lot of very important things happen with their children. For one thing, the children move out of the house. For another, they get as big as (or even bigger than) their parents are. And at some point, there is a sort of power transfer that is extremely subtle, but very noticeable to everyone involved in it. It is sort of the big white elephant in the room that nobody really talks about, but that is pretty plain. One of the most glaring moments in which there is a transfer of power is when a teen gets their driver’s license. This scary moment marks a very large turning point.

For one thing, this marks the first time in a teen’s life in which they can effectively tell their parent where they are going, as well as where the parents themselves are going. After all, the person who is in control of the automobile is also in control of the conversation, at least at the level of “we are going here, and if you make me angry enough I am going to ram us into something at high speed.” While you would certainly hope that your teen has got the good sense and reason not to do that, it is not wise to assume things.

Another way in which this is a transfer of power is that you are (at least in the beginning) giving your teen access to your car, without your supervision. They could theoretically take a turn too quickly and ram into a tree, or rack up fines through running stop lights, or do all sorts of other things that could drive you to drink if you thought too much about the possibilities. Not to mention that fact that they could be going to places that you would not approve of, and not so much as telling you, either.

Filed Under: Relationships Tagged With: Parent

You Will Never Know

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There are so many things that you are never going to know about your teenager. Even if you consider your relationship with your teen to be extremely open and honest, there are plenty of things that they are going to let you go to your grave (no matter how old you may live to) without ever letting on about. This includes how much they drink, what kinds of drugs they take, whether they smoke (and how early they may have started), when they first had sex (and what kinds of sex they have, and with whome), and all kinds of other things that you would probably not even want to know in the first place. of course, while ignorance might be bliss, hopefully you have instilled some positive grounding beliefs in your teen.

For one thing, sexuality is a good thing. While you probably do not want or need to know your teen’s favorite position, it is a good idea to know how early they start out with it. The average age varies wildly by community, with kids in some communities beginning as early as 12 years old. There is a reason a lot of middle schools have nurseries attached to them, after all. If you try to demonize sex, you will produce a kid who hides it, and an adult who feels terrible about something that should be celebrated.

For another thing, some recreational drinking is to be expected. After all, it is a status symbol to be able to handle one’s liquor. And status symbols aside, alcohol allows a person to get into the moment. Adults use it for the same reason teens do- they have a lot of future oriented activities that they do not necessarily want to think about, so they do their best to occasionally forget about them through the drink. Just make sure to keep it away from driving.

Filed Under: Relationships Tagged With: Youth