Sometimes parenting teens feels like living on borrowed time. The years before they leave for college (or whatever their young adult life looks like) can go quickly and they get busier than ever with school, extracurriculars, and their social lives. It can be easy as a parent to worry that there just isn’t enough time to make sure that they learn all the lessons they need to absorb to be functional adults.
The truth is that we suspect most parents want their teens to be more than just functional adults. We want them to be happy and independent. We hope for them to have good relationships, solid financial lives, and, yes, a positive and healthy sex life. While we all know that we’re supposed to have "the talk" when it comes to sex, but that is just one of the essential conversations all moms need to have with their teens before they leave the nest!
We know it can be overwhelming sometimes to figure out how to best communicate with teens, so we’re here to help with some expert advice on how to approach some of the most critical conversations parents need to have with teens. We might not be able to promise a conversation with teens free from eye rolls, but we suspect our biggest kids are doing more listening than we suspect they are!
Conversation 1: All About College
There is a lot of data that makes it clear that most parents want their children to go to college and there can be a lot of anxiety around the college search process. Parents worry about the costs of college, teens stress about finding the one true college that will be the perfect fit for them, and that’s on top of the anxiety about grades and test scores.
The good news is that according to Dr. Thom Golden, one of the essential conversations to have with teens is to tell them to stress less about finding the perfect school. Golden, who is the CEO of Golden Educational Consulting and a former senior leader in admissions positions at Vanderbilt and Purdue universities, told CafeMom that "there is no such thing as a 'perfect college,' only colleges with different communities and collections of experiences."
He explains that while it can be easy to buy into the myth that "here is this one college where things are perfect, where students ride to class on unicorns and on the small handful of non-sunny days, it rains Skittles." He add that this cultural belief can "generate a tremendous amount of pressure because the student feels like they should 'just know' if a campus is right."
Parents should start talking to their teens about college early in high school with the goal of helping their teens realize "that all colleges have upsides and downsides to them, and the more we help our students think critically about the kind of college experience they want, and teach them the decision-making skills necessary to sift through all of their options, the more we are preparing them for the messiness of adult decision-making," explains Golden.
Conversation 2: Making Smart Social Media Moves
It will not come as a surprise to any parent of a teen that they are social media obsessed at this stage of life. Their phones can seem permanently fused to their hands and a lot of us both worry about how much time they are spending online and about them making smart choices when it comes to social media. Teens sometimes aren’t great at being able to predict the future or assess risk, so parents can’t help but worry about them doing something online that will be hard to fix.
CafeMom reached out to Cathy Pedrayes, an internet safety guru and TikTok influencer with over 2.5 million followers, for some expert advice on how to best talk to teens about making smart social media decisions and she explained that we first have to know what we are talking about. "First, it’s important for parents to explore the apps their teens are using and get familiar with them," she explains. "That familiarity really helps when you have conversations with your teen about online safety and the sooner you can introduce these conversations, the better."
According to Pedrayes, making sure teens know how to be smart about social media is more than just telling them not to sext. Rather, we also need to cover things like "how to verify information you’re seeing online, how to identify scams, how to protect online accounts, data and how to balance device usage." Beyond just making sure teens know how to protect their own data and privacy, Pedraryes also recommends that parents talk about the emotional side of social media usage: "Parents can also talk about how social apps make them feel. Nobody feels that great after being stuck in the 'doom-scroll' and many apps are designed with algorithms and strategic gamification to suck us ALL in (kids and adults included!)."
Conversations about social media should begin as soon as kids have access to devices and continue through their teen years, especially since "parental settings can only go so far and the same is true for parental supervision, ultimately the goal is to teach your child how to navigate the online world on their own," explains Pedrayes.
Conversation 3: Mental Health Matters
The teen years can be hard on everyone, teens included! The combination of hormones, shifting social relationships, and figuring out how to become independent while still needing parental support can be challenging. According to the owner of Lux Wellness in St. Paul, Minnesota, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor Maureen Laufenberg, some level of teenage moodiness is normal.
From a counseling perspective, Laufenberg explains that it’s helpful for teens to know that "it’s normal to not feel good sometimes. That’s a part of being a human and living. Our goal is not to feel perfect or be perfect, but instead to build our skills to care for ourselves when something doesn’t go our way."
Laufenberg shares with CafeMom that talking with teens about their mental health is important and good conversations start with some self-examination. "Our teens, in their moments of moodiness or anger, often activate our 'stuff' (ie. our survival strategies, our attachment wounds, our big feelings)," she explains. "It is in service to them and to us to make sure that we are facing our triggers and doing our part to be emotionally trustworthy adults."
Being a trustworthy adult is key because, according to Laufenberg, our teens "tend to thrive with a balance of agency and structure: our teens want to know we are there for them, and they want to have a voice." We can help them have that advice by talking through potential challenges or mental health triggers before they happen. "Ask questions to help your teen develop critical thinking skills about the challenges and social risks that they’re likely to face in these years, and discuss some options with them ahead of time (when possible). So for example, consider acknowledging things like being offered drugs, drunk driving, sending nudes, etc. If they see us acting calmly, they are more likely to come to us in moments of conflict or stress."
Laufenberg also notes that parents can help teens with manage their mental health by both having open conversations about the fact that all of us have days that are challenging and by paying attention to red flags. She urges parents to consider professional help with these conversations if it seems that our teens "are finding that they cannot access any good feelings about themselves or the world" which can be a sign that it’s time to get more support.
Conversation 4: A Better Sex Talk
OK, first things first: we’ve got to stop calling it "the talk"!
Conversations about sexual health, values, consent, pregnancy, and STI prevention should be ongoing and adjusted for the age and maturity of the teen, not just all dumped on a kid in one awkward conversation!
Sam Wall MSW, an assistant director with the super helpful website Scarleteen (which has great content for teens to access on all things associated with sexuality), tells CafeMom that "it can help to start by making sure young people have accurate, age appropriate information about their bodies and experiences" before tackling tougher topics like sexting and porn. Wall explains that during those conversations, parents should strive to make sure their kids get info about "all bodies, not just their own. In a lot of spaces, sex ed is still split by gender. So, you end up with these big gaps in knowledge about some really basic stuff — think about how many cis men make it to adulthood with incorrect ideas about periods — that could have been easily avoided."
The teen years can be confusing and it’s really normal for kids to have wide ranging questions. "The questions we get the most often boil down to am I/is this normal," Wall notes. "So, the more you can convey that, barring really basic stuff like getting consent, there isn’t one, specific, 'right' way to be a sexual person, and that human sexuality is fantastically diverse, the better."
To that end, parents should strive "to avoid heteronormative messages," Wall continues, because we need to be mindful that some teens may still be figuring out their gender or sexual orientation. According to Wall, we also need to do something that should be simple: "Remind them, often, that you love and accept them. We see a lot of teens who won’t approach the adults in their life for help when they really need it because they’re afraid that something about the situation will cause them to stop loving or accepting them. Make it as explicit as you can to them that that just won’t happen, even if you’re ever not feeling great about their choices, or have your own feelings to work through when it comes to the situation."
Conversation 5: Apologize When We Get It Wrong
The teen years can be stressful for parents (hello, understatement of the year!) and the truth is that sometimes we’ll lose our tempers or get it wrong with how we respond to a situation.
It’s hard to find a parent who has survived the teen years who doesn’t have a story about saying something regrettable to their teens in a moment of anger, including Laurel Johnson, a mother of six adult children and a former high school counselor from Dallas, Texas. "I parented six teenagers, four of mine and two bonus kids I got when my husband and I married," Laurel shares. "Some of them were easy teens, some were really hard. I was having a major fight with my oldest child, who was one of the hard ones, and I lost my temper and said some very hurtful things. After I cooled off, I realized that I needed to apologize. I’d never talk to one of the kids at my school like that, so it wasn’t OK for me to say that to my own child. Like a lot of people my age, my parents never apologized for anything, but I knew that I’d hurt her. I also wanted to make sure I was modeling how people should treat each other in a loving relationship. People who love each other apologize to each other when they screw up! Those conversations are essential because it shows your teen that they can trust you to care for their feelings."
At the end of the day, isn’t that what we all want our teens to know? We care for them, they can trust us, and that there isn’t anything we can’t talk about!
