Negotiating with my teen

Next week my oldest graduates from being a teenager! He no longer lives under my roof, but nonetheless I'll no longer be able to say that I'm the mother of three teenagers! It's interesting to look at the blog post I wrote the week he turned thirteen. I wrote: 

I don't know what is ahead, but the last 13 years of parenting haven't been a breeze. I doubt that the next seven are going to be either. I guess the only way forward is how I've made it through the last 13 years — by God's grace and with lots of prayer.

That was very much the case! 

So I'm seven years into being the mother of teens and I can't say it's gotten easier. Of course each child is different in the level of difficulties you face and the areas in which you face those difficulties. Additionally, our family looks different now than it did seven years ago. So the context within which we parent our younger two is different too. 

It's hard to give specifics to make this actually a readable post, without embarrassing boys. However I'm going to give it a go.

Negotiating about household jobs

Our boys have long been expected to do jobs around the house. We've had a long and steady routine of do-the-same-job for some time, due to some personalities in the house that don't like chopping and changing. They've done breakfast wash-ups in middle school (grades 6-8) and hung up washing to dry in high school (grades 9-12). Both jobs were done in the mornings and timeliness was important if they were to get themselves to school on time (remembering that they walk to school independently, but it's only a 300m walk). 

We've had difficulties with all of them at times, getting these jobs done, and had to implement consequences. But with one of the two still at home, we hit a brick wall recently. It was causing lots of stress, conflict, and generally making life together miserable.

In the end we decided something needed to change. I ammended a list of household jobs that I'd typed up a few years back and printed it out again. This is a list of jobs that regularly get done in our house to keep things running smoothly and people happy. I split the list into things that each family member does as well as listed the things that we are all responsible for (eg. getting enough sleep, personal hygiene, manage our personal items, strip beds and remake them). At the top of the list is this explanation:

Listed below are jobs done for the benefit of the whole family. Other jobs we do are self-care or care for our environment, these are the responsibility of each family member for themselves. The purpose of teaching you how to do these jobs is to help you learn how to take care of yourself and your living environment when you move out of home. Sharing these jobs also helps to share the load of caring for four people.

At an opportune moment I presented this 1.5 page list to the relevant boy and suggested that he pick some other jobs that would be equivalent in time to the job that he was struggling with.

Stacks of beautifully folded clothes!

He responded really well and chose four other jobs, the most significant of which is folding the washing. We're still on a learning curve with one of the jobs, but the others he's doing relatively independently and in a timely fashion. Result: stress levels aorund here have decreased. (We're still working on other areas like time management and homework...so our evenings are not without stress entirely!)

Seven years into this parenting-teens journey and I'm still learning that parenting teens requires more negotiating than with younger kids. They're trying to be more independent and that can be problematic for all involved. Some teens need more room to stretch than others. I need to note that this solution was not the first of the solutions that we negotiated with him, however it seems to be working better than previous ones.

I'm not a perfect parent by any stretch of the imagination. And they would be happy to share their thoughts on my parenting failures with you, if you asked them! But I merely share these thoughts as a fellow parent in the trenches.