Your child is not your boss

Original source: Empowering Parents

Youth counsellor and therapist James Lehman, formerly a defiant teenager who drifted into a life of homelessness, drugs and crime before rehabilitating himself, says the lines of authority in a family need to be very clear.

As a parent, if you aren’t the boss in your family, the lines of authority can become blurred very quickly. When your children are unsure about who’s really in charge, they often act out, engage in risky behaviour, or become extremely bossy and patronizing as a result. And eventually, you start to resent them because you don’t have a way to tell them what to do. You’ve effectively lost control.

Many parents also want to be their child’s friend—they don’t like the idea of being the boss at all. The major problem with this approach is that a friend is non-judgmental, and a friend is a peer. In my opinion, your child’s role simply isn’t equal to yours—as a parent, you have to make judgments and be in charge because otherwise, no one will be in charge.

I think when children are very young, it’s easy to see that the parents are in charge — parents make the decisions, direct their children in their day-to-day activities, and organize things for their household. They also supervise their children’s behaviour and decide what’s appropriate and what’s not.

… when adolescence hits … many parents have a hard time reasserting their role as the person in charge

And you’ll often see children from the age of about six to ten being compliant most of the time. During those years, parents tend to develop a friendly relationship with their kids and, unless your kids have significant behaviour problems, they listen to you, do what you ask, and want to spend time with you.

But when adolescence hits, the whole game changes. What often emerges is not only a lack of respect for parental authority but also a situation where your child wants to be the boss.

When this happens, many parents have a hard time reasserting their role as the person in charge. And if you’ve never clearly established yourself as being in control, it may seem as though it’s almost impossible for you to do it after your child becomes a teenager.