Your Relationship with Your Kids!

• Despite transformations in parent-child relationships across the transition to adolescence, parents remain influential in their children’s lives.”
  

• “Adolescents look to their friends for advice on fashion or music and they turn to their parents for guidance on moral issues.”

• Adolescents perceive parents as one of the most accurate sources of information about dating, compared to peers or romantic partners.

• Adolescents anticipate parents’ reactions before taking action.

• Parents’ communication of clear expectations regarding appropriate dating behaviors is likely to influence adolescents’ subsequent decisions.

• Most parents (64%) reported using dating rules, which varied by the adolescents and parents’ gender, for their 17-19 year olds. And more than a quarter of the families in this sample reported that establishing supervisory dating rules was a process that jointly involved parents and adolescents.

Peers vs. Parents…Who do teens listen to?

Ask anyone who has parented a teenager in the past few years what they worry about – most times they’ll tell you it’s the dangers our kids encounter every day. We can’t be naive and think that we can ignore these dangers or that the issues of drugs, alcohol, sex, etc. will never affect our family.

Don’t count on society to take care of it. Often the messages that our kids get from the popular culture are not designed to protect them. Some messages are designed to create discontent in them…to create a false image of what will give them fulfillment…to encourage them to get all that they can right now and that it won’t affect their future. Often we hear only the negative media — but there’s a great deal of positive that hasn’t made its way into mainstream media.

Like…the majority of North Dakota student’s grades 7-12 say that abstinence is an important message for them at this time in their lives. Two out of three adolescents who have been sexually active report that they regret it and wish that they had waited. And, don’t believe that ‘everyone is doing it’. Results from the 2005 ND Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that 41.2% of North Dakota students reported ever having had sexual intercourse. Obviously, the flip side of that statistic is that well over half of North Dakota students have not! This is great news because…abstinence from all sexual activity is the only 100% effective method of protection against sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy. That is a fact!