Happy Kids, Cathy Glass [best ebook reader for ubuntu .TXT] 📗

active, you need to educate yourself, be aware and know what to do and where to go if you need help.

Don’t be shocked if your son or daughter announces he or she is gay. A recent study in the UK found that by the age of nineteen 5 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women had had a sexual experience with a same-sex partner, and 6 per cent of the adult population is gay. You may face a sharp learning curve to come to terms with your son or daughter’s homosexuality, but remember that he or she is the same person, the same child you nurtured; it’s just that they have different sexual and emotional needs to those you had probably anticipated.

Lastly, with all this talk of sex, it needs to be said that if your teen decides to remain celibate until he or she is older or married, that is perfectly normal too. There is so much pressure, particularly in Western societies, from peers and the media for everyone to be having continuous multi-orgasmic sex that parents can believe there is something wrong with their child when he or she hasn’t had a sexual relationship by the time they are eighteen.

CHAPTER TEN

Grown Up

Young Adults

The clock strikes midnight on the eve of your child’s eighteenth birthday, the day he or she becomes an adult in the eyes of the law. Will your child wake the following morning, having been endowed with the wisdom and experience necessary to successfully meet all the challenges of the adult world? The intellect, caution, diplomacy and plain common sense required to navigate the hurdles which face adults on a daily basis? No. Or at best, it’s highly unlikely. Your young adult will be the same person who went to bed the night before, with the same teenage impulsiveness and ideology, and this will remain true for quite a few years to come.

Even though your son or daughter can now legally hold a driving licence, drink alcohol, vote, fight for their country, sign binding contracts including credit agreements, in many respects he or she is still a child. They will still need the same guiding caution and boundaries as they did in their older teenage years – which can be a rather worrying prospect for parents whose children are about to go away to college.

How mature?

Children and teenagers mature at different rates. One eighteen-year-old will have more of the ‘adult’ in them than another, and many young people well into their twenties will still need boundaries, support, direction and advice. In this chapter I am generalising about the average eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old.

During the older teenage years your son or daughter strove for independence and autonomy, oblivious to many dangers as they challenged the boundaries for their safety and reasonable behaviour that you, the parent, put in place. By the time your teen reaches eighteen he or she will have accepted many of your guidelines, and should now be able to be self-disciplined, and make reasonable decisions, much of but not all of the time. Your son or daughter will have found a new position with their new legal status, but there is one position you retain, and will do so for ever: the position of parent.

With that position comes the right to respect from your child, whatever his or her age; and the maturity of your young adult can largely be gauged by the degree of respect he or she shows you, as a parent and individual. This is a good yardstick. If your eighteen-year-old still challenges you as they did at fifteen, then they still have a lot of growing up to do. Continue with the boundaries for acceptable behaviour that were in place during the older teenager years, and encourage your young adult to more mature behaviour by giving them more responsibility for their daily lives.

In present-day Western society we often ‘baby’ our children for longer than is necessary, with the result that the child can get stuck in the teenager role. Taking care of more of his or her own needs, for example ironing and cooking, will give your son or daughter a focal point, as well as encouraging a more mature responsibility. But wait until they are calm before you introduce the subject. Don’t, for instance, shout in anger, ‘You can do your own bloody cooking in future!’ when your young adult has turned up his or her nose at a meal you spent a long time preparing. Simply suggest that perhaps in future he or she would be happier doing their own cooking (or whatever it is), and then let them do it. Teenagers and young adults often have no idea how much parents actually do for them, and giving them responsibility for looking after themselves will encourage appreciation and respect.

Even the more mature eighteen-year-old will not suddenly stop behaving negatively or unsafely on the stroke of midnight; indeed with the increased amount of options and choices that their adult status allows there will be more decisions for them to make and dangers for them to avoid. As well as maintaining the decisions he or she has already made – not smoking, taking drugs or having unprotected sex and drinking sensibly, etc. – your son or daughter should now add to this list not drinking and driving; limiting credit to what he or she can afford; holding down a job; committing to a relationship, etc.

You will have gradually been giving your teen more and more responsibility for his or her own decisions and you will be hoping that, having set boundaries for good behaviour (put in place using the 3Rs), you will have given your young adult a good moral code with which to approach adult life. However, your house rules still apply now your teen is an adult, so that if it wasn’t acceptable for Tom to stagger home drunk and throw up on the carpet every Friday and Saturday