I was in the construction site when my mobile phone rang. It was my wife on the other line but the signal wasn’t clear so I decided to hang up. When I reached my office, I found her off-line messages in my YM and after few “buzzing”; we were able to chat finally. Her message seems to be in resignation for a fact that she just had witnessed a quarrel between our eldest and youngest sibling. Tired from work and coming from a short errand in a grocery store, the sight of commotion understandably, is not a good way of welcoming a work-tired mother.
I waited for her to cool down and for a while, I listened as she expressed all her torment and anguish about the pressure of raising single-handedly truculent teen and naughty youngster. By the way, lest I forget to tell, I was working overseas while my wife and my kids are in the Philippines. Absentee parenting is a great challenge and requires a lot of painstaking effort to maintain the level of discipline within the family while providing the means to sustain a living.
Parents are often pushed to the threshold of surrender when it comes to child rearing. I was once a living witness during a quarrel between my eldest son and daughter. I was taken aback by the sight of the commotion that almost shook our house. The only thing that preserved my sanity was thinking that in twenty years, my teenage boy and three girls would be having the same with their children. (LOL) What a way to get even, huh? Kidding aside, I am too tired for the terrible two’s (my 2 youngsters) and truculent teens (my eldest son and daughter). And you know what I have discovered as the best way to deal with it?—just let them be. As long as no one is hurting physically and no foul words are used, let your children spill out their emotions and yell out the anger. After all, feeling is neither right or wrong (Marriage Encounter Principle) so why suppress it. At the end of the day, once they are tired of the yelling and yakking, they will surely stop and will cool down naturally. Have you tried to shout continuously for 30 minutes? If not, try to do this simple test if this tip really works.
The best thing to deal with truculent teens is to do nothing. After all, weren’t you be the just like your kids when you were in your teenage years?
Gino Marcelo is a regular contributor to E-Zine Articles. Visit his other articles at:
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert_bio=Gener_Marcelo
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