Reply to "Fast" kids -- how do they get that way?

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

Reply to ""Fast" kids -- how do they get that way?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This question is hard to answer universally -- look at families with siblings. One or two might be rule followers and one or two might be into drinking and sex at a young age. Same parents, same rules.

Sometimes its the personality, sometimes its the friends they spend a lot of time with in their formative years (12/13/14) and the boundaries those friends have, and sometimes its a traumatic event.  [/quote]

This, but also:

Sometimes parents react to their older kid's behavior and that reaction has a different effect on younger kids. In my family, my older brother was "fast" -- lots of drinking and partying. It was partly due to inattentive parenting, as others have noted, but also my parents just not really being prepared for the teenage years. And also a general failure to instill certain qualities in their kids (self-confidence and self-worth) that made him particularly susceptible to running with a fast crowd.

Well of course they freaked out and came down very hard on my sister and I, with lots of rules as well as a lot of moralizing (drinking is "bad", drugs and sex are immoral), so we were super good two shoes through high school, though also not at all self-confident, just too afraid of our parents to try anything. I had a curfew of 8pm until I graduated from high school.

And yes, gender absolutely plays a role in this, too. "Fast" girls face a lot more reprobation than boys due, and thus I think are less likely to do this (and punished more harshly by society when they do).

But the point is, it is parenting, but it's not so simple as keeping a tight rein on your kids. You need to view them as people and figure out how to help them build skill sets and then give them independence in which to use those skills. It's not one or the other, it's both.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics