Reply to My teens are just fine. WDYT? Are they really behaving or are parents fooling themselves?

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Reply to "My teens are just fine. WDYT? Are they really behaving or are parents fooling themselves?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was one of those kids you never had to worry about - polite, smart, responsible, never drank until 21 (rarely do now), good grades, absolutely no drugs, no sneaking out, no lying to parents, no sex, no shoplifting, ect. Basically no drama. And people constantly told my parents that when I went to high school\college I would go totally crazy, especially since I went to a "party school" for college. Never went crazy. My dad often complained to me (in a joking way) since he had to deal with my younger sister doing normal teenage stuff and didn't have the experience from dealing with me.

I realize I'm pretty rare and that my kids will probably be insane.[/quote]

I was such a goody two shoes that I missed ALL the signs that my kids were going off the rails.  Oldest is about to graduate from college and only now is he telling me about some of the things he did in high school that I didn't know about.  I had these horrendous fights with my husband because I felt like he didn't trust the kids.  He would tell me "The kid is sleeping all day Saturday because he's high" and I would say, "No, he's tired from studying."  Turns out my husband was right about everything.  IN retrospect I am ill at the thought that we gave this child a car and he probably drove after smoking pot, etc.

We have clamped down so hard on our youngest as a result.  We regularly make her take a surprise urinalysis. (You can buy home drug test kits online.)  She is the one who says to her friends, "No, I can't.  I would get caught and I would get in so much trouble!"  Honestly, I wish I had instituted random drug tests the moment each kid turned 14.  We could have avoided so much.

I was equally surprised when my son told me he lost his virginity at age 15 at summer sleepaway camp.  I literally had no interest in sex until my senior year in college, in the context of a committed relationship, etc.  so it never occurred to me that my kids would be sexually active that young.[/quote]

Sometimes I think it's better to support them doing SOME things (like sex or pot, where you can do so legally) than causing  them to sneak.[/quote]

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