By Debra W. Haffner



Media headlines and parenting books would have us believe our children might, at any moment, fall prey to mean girls, cyber-bullies, sexual predators, drug addiction, drinking, the obesity epidemic, teen pregnancy, “out of control” behavior or worse! Fears aside, facts actually suggest that in many ways our kids are safer and our jobs as parents easier than ever before, and—even more good news!—kids look to their parents much more than we think when it comes to the important stuff. Author, mom, minister and sexuality educator, Debra W. Haffner, separates fears from facts in her new book due out this month, What Every 21st-Century Parent Needs To Know. She also offers practical tips and reassuring insights to help parents navigate that fine line between “too strict” and “not strict enough,” and cultivate what she calls an “affirming” style of parenting.(What type of parent are you? Discover the pros and cons of your own parenting style in Online Extras.) Here she shares just some of that advice:

Affirming Parenthood comes down to six key tools:

1. Love your children unconditionally.
One of the Ten Commandments is to “honor your father and mother.” Frankly, I wish Moses had returned from the mountaintop commanding us to love our children, too. (That he did not reflects how differently children were viewed three thousand years ago. The penalty in the Torah for not respecting parents is death by stoning. Yes, times have changed!)
Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner, renowned psychologist and cofounder of the U.S. National Head Start program, is credited with the statement that children need an enduring, reciprocal, and irrational relationship with at least one person. In other words, what children need most are parents who are crazy about them, who love their children “more than anything and anyone.” One parent I spoke to said that his primary role was to “love his children in extremis.”

2. Stay actively involved in your children’s and teenagers’ lives.
The most important advice I can give parents as their children move to adolescence is to stay involved in their daily lives. Parents of smaller children do this naturally, but it takes more effort as our children develop friendships apart from us, join activities outside of school and the faith-based institution, and later begin to drive. One parent of a fifteen-year-old girl plaintively asked me, “When are we going to talk if she does not need me to drive her from place to place anymore?”
Too many parents, as their children approach middle school and then high school, begin to pull back from active involvement. It’s as if they feel they are “done” with active parenting. You are not done—probably ever and certainly not until your child is launched into adulthood. Our tweens and teens need us. I am always surprised that fewer parents of middle and high schoolers than elementary school parents come to my talks on sexuality issues; it almost seems they have “given up” their opportunities for influence.
The balancing act here is to stay involved but not so involved that you micromanage their lives or keep them from developing their own sense of independence and decision making. Our generation of parents has been dubbed “helicopter” or even “hovercraft” parents. It is indeed hard to get it just right—just the right amount of involvement, neither benign neglect nor overbearing presence. Remember, you are not your children’s best friend, however appealing that may sound to you. You want them to enjoy being with you, but you also want them to begin to develop lives of their own…

3. Set limits jointly.
Authoritarian Parents make the rules. Permissive Parents often have few, if any. Affirming Parents approach their families as a “limited democracy”—when their children are small, they define many of the parameters; but as they get older, they involve them in setting limits and consequences.
I believe that young people want our help and our parameters about their acceptable behavior. I think about several smaller children I knew who were whiny, demanding, and tantrum-prone. All had few limits on their behaviors. As children get older, they continue to need our limits to feel safe, but they can also be involved in setting them.
Bedtimes can be negotiated, for example. Rules for TV and Internet use can be developed jointly. Asking your children to research issues and present their case can be empowering, and you may find your conflict resolves itself. For example, when my daughter Alyssa was sixteen, she wanted to have her belly button pierced. I asked her to research the risks online and to present them to her father and me. After seeing pages upon pages of pictures of infected navels, she decided she was not interested after all.

4. Set consequences and follow through.
Setting and being consistent about consequences is one of the most important skills of the Affirming Parent and one of the hardest to do “just right.” Talking with your children about what they think will be fair consequences when you set limits together lets them know in advance that you are firm about your expectations.
The parenting literature has talked about natural and logical consequences for more than thirty years. “Natural” consequences are those that are not controlled by the parent. If a child stays up too late, she’ll be tired the next day. If he skips dinner because he doesn’t like what’s being served, he’ll be hungry at bedtime. If he doesn’t study for a test, he gets a poor grade. Our parents called it “learning the hard way,” and if you can tolerate the outcome for your children, it’s a great way for them to learn. The hard part is knowing which consequences are okay for them to tolerate: failing one test may be a lesson; allowing them to fail a course and have to repeat a grade because we aren’t regularly monitoring their homework is taking a consequence too far.
“ Logical” consequences are more about discipline and parents determining the consequences. They’re usually used when there aren’t natural consequences. You and your children agree in advance to what the consequences will be if an agreement is violated and then you make sure that you (and they) follow through. The teen who misses curfew does not get to go out the following weekend. The child who doesn’t want dinner doesn’t get to have dessert. The tween who goes on an Internet site that you have not approved loses Internet privileges for a period of time. The idea behind logical consequences is that they follow from the behavior; finding out that your child is texting messages during class means losing cell phone privileges, not losing TV time.
I have seen many parents who tell their children that there will be consequences, but then back-pedal because of the inconvenience of carrying them through. Be sure you can live with what you agree upon. No car for a week means that you may have to drive them to school or work if there is no public transportation. No cell phones mean that they have no easy way to call you. Having to go over each homework assignment with your procrastinating eighth grader means a half hour out of your evening when you could be doing something else. You get the picture. But if you do not follow through, your child or teen will quickly learn that your consequences are merely threats that can be ignored.
Anticipating consequences from their parents can make a big difference in adolescent involvement in risk behaviors. For example, teens who do not think their parents will do anything if they drink alcohol are more likely to do so. Teens who think that their parents are okay about teens having sex are more likely to engage. The converse is also true: teens who believe that their parents will apply consequences are more likely to avoid the behaviors in the first place.

5. Communicate your family’s values.
All children need to know their families’ values. It’s important for you to impart your messages to your children. Views on sexuality, alcohol and drug use, appropriate media for young people, the role of religion in your family, even the value of physical exercise and time outdoors all vary from one family to another. In this information age, your child will learn facts about almost every area of life from school, the media, and their friends. But only you as the parent can teach your children about your family’s views.
It begins with how we treat one another. I have a strong value that every person deserves to be treated with dignity and respect and affirm the biblical teaching “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Those form the hallmarks of how I hope we behave to one another in our home. I am certainly not a perfect mother, nor is my family perfect; I am guessing you’re not, either. I lose my temper at times with my children and I do not always bring the best of myself to all our interactions, especially when I am stressed. But it is a goal for the members of our family always to strive to treat one another with dignity and respect.
I know that actions speak louder than words. (As James Baldwin wrote in Nobody Knows My Name, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”) I also know that I should not be “preaching” our family values to my children. My children need me to be mom, not minister. Parents need to model the behaviors that we hope our children will adopt. It does no good to tell them to exercise and eat well if we do not; if we treat our partner with disrespect, they will learn more from this than from our admonitions about kindness.

6. Understand the world your child is growing up in.
In the old days, parents may have scoffed that their children had it easy because when their parents were small, they had to walk miles to school in the snow. But have you ever told your child about the good old days before computers or when there were only five TV channels? Or how we used to have to go outside to play because there weren’t video games?
Yes, our children are growing up in a different world and rather than bemoan it we can celebrate with them all that it brings. We are blessed by living not only in the Internet age, but also in a time when more and more children can grow up to reach their potential. When people idealize the United States of the 1950s, they often forget about its pervasive racism and sexism, about segregation and poverty, and about the invisibility of ethnic, religious, or sexual diversity. Although the twenty-first century must still confront many of those “isms,” our children are growing up in a country with much greater respect for diversity than the one we grew up in.
We can either be afraid of this new world or we can embrace it, learn about it, and help our child set limits. For example, forbidding your fourteen-year-old to have a MySpace page when all her friends do is likely to result in her creating one at school or at a friend’s house, or feeling isolated and unnecessarily controlled. Affirming Parents understand that it might be better to help define the limits for safe use of these types of sites and then appropriately monitor them.
We also need to remember that children and teens understand their world in different ways than we do. Research now proves that a child’s brain processes information very differently than adults’. We know so much about child development and the adolescent brain; even our own common sense tells us that our children do not see things the same way we do. Remembering this and trying to remember what it felt like when you were their age can go a long way in helping to understand your children’s feelings and behaviors.

My last piece of advice for the Affirming Parent is to enjoy this special time. Yes, there are days when parenting makes us stressed, worried, and crazy… But overall I love parenting and I can’t think of anything that I’m doing that is more important than nurturing and raising Alyssa and Gregory. We are blessed to be parenting at this particular time in history.

From What Every 21st-Century Parent Needs To Know, by Debra W. Haffner. Copyright © 2008 by Debra W. Haffner. Reprinted by permission from Newmarket Press. www.21stCenturyParent.com

Are You An Affirming Parent? What is your parenting style? Take the Haffner's quiz (in this issue's Online Extras), and find out!