Should I validate my teen daughters’ concerns, or support their father as a co-parent? | Leading questions

This is a common parenting dilemma, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Find a way to hear your daughters without turning this into a proxy-fight

Is it more important to validate and empathise with my teens about their difficult relationship with their dad, stepmum and stepbrother; or support him as a co-parent, even though I can see the damage it is doing? I have two teenage daughters, 14 and 16, who have a fractious relationship with their dad and his family. He approaches parenting in an authoritarian way and I can see the negative impact this has on our daughters’ self-esteem and self worth.

They are delightful young people and I am very proud of how thoughtful, intelligent and individual they are – the horror stories of parenting teens are not something that I have to worry about and I have an open, respectful relationship with them. Because of this, they often come to me, together and separately, about the problems they have with their dad, stepmum and stepbrother.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/7Y4t0sb

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two years after Buffalo mass shooting, an art exhibit focuses on the victims

A few months after 14 May 2022, a curator sought out three local artists. The resulting exhibition, Before and After Again, is thought to be the first of its kind Two years ago, a white supremacist drove 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, and opened fire in a grocery store in the city’s predominantly Black East Side neighborhood, killing 10 people and injuring three. Though the Tops Friendly Markets where the racist mass shooting took place has been remodeled, and most of the country has forgotten about the violence that occurred on 14 May 2022, Buffalo’s East Side is forever changed. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mqu1LFv
Read more

£1 Thursdays review – nightclubbing, sex talk and big decisions

Finborough theatre, London A mix of sweet observations about female friendship and cheeky brazenness about sex, Kat Rose-Martin’s play finds two young women at a crossroads in their lives In the cold air outside a sticky nightclub in Bradford, 17-year-olds Stacey and Jen are at a crossroads. In one direction lies the world they know: the family stress, the looming exams, the pumping pop beats at the club where they’ll reliably pull boys from school. In the other direction lies an uncertain path, and questions of who they are apart from one another, whether they could be the first in their families to go to university, and how to afford it if they do. Constantly on their minds, while they’re drunkenly dancing the nights away, is where they’ll end up, and what to do if they are the ones left behind. Thoughtful if not revelatory, £1 Thursdays covers an uneasy period of big decisions in these characters’ lives, as the gap between them widens. Monique Ashe-Palmer (Six) is ebullient as St
Read more