Parenting tweens and teens in today’s culture means constantly adapting to the flow of new issues, unfamiliar challenges, and tenuous balancing acts for everyone involved. When we are raising tweens and teens who are also impacted by the foster system or adoption, you have some additional, complex layers to consider as they reach for independence and develop their identity. Then there are the hormones! And the moods. Oh, the moods.

Maintaining a healthy perspective when raising tweens and teens can challenge even the most even-keeled among us. However, a healthy perspective is crucial so our families can thrive together and our tweens and teens feel supported and equipped.

Tips for Maintaining a Healthy Perspective with Our Tweens and Teens

Our dreams for our tweens and teens include the desire to develop a healthy self-identity, a sense of purpose, and a respect for themselves and others. While that list may feel out of reach some days, it’s crucial to remember that raising our kids to adulthood is a long game. There’s no quick, easy fix, but we can make small, meaningful daily steps toward that goal. These five tips should be practiced repeatedly, like how you remind them to pick up their wet towels and shut the door behind them!

1. Put our parenting house in order. 

We must consider our emotional histories or trauma impacts and how they may affect our parenting style and interactions with our kids. For example, you might have unresolved trauma of your own or wounds from your family of origin. Healthily coping with those issues can improve your ability to support your tween or teen in facing their challenges.

How a Parent’s History with Attachment and Trauma Impacts Adoption and Fostering

Our role in our tweens’ and teens’ lives is to nurture and empower them to form identities and grow into successful adults. This focused perspective can motivate us to act in their best interest. We can also put aside unhealthy expressions, pity, or rescuing them, and instead deal with the realities they face as they grow.

Joining a support group or checking in with a therapist or trusted adult can help us learn and keep learning about ourselves. From that position of strength, we can maintain the appropriate foundation to guide our tweens and teens as they grow.

2. Balance our focus.

Our kids have joined our families because they’ve experienced some form of loss and trauma – it’s inherent to adoption, foster care, or raising a relative child. However, their story is about them, not about us or about us saving them.

It is developmentally typical for adolescents to go through the stages of separating from their parents to form their identity. It’s also typical that they do it awkwardly, and sometimes hurtfully. But their messy process usually isn’t about us or how they feel about us. It’s merely one of the tougher parts of becoming an adult. Yes, adopted or fostered tweens and teens might have more challenging stuff to work through. But it’s (usually) still within the range of typical “growing pains” for the adolescent brain.

As much as we love them, we must resist the urge to protect or rescue them from things they need to experience. Learning how to overcome the hard things in life will empower them. Knowing you are there, ready to be a safe landing place or a sounding board, will allow them to figure out their stuff and develop necessary life skills. When they face these obstacles or challenges (even those of their own making!), they can face the future with earned confidence. We must balance our safe, nurturing presence without over-parenting them. 

3. Keep an open-door policy.

It’s common for our kids to be curious about their birth parents and extended families, and to want a relationship with them. It’s also normal for them to struggle to understand the complex parts of their story and worry about inheriting negative traits from their families. We must acknowledge our tweens’ or teens’ curiosity and fear and be willing to sit with them in those feelings.

No matter the complex issues, the best policy is to communicate that they are always welcome to share their thoughts and feelings with us. We can do this with our words, our modeling of openness, and how we handle their vulnerability when they offer it. We can communicate that we are open by demonstrating how we overcome our fears, anxieties, or discomfort with these issues (and other tough topics). Our kids should know we are and always will be safe, supportive, and non-judgmental with them.

It’s crucial to understand that many of our kids impacted by trauma or loss may also be at increased risk for suicidality. Please take time to educate yourself about risk factors and suicide prevention.

4. Acknowledge, discuss, and embrace diversity.

Many of us are raising children who do not look like us. Celebrate it and normalize it for your whole family.

Rather than trying to fit them into the mold of our existing family dynamic (or expecting them to do so), we must let them know that we love them as they are and welcome the differences they bring! Talk about their culture of birth, the region where they lived before coming to your family, the food they loved, and the community they left behind.

We can celebrate the differences they enrich our families with by cooking, attending cultural activities, reading diverse books, and learning about historical and cultural events. And when challenging issues of race, culture, or identity development arise, we can assure them that we are “all in” to tackle them together. Our goal is to make sure they feel seen and heard for all of who they are.

5. Prepare tweens and teens to launch.

By the time our kids reach the tween and teen years, we are all too aware of the truth of the adage, “The days are long, but the years are short.” No matter how old our tweens and teens were when they joined our family, they are quickly approaching the day they launch into adulthood.

Our primary role is to prepare them to launch successfully by teaching them the life skills they need to function as productive adults. When we allow them to experience life with its good and complex parts, we can support their identity formation and growing sense of purpose.

Navigating the good and the bad will also help build the resiliency they need to move forward and thrive. We can bolster the learning by providing opportunities to work or volunteer outside our homes. Through those additional experiences, they learn about themselves, including how to identify their interests, strengths, and weaknesses. These are all essential elements of picturing a future for themselves and figuring out how to pursue it.

Strengthening & Supporting Your Transracial Adoptee

Grow and Keep Growing

We certainly aren’t getting credits for it when we commit to “continuing education” as a parent or caregiver. Still, we can see the benefits and improve our kids’ chances of positive outcomes. By continuously balancing our parenting, welcoming them unconditionally, and ensuring they know we are open and able to handle whatever they experience, we offer them the opportunity to build life skills that will carry them into adulthood. We all want our kids to thrive, and maintaining this perspective of “let’s grow and keep growing together” will serve them well in doing that.

Image Credits: 
Title Collage - Mizuno K; Tima Miroshnichenko; Pixabay
Body of Article - Gustavo Fring; RDNE Stock project