This weekend was like a lot of our weekends as parents of teens… divide and conquer. What does this mean, you ask? It means both teenagers have to be places around the same time in different towns, which means parents have to divide up to make it all work.
I was on social teen girl duty. She had a birthday party that I agreed to get her and 2 friends to. This chauffeuring overlapped with the teen boy’s band performance. So the husband (who turned down ACC Championship tickets) was on band duty. He is a keeper for sure.
I did party drop off 10 minutes early so that I could get to the band performance only 30 minutes late. I got to see 2 of the 5 songs. Thankfully the husband recorded the other 3 on his phone. This band has been together for around 4 years, and I am happy to report that my teen is the main writer of original songs. The content can be a bit… well, like the maturity level of teenage boys, but I love that they are creating music together. My favorite song? Fruit Armageddon (their band is The Mangos). For folks local, please check out Wall of Sound. An amazing place for budding young musicians.
Not sure how single parents do it. Or parents where the teens out number the adults.
One thing I am working on is setting limits with activities. I will end this post with one example that I felt proud of. Social teen girl asked me to take her to Durham this morning so she could go to the mall with friends to buy presents for the birthday party. This would have meant 3 trips to Durham in one day for me. For folks not local, that equals 3 hours round trip in the car. I offered instead to drop her off at Target when I went for my small group class at Chapel Hill Training with $20. I felt like this was a good compromise. She still got to shop, and I was not in the car all day getting her to everything she wanted to do. Setting limits is so important with parenting teens. How do you do it?
Want to chat about parenting in the teenage years? Check out the Let’s Talk Parenting link and get in touch. I would love to talk with you!