When I decided to concentrate my practice on adolescent medicine, I did so because I thought I would be able to help many troubled teens. I soon found that by age 13 kids are pretty much set in their ways (read “values”) and changing them is difficult, possible, but very difficult.
How much easier things would be if parents knew how to be parents. Almost all parenting books are written to teach mothers how to parent. They go to great length to tell her how to nurse a baby, give a bath, introduce soft foods, toilet train a toddler, read to a child, play with him or her, and how to avoid other possible stumbling blocks. But, fathers are as important as mothers! Dads need to read parenting books, too. There are few fathering books, and most of them focus on these same details or laugh at the things father’s do. In the end many humor Dad and keep him out of Mom’s way, but this makes dads look and feel like incompetent duds.
Knowing how to parent is important, but it’s much more important to know how to be a parent! Being a parent means changing yourself from being a self-centered adolescent, a friend and buddy of everyone who makes you feel good, to being a responsible adult in all things. We all know that what you do is more important than what you say, but too often we forget. Everything a parent does is important, everything! I heard a wise man say, ”Don’t worry that your kids don’t do everything you say, worry that they do everything you do!” Learn this and you will have the foundation for becoming a great parent!
In a perfect world the answer to the above question would be “NO”. But in our current place Adolescent Medicine is a very much needed specialty. If we could teach couples how to be parents when their children are very young, or even before their kids are born, we would not need a special field of medicine for our teens. One of the goals of Messengers in Denim, and the soon to be, Tools for Raising Kids of Character, is to make Adolescent Medicine passé. To that end both books address parents as equal but different partners in raising kids and shows them how to be parents.
The future of our country lies not in our children, but in their parents who must teach them right from wrong and form them into people of character.