No, I won't gloat over your state of childlessness.
But it does cast a new light for me onto your postings. Someone like you, with years of counseling teens, no doubt has gleaned a lot of insight into the minds of teenagers.
But OTOH, I would like you to consider asking yourself this: Could your lack of experience of being a parent of a teen possibly color your views of the teen-parent relationship, weighing it too heavily towards the teen's point of view?
I'm sure that any tendency to take a teen's word against his parent is highly useful, especially when the teen needs a sympathetic ear to listen to him. Just having someone to listen to everything you say and automatically accept it as unvarnished truth, can no doubt be very helpful in many situations. (Though I can't help but wonder if it's the best thing in ALL situations?)
But from what I can see, a tendency such as this can make your posts here much less useful to many of us, because of what appears to some of us to be an unreasonable bias against MM's mother, with all kinds of unsupported accusations being leveled against her, many approaching the level of libel. (in my opinion).
But OTOH, I would like you to consider asking yourself this: Could your lack of experience of being a parent of a teen possibly color your views of the teen-parent relationship, weighing it too heavily towards the teen’s point of view?
I’m sure that any tendency to take a teen’s word against his parent is highly useful, especially when the teen needs a sympathetic ear to listen to him. Just having someone to listen to everything you say and automatically accept it as unvarnished truth, can no doubt be very helpful in many situations. (Though I can’t help but wonder if it’s the best thing in ALL situations?)
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Actually, most of the teens might well have told you—at least 40% of them—that initially they thought I was taking too much of their parents’ perspective.
I probably did best with teens who were my students counseling them about family problems—especially in China and Taiwan vs in formal counseling situations.
IN formal counseling situations, usually getting the dad involved was very difficult. Also, they tended to bring the teen in when things were durn near hopeless to begin with.
IF the parents were willing to adjust their pride, ego, and petty issues and if the teen was willing to consider his/her flaws . . . progress could be made. Those were often big IF’s.