Parent’s Teenage Dating Advice: Black Ice Dating

This article provides some essential tips for parents whose teenagers are beginning to explore the realm of dating. 

"I hope she makes it home safely. It’s snowing and the roads are covered with ice. She isn’t a very experienced driver at 17 but I still let her journey out into the tundra praying she wouldn’t hit a sheet of black ice that looks like dry pavement. Am I nuts?!" Those were my thoughts two years ago when we lived in Michigan and my daughter was just learning to drive. Scary times. Had I explained to my daughter how to respond to a skid? Should she turn the wheel with the skid or against it? Was this covered in Driver’s Ed or is it simply “learn as you go?”

Providing Teen Dating Advice: Saving Lives

How do those parenting teens teach their kids everything there is to know about driving conditions and dating relationships? Both roads lead to hazardous situations that we can’t predict. Both driving and dating can go from safe to scary in 7 seconds flat. Will my daughter be able to use her head to avoid disaster or will she be frozen with fear? Without the right teen dating advice, will my son recognize that he is accelerating at a dangerous speed and know to slow down?

Just because those who are parenting teens aren’t sitting in the seat beside our kids doesn’t mean we stop instructing them on driving conditions. How often then should we be providing teen dating advice and addressing the manner in which our teens are handling their relationships?

My daughter may have passed Driver’s Ed but every day represents another test; another challenge. Maybe I have drilled “cautious dating” into her head a thousand times with my endless teen dating advice, but every day will be a new opportunity for her to get that right or wrong. Weather and traffic conditions prompt us to remind our teens to be safe on the roads every single day. How often do we evaluate our teen’s relationship safety and recognize that dry pavement could be black ice? Does your teen know how to avoid a catastrophic skid? Just like a proper driver’s education, the right teen dating advice could save your kid’s life!

Teen Dating Advice: Fundamental Tips for Those Parenting Teens

Here are some helpful tips for Teen Dating Advice that I have developed with my own kids, some of which have saved us from many of those midnight phone calls we all dread!

Teen Dating Advice #1: When your kids go out with friends or out on a date, save at least two other numbers into your phone and their phone in case of an emergency. Who are they out with? Do you have the parents’ numbers as well as the students’?  

Teen Dating Advice #2: Get the address of your kid’s destination. My rule? If your physical address changes, you need to call me before you put the car in ‘drive’. If I don’t know, you don’t go!  

Teen Dating Advice #3: Girls should ALWAYS have a phone charger in their purse. Guys and girls should also have one in the car with a hands-free device for emergencies only.  

Teen Dating Advice #4: Have an emergency code for help that will enable your teen to let you know they are in a difficult spot without arousing suspicion from the person they are with. This could be anything, for example: “Is the dog feeling better?” In keeping with teen dating advice point #2, you should have their address, allowing you to come to the rescue at turbo speeds!

 Teen Dating Advice #5: Those parenting teens should give their kids permission to blame them when they feel embarrassed about wanting out of a situation. Many teens will cave in under peer pressure because they don’t have an alibi. Give them one in advance. For example, tell your kids: “If you’re tired and want to go home, or are uncomfortable about a situation you are in, explain to your friends that I am being difficult and am insisting that you come home immediately.”

As someone who’s parenting teens, until you get to use the words ‘young adult’ with your child, they are officially teens and are guaranteed to still be ‘under construction’ in the brain development department.

Assume the responsibility of bridging that gap and being the missing piece. Not ALL the pieces; just the one that is not able to make the connection in a time of need.

Your thoughts on this teen dating advice?

 Mama j

When the Frustration of Parenting Teens Causes Bad Behavior

This article addresses the options on how to respond as a parent to difficult teens 

Is parenting teens a sport or a responsibility? According to ABC News, Tommy Jordan is getting quite a bit of recognition for his parenting teens skills by shooting bullets through his defiant daughter’s laptop. If he was looking for spectators for this new game he invented, he has clearly been successful with 246,000 likes on YouTube. What a great sport!

Parenting Teens: Are we Missing the Point?

What’s missing for me in all the sensationalism is the potential long-term effects of the bridge this father successfully built in his daughter’s brain while playing with guns. In one 8-minute video, he set a memory in concrete. This is a memory that is not likely going away and less likely to be the endearing story told around this family’s Thanksgiving dinner table in the years ahead.

Though I completely understand the frustration caused by a troubled teen and the stress it can create in a home, when parenting teens, our response is still our responsibility. It is our job to recognize when we need help parenting teens; unloading six bullets into a laptop is a pretty clear neon sign, “Help!”

Parenting Teens: Understanding the Teen Brain

Here is what we know to be true; the Teen Brain is not fully developed. There is a gap. They are not defective; they are just incomplete. It is our responsibility while parenting teens to bridge that gap with the tools our kids need to navigate life and become healthy adults. Building a safe, functional and secure bridge in the teen brain takes work. If we don’t have the tools, skill or knowledge, doesn’t it make sense to hire someone who does?

Parenting Teens: An Analogy

I once owned a home in Michigan where we had to cross a bridge in order to get safely across a dam to access our property. When we moved in, we had the bridge inspected and found the structure to be unsafe to cross. It was condemned due to neglect. Now, I admit, I am pretty handy but I know that building a bridge for a two-ton vehicle to traverse is out of my realm of expertise. So, I had three options:

1. I could ignore the condition of the bridge and hope it would “turn out just fine with age.”

2. I could get out my nail gun and radial arm saw and foolishly attempt to build the bridge myself.

3. Or, I could admit that I needed help and hire a professional to complete the job.

Who in their right mind would trust the first two options?! Both are a guarantee for disaster. The only smart and safe choice would be to recognize the magnitude of the problem and enlist a qualified, licensed professional to do the work. Someone with a skill set I could not learn overnight (or even in 3 years for that matter!)

We got four estimates and chose a company that had our best interests in mind that we knew we could trust. The job lasted almost three months and cost 175k. I stood by the fence daily, fascinated, as destruction became construction. I grew to appreciate the engineering degree that I didn’t have, which was clearly required to achieve the desired goal. What could have been a nightmare was instead an expensive, well-planned and strategic solution with invaluable results.

Parenting Teens: Realizing when you need Help

Tommy Jordan needs parenting teens help. Almost as much help as his daughter does, maybe more. He needs the support, the tools, the guidance and the professionals to step in and help him get his daughter on solid ground.

Our bridge took 125 years to fall apart. It doesn’t take that long for teens and it doesn’t just happen overnight. In the Jordan family, there had been erosion and decay for years before the death of the laptop. Relational deterioration was obvious and extreme in this story. I’m going to guess that friends and family members saw this coming. None of us should be shocked by this multi-person collision; we should just be concerned and proactive with your own teens to avoid ending up in the same mess. Parenting teens can be risky business.

I’m writing the sequel – "Daughter’s Teen Brain: Bridge over Troubled Water."

Thoughts on this story about parenting teens?

Remember – safe teen dating does not happen by accident!

Lisa Jander – The Teen Whisperer

In the book Dater's Ed, Lisa Jander, the Teen-Whisperer, helps parents teach their teenagers to learn how to “date defensively, navigate safely and steer clear of unhealthy relationships."

Teenage Dating Help: Understanding Modern Teenage Physical Desires

This article discusses the challenges facing the millennial parent: What you can do about your teenager’s desire to explore physical temptations at an inappropriate age.

Teenage Dating Help for Those Parenting Teens: A Bumpy Road

Providing teenage dating help to enable your child to navigate the highways of love and read the road signs to dating success requires a thorough understanding of the millennial teen dating landscape. While the age around which they start pairing off hasn’t changed much (between 12 and 14), the age at which teens become physically and even sexually active certainly has. Young teens may have the desire to drive a car at 13, but that doesn’t mean they should! Instead of waiting for their maturity level to catch up to their decisions driven by desire, teens are heading down a dangerous path with each other at ages as young as 12, 13 and 14! Sometimes younger!

A parent’s concern for their children being physically active at too young an age is as strong as the parental concern that they will steal the car and end up in a ditch! And when teenage dating help demands a solid boundary line of: “wait ‘til you’re married,” teens often drift across that line when no one is looking. With the dwindling role of religion in education and a wide range of upbringings, many teens today are not committed to remaining celibate until marriage and sometimes it only takes a line to be crossed once for there to be a tragic accident.

Teenage Dating Help for the Millennial Parent: The Key to Safe Navigating

What teenage dating help can those parenting teens provide for their kids when the desire is revved up and rarin’ to go? Obviously you don’t want to endorse physical exploration but there are some inevitabilities that those who are parenting teens would do well to understand. Just because kids don’t own a car or have a license yet does not mean they aren’t craving both. The problem is that it is much easier to lock the car in the garage than a hormonal teen! The Internet and cell phones have made it incredibly easy for teens to stay in constant contact with each other. Instead of being forced to wait hours and even days to hear from the object of their affection (via the trusty telephone or in person), teens can spend the entire day messaging each other back and forth without any “dating police” in sight. This facilitates a much faster progression from casual to serious and from plutonic to physical.

The array of social media and networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace also puts the dating game on the fast track. And the typical teenage dating help from parents often does not even include the recognition of dating sites on the Internet available to our teens free of charge! Imagine a car dealership where your young teen can go to test drive cars for free without parental permission, supervision or having to meet any requirements! And, they can bring a friend! Welcome to online teen dating!

Teenage dating help that demands that kids preserve their sexual integrity is hard pressed to drive home when they are constantly exposed to sexual images and media. It’s like taking your teen to the car lot every day, letting them see all the “beautiful options” and expecting them to resist the temptation to want to sign on the dotted line. Sex sells. The kids of those parenting teens are becoming aware of their bodies and sexuality at much younger ages and we have advertising, movies and music to thank for that. You can try to isolate your children from this media, but trust this teenage dating help: it would be easier to eliminate all vehicles from every road assuming that it will remove your teen’s desire to drive a car! Because their brains are not fully developed until around the age of 25, the best teenage dating help for parents of millennial teens is to “get in the car” and to help them understand how to safely navigate this uncharted course. The state mandates that those parenting teens ride alongside them when they are learning to drive; why not apply the same principals to relationships and teen dating? Let them steer, teach them how to brake as you gently guide them through experiences that will help them own the decisions they make. The only weapon your teen has against a world fraught with temptation and corruption is their own ability to date defensively and steer clear of unhealthy relationships. And this is something that a solid family foundation, parental wisdom and the right teenage dating help can provide.

What Those Parenting Teens can do

•    Teenage Dating Help #1: Night driving is more dangerous than in the daylight. Apply the same concepts and limit cell phone usage at night: Charge their phone in your bedroom…not theirs.

•    Teenage Dating Help #2: You learned to drive before your teens, right? Why not learn to navigate social media before they do? It is not a matter of “if” but “when”. 

•    Teenage Dating Help #3: Those parenting teens must be open with their kids about the physical and emotional consequences of poor decisions. Hitting a guardrail can hurt.

•    Teenage Dating Help #4: Get in the car! Know the “who, what, when, where, how” of dating with the same boundaries as driving.

•    Teenage Dating Help #5: Provide teenage dating help with some “classroom hours” before they get behind the wheel of a real relationship. Talk about peer pressure vs. date pressure and peer pressure and what they can expect.

Some Final Teenage Dating Help for Those Parenting Teens:

Too much control will alienate your kids. The right amount of control and support will compel them to make the most responsible decisions. Best teenage dating help for those parenting teens? Don’t drive blind, don’t tailgate and don’t be an airbag parent deploying only on impact when it’s too late!

Parents Teenage Dating Advice: Your Teen: Hotrod or Economy Car?

This article provides a different perspective on parenting teens with the analogy between two major car categories: racy, sports models and safe, reliable economy cars.

As a parent, you may sometimes feel overwhelmed at the thought of guiding your child through their teen years. Teenage dating advice can seem daunting as a teen’s physiological and psychological changes lead to behavior that can manifest as self confident, bordering on vain, and at other times insecure and self-deprecating. Their brains are still being pruned and developed; heading toward adulthood but not quite there. With this confusing behavior, Teenage Dating Advice can often be very confronting and leave you feeling useless as a parent, but this don’t have to be the case. Let’s take an automotive example: your teenage son can one moment see himself as a muscle car, able to take on the world, while your teenage daughter might feel like a hot Ferrari. How will you keep your teen from heading full-throttle into relationships without the gearbox to downshift? On the other hand, teenage dating advice can be difficult to follow when, after a discouraging dating encounter or non-responsive post on Facebook; you find your teen comparing themselves to a “boring” economy car. Your teen’s attitude towards their peers and potential dates can impact how they view themselves and your teenage dating advice should address their behavior as a result. Every teen is unique and should not feel categorized as “just a beige minivan.”

This is where teenage dating advice becomes more complicated; you want your teen to be self confident, but also grounded and mature enough to take disappointment well and treat all relationships with respect. It is important when giving teenage dating advice to encourage your child to view themselves, as well as their potential dates, as a combination of that attractive car they admire and the more reliable, cost-effective economy car; there are clearly benefits to both.



Ask your teen the question, “If you were a car based on who you are today, what car would you say that you are?” Then, “What car would you like to be?” You can give teenage dating advice by asking them to compare the two types of cars and how they would view potential dates.  By comparing themselves and others to a particular model, your teen can get a more objective view of themselves and how they fit in to their social environment. Understanding how your teen views him or herself can also help you as a parent to give better teenage dating advice. If your teen identifies more with the flashy high-performance sports car, it might be helpful to point out that cars like this tend to be high maintenance and lose their value if not taken care of properly. Furthermore, ‘road rules’ and respect for those around you are equally as important in showing good character and gaining respect. Similarly, you can point out that economy cars are just as valuable as the flashy sports models, because they are approachable, reliable, low-maintenance and safe. If treated with respect and care, these kinds of cars hold much value.

What is ideal when giving teenage dating advice is not to try and encourage your teen to identify with one type of car or the other, but rather to achieve a healthy balance between the two types. Teenage Dating advice like this can show your teen that by viewing themselves and others as a blend of the pros of both luxury and economy cars, they can see that there is a much deeper measure of value to be found beneath the surface of a slick paint job and roaring engine. If they treat themselves and their potential dates with care and respect, they will discover that they are both reliable and easy to maintain, as well as racy and exciting all within healthy limits.