For parents the most stressful years in parenting are perhaps the time when their kids turn into teenagers. Some parents have a strong belief that a strict approach to parenting the kids is a must. Others believe that it is best to give teenagers a free hand. 【小题1】 The best way to parent teens is to use a mix of both. Read below for more tips on parenting teens.

Make use of the problem areas in your teen's development as an opportunity to teach him or her tricks of good decision-making. 【小题2】. The only way in which you can do so is treat your kid as an adult. That is why it is very important to discuss the matter with your teen as you do with any other adult.

If you have set rules for your teen to follow, then make sure you are strict in them. A teen who knows that there are certain rules that cannot be overlooked will make an effort to follow them. 【小题3】. Award your teenager when he or she follows the rules, but don’t forget to punish him or her each time a rule is broken.

Do not ignore your teenager’s unfriendly attitude or regard it as normal teen behavior. If you ignore this at the start, then you will have to face all the more difficult situations later. Mind signs which can point towards such behavior as sleeping late, missing classes, etc. 【小题4】 Be observant (善于观察的), but don’t let it become obvious.

Parents often make the mistake of setting unreasonable goals for their teens. The expectations you have should be dependent on the abilities of your kids. Never shout at them if they fall short of their goals. 【小题5】. Only then are they able to reach their goals next time.

My memories of my father are divided into parts and shares. Alive, and then dead. Healthy, and then helpless. And further back in time, the first and most division: Present and then absent; loving, and then indifferent (漠不关心的).

He used to be a good writer and loving father. When I was a 16-year-old girl, he was fired from his company, a public, gossip-based dismissal that he would spend decades refusing responsibility for. This was the first crack that divided my relationship with him into poles of before and after. To escape his shame, he pushed away those who reminded him of it, first divorcing my mother, then alienating (疏远) my sister and I.

As an adult, my relationship with my father was one of low expectations and high boundaries. He spent most of his time travelling. But when he died of heart failure in August, I was knocked off balance by the weight of the blow. I thought, after years of setting up delicate fences around our relationship, that I had already begun letting go. His death delivered a realization: despite years of analyzing his complicated love for me, there were pieces of my father I never understood—until I found my father’s notebooks in his cupboard.

In the notebooks, he often collected documentation: train tickets from Rome or a photograph of San Francisco’s Prescott Hotel. But what he was also doing was offering fatherly guidance, the kind I could only receive after he died. His life, in which what he had was never quite enough, was eventually exposed. In his final decade, he realized he had built a castle for himself upon sand and regret. Now in his entries, I hear his voice. “Debaleh,” I hear him say, using his pet name for me, “learn from my mistakes.”

I read these pages among my dad’s clothes, and wept. I hadn’t known that my father, too, lived with that familiar ache for new horizons in his heart, the one that can only be comforted by traveling.

One day when I was 5, my mother criticized me for not finishing my rice and I got angry. I wanted to play outside and not to be made to finish eating my old rice. In my angry motion to open the screen door (纱门) with my foot, I kicked back about a 12-inch part of the lower left hand corner of the new screen door. But I had no regret, for I was happy to be playing in the backyard with my toys.

Today, I know if my child had done what I did, I would have criticized my child, and told him about how expensive this new screen door was, and I would have delivered a spanking (打屁股) for it. But my parents never said a word. They left the corner of the screen door pushed out, creating an opening, a crack in the defense against unwanted insects.

For years, every time I saw that corner of the screen, it would remind me of my mistake from time to time. For years, I knew that everyone in my family would see that hole and remember who did it. For years, every time I saw a fly buzzing in the kitchen, I would wonder if it came in through the hole that I had created with my angry foot. I would wonder if my family members were thinking the same thing, silently blaming me every time a flying insect entered our home, making life more terrible for us all. My parents taught me a valuable lesson, one that a spanking or stern (严厉的) words perhaps could not deliver. Their silent punishment for what I had done delivered a hundred stern messages to me. Above all, it has helped me become a more patient person and not burst out so easily.