Dear ones, there’s a fine line sometimes: am I an easy-going, cool mum or a naive, blue-eyed one? Do you sometimes ask yourselves this in life with your teenagers? What can I allow, what should I forbid, where do I need boundaries, where do I need freedom, how do I do it right? And do I regret my decision later?
We asked you on Instagram what you are currently most concerned about in life with your teenage children and a number of you wrote about how we handle going out in the evening. Whether there are fixed times when the children have to be home at the weekend or whether there are fixed times in the evening when they are allowed to stay out.
I remember very well that I could never meet up with one of my friends on Sundays because she had a „family day“ and had to go for a walk with her parents (yes, it felt like a „must“).
I often thought it was a shame because I would have liked to meet her and: I didn’t know anything like that from home. There was no fixed time when we had to go to bed, no fixed time when we had to be at home, no fixed day that was reserved just for the family. And that’s how I feel about my children today.
Of course, there are legal requirements. Many clubs – including the Bootshaus in Cologne, for example – nowadays also offer parties for 16-year-olds; everyone under 18 has to hand in their ID card at the entrance and then collect it again at midnight to go home. They are not allowed out any longer.
My own parents never had to get to know my friends‘ parents before I was allowed to spend the night there, we had a lot of freedom and trust. And we do the same with our children. We have a rule at school that sleepovers are only allowed at the weekend and not in the middle of the week if they have to get up early the next day.
Katharina recently said on the phone that she admires how cool I stay, she – who has younger children – couldn’t do that so well. And that’s despite the fact that, significantly, she also had a lot of freedom in her youth and sometimes spent a whole weekend staying with people her parents had never heard of, she says.
Cool mum who allows a lot or naive and naïve?
A reader wrote to us to tell us that her daughter and two friends were planning to take the train to a city hundreds of kilometres away to meet other girls they had only met online. She said she was really proud that the girls dared to do this and was also pleased that they were independent, but at the same time asked herself: Am I a super cool mum for allowing this or am I just naive and naive?
And don’t we always live in exactly this dichotomy with teenage children? Of course, a lot of our own life experience also plays a part. If I’ve just found out from a friend that her daughter was touched indecently against her will at a sleepover party, I’m sure I have more fears as a mum than if everything has always gone well.
I personally find it difficult to allow children to ride with very young and inexperienced people on a motorbike. Simply because I myself once ended up in the bushes as a passenger on a moped when I was young.
And on the other hand, my parents allowed me to write to the German school in Bogota and look for a host family for me on the notice board, which I then simply flew to for six months. Without being checked by any organisation. Then again, I don’t think I would dare do that with my children 😉 But a weekend somewhere else or a trip with the gang – why not.
And of course, in the early days of my children’s puberty, I wondered what they were doing behind closed doors. Are they radicalising? Are they watching videos with violence? With pornographic assaults? And now that they are outside so much, even in the evenings: who do they meet there? What tests of courage are currently in vogue? Will they come back safe and sound?
But what would be the alternative? They have to live their lives, they should gain experience, we can’t protect them from every horror, we can basically only hope and plead for luck that nothing happens to them in their youthful exuberance.
We can tell them not to leave anyone alone, that they can call us at any time if something strange happens. We can tell them about cases where things didn’t go well and discuss with them how they should have acted. But we can’t forbid them to live.
And no, we don’t have fixed family days, fixed bedtimes or curfews, we discuss everything individually and according to their needs. But when her aunt with Down’s syndrome celebrated her 38th birthday recently, all three of them suddenly sat in the back seat again and voluntarily came along to the family day. They know it’s the most important day of the year for them.
We actually always have at least two out of three children with us on our holidays – and if one child goes on holiday with another family, like now during the Easter holidays, we simply borrow another one so that we have three children again 😉I think that the longer we leave the lead (not completely off the lead, a bit of connection is allowed up to a certain age), the more willing they are to come back voluntarily. At least that was the case with my parents. My brother and I both used to live in other cities, even abroad.
Today, we’re both back in the extended family home and next door to our parents 😉 We don’t have fixed meeting days with them either. But when the Bundesliga is on, we often all meet up together in a free-spirited atmosphere…
