Get tough with your teen and you’ll likely hear a door slam. But calm yourself because it’s is for their own good. Wait! Does it sound too pushy? Did you just push too hard? Or maybe it was the right thing to do; after all you need to be pushy at times for your child’s own good. Being a parent of teen, you have to choose your stance wisely and stick with it.

Being the parent of a teen daughter I have to deal with such issues every now and then. Such arguments may happen daily, but you have to choose when to be pushy and when not to.  And like every other parent, I ask myself these questions every time I have to be strict with my daughter. So when should you be pushy, after all?

Respect and manners

I never compromise on respect and manners. Every time when I feel my teen is being disrespectful with someone, I instantly reprimand on the spot. She may find it embarrassing in front of other people, but you have to be pushy when you need to be! I make sure my teen always uses words, ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘may I’, ‘excuse me’. Every parent should hammer down these values in their children when the cement is wet, otherwise when the cement dries their personalities cannot be changed.

Doing the chores

This is the part where things get a little tough. You want your teens to do their part of the house chores but they keep finding excuses to run away from them. This is where you need to push them; they need to know how to take care of themselves on their own. After all, it’s only a few years till college, if they don’t learn this now they are going to have a hard time taking care of themselves later.

You can try reinforcements like I do, give them a small reward every time they complete their part of the house chores. This will make it fun for them and they will actively take part in the chores.

Letting them try new things

Teens get a little shy and self-conscious in their teenage, so they hesitate from trying new stuff. Parents need to be not much but somewhat pushy in this matter. We need to encourage our children to try new things and have fun. This is their time and they should enjoy it to their full. So even if they tend to shy away from going out on an expedition, encourage them to go on, make new friends and enjoy themselves!

Rules and restrictions

Teens tend to get very rebellious at this age. They think their way is the right way, but you have to tell them that it’s either your way or the highway! Every house has some rules and restrictions, and you have to get pushy when it comes to following them. I, for instance, don’t allow my daughter to stay out alone late in the day. I’m not comfortable with her going out to pubs and bars for a drink too often.

Go for reasonable controls!

Mutual consent is very important between parents and their children. They need to feel that they have their privacy and you need to ensure that they are safe. Like many tech-savvy parents these days, I use parental monitoring apps like, FamilyTime, to ensure that my teen doesn’t break her rules and is safe at the same time. It is a parental monitoring app this has different dashboards for parents and children. My dashboard offers me features like, location tracking, Geo-fencing, web-browsing history of my teen and much more.

What I do is that I have Geo-fenced locations of bars and pubs nearby, so whenever my teen visits these places I will receive and alert automatically. I also use this feature to Geo-fence my daughter’s school so whenever she reaches and leaves school I get an alert. This app lets me know the whereabouts of my teen by providing me with her location history along with the date and time stamps. Just so you know this app doesn’t extract information from a parent’s smartphone, you can either download it or even use it on your laptops.

So with FamilyTime keep your teens safe and make sure they aren’t breaking any rules. They might not understand it, but we know that it is for their own good.