Teen torture

Matthew and Jaime Ridge. Photo / Herald on Sunday

Celebrity dad Matthew Ridge has had a chance to cool off since he stormed into the home of ex-wife Sally Ridge last month after learning their 16-year-old daughter Jaime had her boyfriend staying over.

Backed up by stepdad and Sally's ex, Adam Parore, Ridge confronted his former wife over her decision to let the boyfriend stay.

Since then the TV presenter and former rugby and league star has had a chance to reflect. When the Herald on Sunday spoke to him this week his attitude had mellowed and he admitted that trying to lay down the law was just not going to work.

"Hey, we're all put on this earth to procreate," Ridge says. "Society trying to stop kids from having sex -it's just not going to happen."

Ridge is similarly contradictory when it comes to underage drinking. "Are you kidding?" he snaps when asked if his 13-year-old son Boston has ever drunk alcohol at parties. Yet Ridge admits to learning a lesson after getting "blind drunk" and "alcohol poisoning" when he was 13 or 14.

"I think you've got to go back and remember how you were when you were a teenager and all the things that you got up to," says Ridge. "Your parents can't control what you do."

His approach to parenting is to be "firm but fair" and instil in children the common sense to make good choices.

"They're young adults so they're going to make mistakes," says Ridge. "You just want to be there to guide them. Hopefully they've been brought up well enough to know what's right and what's wrong."

The teenage years are undoubtedly fraught for both teens and parents and research shows the adolescent years are getting longer.

Adolescence is increasingly starting earlier, a statistic bound to make parents nationwide shudder. Rather than face the troublesome teens well into secondary school, now they're likely to start in the intermediate years. Thanks to better health and nutrition, in the past 200 years the age of sexual maturation has fallen dramatically from about 16 to 17 years to between 11½ and 12½ years.

However, while the body may be reaching maturity, studies show the human brain is not fully mature until sometime between 20 and 30 years of age.

Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, the Prime Minister's chief science adviser, is investigating why New Zealand measures up so badly against OECD countries in outcomes for young people, including teenage suicide and teenage pregnancy rates. His team's research shows that young people today live in an increasingly complex world, with technology enabling them to form huge social networks through media, internet and mobile phones, and it is a volatile mix that results in high-risk behaviours such as binge drinking, illicit drug use, unsafe sexual activity and criminal offending.

So what can parents do to guide children through the minefield of the teenage years?

Family therapist Diane Levy says life for a teenager today is hugely different from a generation ago, particularly in the level of communication and the ease with which they can bypass parents.

"Whenever you have the opportunity to guard the boundaries, grab it," says Levy, who recommends picking your teenagers up froma party as well as dropping them off. And don't text them from the car. "Go in and pick them up. It gives you a chance to see who is puking in the gutter.

"Then on the drive home, pretend you are part of the car. With three teens in the back they won't be able to resist to chatter about the night." Don't comment, but store it up as useful information and save it for a more teachable time, such as before the next party.

When should you allow your child to take alcohol to a party? That's a tricky one, says Levy, author of Of course I love you ... NOW GO TO YOUR ROOM!

"Hold out as long as you possibly can when it's not legal."

Common mistakes parents of teenagers make are worrying about losing their friendship, criticising rather than listening, leaping into problem solve and not expecting enough contribution to running the household.

"The most important thing is to start from a basis of 'I need to be the person my child trusts'," says Levy.

Suzanne Booth, executive director at the Hibiscus Coast Youth Centre, says parents have to find a way of instilling consequential thinking in teenagers, without scaring them off.

"We say, 'Okay, you will be in this situation at some point. Someone is going to want to have sex with you or offer you drugs or alcohol.' At a certain age you've got to start talking about that. That could be from11 years old."

Booth finds that a lot of kids are not hearing, or not being taught, basic values in life.

"You've got all of these different avenues for the elder teen these days," she says. "There's a lot more freedom in households these days. There's the internet. There's the openness about sex and the behaviours around that. I think the hardest part for parents is to try to keep their children close without being too overwhelming or too interfering."

With their tantrums and sulks, teenagers can act just like toddlers and be just as needy, says Wendyl Nissen, mother of a blended family of five.

"Parents seem to think, 'Oh they're mini adults, they don't need me as much,' but they do," says Nissen, who has a family tradition of getting all the kids around the dinner table on a Sunday night.

Nissen's biggest fear when the oldest four children were in their teenage years was exposure to hard drugs like P. The family dinners gave an opportunity to talk about the risks.

"We couldn't stop them trying it but all we could do is keep talking to them about it," says Nissen, who developed a catchphrase when the kids left the house, "Make good decisions!" It was a cheesy joke from a movie, but the message was real.

"If you tell a kid that you trust them it's amazing how it affects their self esteem and their decision-making," says Nissen.

When it comes to sex, Nissen says she has a liberal attitude. From the age of 16 onwards, it was okay for her children to do it under her roof - provided it wasn't a random encounter.

"I said clearly to all my kids, 'You're not dragging home some kid from a party. My house is not a hotel.' But if they were in a committed relationship with someone, as long as the other parents agreed, then it was fine that they stayed over."

Dr Michelle Mars, sexologist and mother of a teenage son, says parents often suffer fear and anxiety when talking to their children about sex.

"Lots of parents don't actually know that much about sex," says Mars.

"When their child comes to ask them they aren't necessarily well informed about sex and they feel uncomfortable."

She recommends parents tell teenagers to masturbate rather than rush into intercourse.

"If parents encourage their children to masturbate more then they get more aware of their own pleasure and then they can communicate it better and become more aware of their partner's pleasure as well," says Mars.

While it's legal to have sex at 16, parents are unlikely to be able to stop teenagers having sex at an earlier age. Talk about sex with your children in a way that normalises it. Don't make it taboo.

"A lot of teenagers get most of their information from pornography which is completely unrealistic," says Mars.

"It's about as realistic about sex as an action movie is about war or a musical is about life."

Whether it's accessing pornography or excessive texting, a heavy-handed approach to policing your children's technology use won't protect them, says Martin Cocker, executive director of the internet safety group Netsafe.

Banning the internet has very little success because there are so many places teenagers can access the internet outside the home, such as cafes, libraries, schools, friends' houses and mobile phones.

"The key thing with banning is the reporting levels for things goes down," says Cocker. "So kids don't tell you when they have trouble because they're worried that you'll blame it on them and take their technology away, which is important to them."

Parents chatting on a TradeMe message board are swapping advice on rules for their children using Facebook. Some advocate full control - with parents knowing passwords, approving friend requests and making sure children sign up with a family email rather than a personal email address. Another parent on the message board thought this level of supervision was "OTT!" (over the top).

Many parents thought good guidelines included warning their children not to talk to strangers, censor their photos, not to include personal information and to remember that what was posted would be there forever.

While checking up on children's internet use by insisting on access to passwords for email and social networking sites might work for younger children, experts say it is not effective for older teens. Teenagers can create a false profile their parents can see and a legitimate profile they use to contact their friends.

However, Netsafe says it is not seeing a high percentage of teenagers getting into trouble on sites like Facebook, except in terms of the normal peer issues of bullying and social isolation that come when they have fallouts with their friends.

"That's just an extension of what's happening in the rest of their life playing out on Facebook," says Cocker.

Parents need to understand the technology their children are using and be aware of the risks, says Cocker. Arecent survey by Netsafe found 22 per cent of children had mobile phones that could access the internet and only 11 per cent of parents realised the phones had this capability.

"They wouldn't put a computer in their kid's room but didn't know they had it on phone," says Cocker.

Providing access to the internet in a private space such as a child's bedroom, is exposing them to the whole of society online.

"The point at which you're allowing them to see that, you're saying that they're ready to face the world and all the challenges that it brings."

TEEN TIPS FOR PARENTS

ONE
Put the computer in a public area, like the living room, to keep an eye on internet access.

TWO
Non-communicative boys are more likely to open up on long drives when they don't have to make eye contact with you.

THREE
Keep up the habit of tucking teenagers in at night. Bed time is when surly teens tend to want to talk.

FOUR
Get to know your teen's friends and take a note of their mobile phone numbers so you can call them if your teen goes AWOL.

FIVE
Your most powerful phrase as a parent is "I'm worried that ..."

SIX
Talking about the big issues doesn't have to be serious. Use humour to get the message across.