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If your parents had strict rules, did you respect them as a teenager?

1 reply

wanderings · 02/02/2020 19:56

Either the rules, or your parents for making them? For example, being home at a certain time, doing homework before watching TV, lights out at 10pm, not having elbows on the table, always wearing a cycle helmet, keeping bedroom tidy, and so on? Did you always obey these rules, or did you break every rule you could when their backs were turned?

Speaking for myself as a teenager, I liked rules to do with smooth running of home or school, but I was very ambivalent about rules which were my "benefit", such as the need to work hard at school, or to keep my bedroom tidy. Most disagreements with my mum were about these, and rarely about anything else.

There was one thing which I really had no respect for: if my mum used any sort of "voice" to deliver a message, such as a teacher voice, or a talking-down-to-me voice, or an "emotional" voice, or shouted, I quickly became much less co-operative. Teenage priorities, I know! After all, my parents didn't tolerate silly voices. Wink She sometimes got other family members to tell me important morals if she knew I wouldn't hear them from her; I didn't guess she'd done this until much later.

With all the threads about screen time, reading teens' social media, confiscating phones (at the drop of a hat on MN), changing wifi password etc, I've caught myself wondering: how much would we as teenagers have respected measures like this, if the devices had been around in our time? I know that "screen time" is not a new issue, as TV and computer games have been around for a while now, but social media has in recent years brought its own issues which barely existed when many of us were teenagers.

OP posts:
Dogsaresomucheasier · 02/02/2020 20:01

I can remember loathing “silly voices” too. I was quite contemptuous if my parents as a teenager but they were not very effective.

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