As your child ages, your relationship with them changes a bit.

There's a constant guidance that you're offering, but it has to change, especially as

the enter the teen years.

And giving rules is easy, but it may not be the best approach.

Conversely, not having rules might seem like it's easy. Just make the decision, but it may not be the best approach. Conversely, not having rules might seem like it's easy,

just make the decision, but our kids do need some guidance. So how do we make sense of all that?

Well, that's what Dr. Danny Werta's here for. He's going to just shine the light on all of this.

And we'll get to Danny in just a minute, but first we're in here from a conversation that Focus President Jim Daly had with

Keri Kempakas on that transition from being kind of the guardian protector to the friend

of your team.

Let me ask you about the buddy parent and the danger of the buddy parent.

Because I kind of lean in that direction.

So when I was reading that,

okay, I'm a little guilty there. You know, you want, especially for the latter teenage years,

you do need to move into that consultant role. So, you know, real successful consultants,

usually are good friends as well. Somebody you can confide in. This is what the business is doing.

What do you think I should do? How do you not become a harmful buddy parent and still stay in a good buddy place,

if that's the way to ask this? Right. You know, the best thing that I've seen on that subject,

it was Sissy Gough and David Thomas, their counselors in Nashville, and I just, I love everything they produce and write. But they talked about parenting with rules and relationship. And they said a lot of parents today grew up with parents that had the rules, but they did not have the relationship. So what we're seeing is the pendulum swing that a lot of times we see the relationship, but not the rules. And I do think it's important for us to have that relationship,

even more so now than our parents' generation, because there's a lot at stake if our kids aren't listening to us, and they're listening to their friends and going elsewhere for advice. It's not always backing up what we're saying at home. But at the same time, you know, what I have to remind myself, when there's something I have to tell my child that I'm like, she is not going to be happy about this. I have to think that she's got lots of friends, but she only has one mom. And if I don't mother her, then who's going to do it? And so the way I look, but it's hard. Because you know, when they get older, you know what's going to set them off. You know what's going to get some resistance. So I do think we have to be pretty selective about the battles we choose to fight. And if we choose to fight every single battle, then we're just going to push them away and we can make them rebel. A lot of times if you have those rules without the relationship, it can lead to rebellion. But then if you have too much relationship without the rules, it just leads them with this like sense of they don't know where the boundaries are and they can go off the deep end even more so than they might have otherwise.

No, that's good insight. You and your husband Harry spoke with one of your daughters about,

I think, cell phone. And so I don't know who was the bad parent and the good parent in this story.

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