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When my children were young I used to discard all the stories that circulated about how the teen years would be the crisis time in my child rearing experiences. It was easy to believe then that I would be able to draw strength from the fact that I had once been a teen myself, and could use this experience to ensure that my children would journey through teenage without causing me to so much as raise an eyebrow.

However, as I sit here today, the other side of three teenage year's experiences that, at times, seemed to be unending, scarred and bowed, the one thing that I am thankful for is that I survived the raising of my teens. This is a fact that I feel justly proud of and, as I can now reveal, it took a lot of guile, cunning and inner strength to survive those many years that spanned the time from when my first borne turned thirteen until the third, some twelve years his junior, celebrated his twentieth birthday.

I have to admit that I was not prepared for the child transition from twelve to teen years. It seemed as if, from the morning of their thirteenth year they became almost possessed by the power of teendom. Suddenly the sweet, funny, communicative child who seemed to adore the very ground that I walked on, changed. In its place there was this strange teenager, one who had a language that was foreign to me, composed of grunts most of the time. There was this challenger, who doubted my knowledge experience and cast my opinions into a bin marked "old parent's views," which held little value to the new teen pioneer as they started on the real journey to adulthood.

I acknowledge openly that it took me quite a while to find ways of surviving the long and almost continuous years of three teens and I am grateful to my eldest son, whose journey through this time helped to teach me how to deal with the teen experiences that still awaited.

The first lesson I quickly learned was the one sure way to deal with the sometimes grumpy side of the teenager was to be as wacky, if not more so, than they were. In all my life I have found that humour is the best policy and, believe me, it works with teenagers as well. True they might find it embarrassing and cringe a little, but it does evoke a smile and it is very hard to be grumpy when you are smiling.

The second lesson I learned was tolerance. Teens are often emotionally erratic and this can only be responded to with tolerance and calmness. I have lost count of the times one of my teens would say to me "how can you be so calm?"

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