by Laura Elliott

Created on: November 28, 2007   Last Updated: November 14, 2010

The Teen Jungle
7 Tips to Taming your Teen

Webster defines a teenager as a person between the ages of 13 and 19; an adolescent.

Oh, but a teenager is so much more. Here's my definition:

n. A person who leaves a note telling you she is spending the night at a friend's house, calls you the next day and tells you they've been in a car accident. The teens in the car are fine. The car, in intensive care, doesn't pull through.

n. A person who leaves their passport in his/her dorm room in San Francisco then realizes this fact two days before Christmas Day, the day the family leaves for Costa Rica. You take an impromptu twelve-hour road trip with your teen when you should be baking for Christmas Eve.

n. A person who meets a friend outside your house at 11PM to see his tattoo, decides to go on a Red Bull Run and ends up at the beach watching "Jackass" when a Department of Defense officer calls you at 2AM to ask you if you know where your daughter is because she fits the description of a runaway.

I don't pretend to have any answers because all of the above happened to one or both of my kids, now very successful 18 and 21 yr olds. But, at the time, in the trenches, life with my teens got more than a little ugly.

So, why read my tips? Well, these are the tips that, during the worst of times, really cut through the fog of teendom and brought our teens back to my hubby and I. Take what you like and leave the rest. Truly, I think teen rebellion is healthy and natural, so the idea isn't to squelch independence or their good times, just get them to use their good judgment. And, in the end, that's what most teen troubles boil down to, bad judgment.

Teen Tip 1. Dinner together during weeknights. Very important and increasingly difficult as my children got jobs and involved in more activities at school. But having the kids write their work schedule on the family calendar made it easy to know when those dinners would be and made them accountable to be home.

Teen Tip 2. Family Vacations. Nothing is more important than getting away with your kids to create memories. Now that my girls are attending University and living a continent away from each other, one of the things they treasure the most are their memories of our vacations. And we've taken some simple ones. The best meal we ever shared was trout the girls caught one afternoon and cooked over an open fire flavored with sage growing by our camp site when we went backpacking.

Teen Tip 3. Read Aloud Together. Reading aloud isn't

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