Dear Parents or Guardians of Teenagers,
As a teenager, you may have been jealous of your friends who were allowed to stay out as late as they wanted. My name is Kamaya Ronning, and I am a teenager with strict parents. I have a curfew and have experienced the anxiety that comes with having to constantly keep an eye on the time. I have come home many times to an angry parent that yells at me for not checking my phone enough and staying in contact with them. With the upcoming political election, there is a lot of tension in America’s social atmosphere. Democrats and Republicans are arguing and the primaries are causing a lot of heat between people. It is important to cause the least amount of family tension so people don’t get hurt emotionally or physically. Families need to bond together in a time of social unrest. Teenagers especially are building their lives online, so it is essential for them to have positive reactions with their parents so they do not become reclusive. Parents are worried about their child’s safety primarily, and then they are concerned about establishing a healthy parent-child relationship and raising the child into a successful adult. While many parents are concerned about their teenager staying safe during their last years at home, parents should not enforce curfews on their teenagers because teenagers use those years to flesh out who they are with friends or alone and a curfew would restrict that time and ability, force the teen to be responsible to someone else, and never allow them to truly unwind.
Curfews tend to be a source of a lot of stress and strain on a relationship between a parent and teenager because some teens have expectations of how they should be parented, and their parents don’t agree. Because curfews are fairly common among high schoolers and their friends, many teenagers have expectations about them. According to Shannon Conner, in an article from healthline guiding parents on how to set up curfews, most teenagers want to have freedom and exercise judgement on their own. Allowing the teenager to try having more freedom than when they were younger can allow them to learn as much as they can about themselves before they go to college or a job and make life-changing decisions such as whether or not they want to drink alcohol. When a curfew is implemented, it restricts that freedom, the element of making judgement on their own is lost, the teenager often feels demeaned, which can lead to a damaged relationship between the parent and teen. For example, when my mom first gave me my curfew I felt like a toddler being told exactly how to live my life and it made me feel like I had no control over my life. I got in a fight with my mom over the curfew and it took us several years to work together to come to an agreement on it with many more small fights in between. The hassle could have been avoided if there was never a curfew in the first place.
Teenagers deserve the respect of controlling their own lives because they are old enough to learn what being respected feels like before going into adult relationships where respect is extremely important. Many parents have heard of or even experienced the stereotype that teenagers are stubborn and resistant, and this is an issue of respect. Those teenagers feel disrespected when they have a curfew, and to insert their stance, they break rules. According to an article by Russel Hyken discussing the conflicts between parents and teens about curfews, intelligent discussions and giving the teen his or her own adolescent responsibility will increase respect between the parent and child. When I have a curfew, I feel like I can never truly unwind with my friends and fully destress because I am responsible to my parents to be home on time. Without a curfew, my friends are much less stressed and irritable, and they have in general better relationships with everyone they talk to, which includes their parents. With these intelligent discussions and more responsibility, the chances of rules being broken goes down and the quality of the relationship between the parent and child raises because communication helps make relationships more open.
One of the biggest concerns for parents is that their teenager will follow the law and be safe all the time, so they impose curfews on the teenager. Speaking from personal experience, parents are typically more nervous the later in the night it is. According to Brandon Gaille in a statistics article about crimes, this anxiety is unreasonable because in most cities, violent crimes from teenagers occur nearly always at “3:00 pm, right when school gets out.” A curfew is almost always implemented later in the night, so having a curfew does not protect your kid from most violent crime. Another huge concern for a lot of parents is teenagers participating in underage drinking, parties or doing drugs because there are a fair amount of stories on the news of deaths or injuries related to these dangerous activities. My parents have been lecturing me on not drinking or doing drugs for as long as I can remember. However, Russel Hyken explains a 2018 census revealing that only about “11 % of teenagers participate in illicit drinking around the country.” This is a decent amount of teenagers, but even still, teenagers are a lot less likely to engage in underage drinking if their parent communicates with them why it is bad for them and treats them with respect. Because the teenager feels respected, they are more likely to listen and therefore take the advice. These fears can never be fully erased, but taking the risk to let teenagers live their lives and keep a positive relationship with the parent is worth it.
The best solution to the conundrum of curfews would be to just not invoke curfews on teenagers. When they ask to go out, parents should just say yes and let the teenagers tell the parents when they might be home. This is crucial to maintaining a happy, working relationship between the parent and teenager. It is crucial for them to use this time to learn about themselves. It is crucial for them to have this time to destress. With curfews still in place, teenagers are more likely to be stressed and irritable, and relationships between parents and teenagers could be damaged. It is more likely for the teenager to rebel against domestic rules and national laws, which could be extremely dangerous for multiple people. Parents, don’t enforce curfews for your teenager. They will thank you for it and you will benefit from it too by having a healthy relationship with them. Thank you for considering my point that curfews do more harm than good for teenagers, and I hope you got something out of it that will benefit everyone in your family.
Sincerely, a teenager with a curfew,
Kamaya Ronning
Parenting Advice from a Teenager 