Who wants to be the bad guy? A united parenting front helps keep the teens in line

All the trickiest challenges of raising teenagers come down to two intertwined facts: A teen’s brain is almost as deft as a fully alert adult’s, and by this point in life they’ve gotten pretty good at keeping the adults in their lives from being fully alert.

A compadre of mine is seeing the effects of this right now as his high-schooler’s grades crystallize from a morass of excuses (“I just haven’t retaken that test yet!”) into a final first-quarter report card. It turns out the girl had been keeping track of which parent was paying attention to her grades and then asking only the other one when she wanted permission to go out and have fun.

It was actually a grand situation for everyone up until Mom and Dad compared notes. The girl had managed to hold onto her privileges while skirting schoolwork, and both parents got to skip out on being the bad guy.

Although it might come as a surprise to the kids in my life who’ve heard how loudly I can bellow when I have to lay down the law, I hate being the bad guy.

It’s much more fun to, say, watch an 8- and a 6-year-old rig belts and pillows into padding for a living-room football game — an actual event that marks either one of the high or low points of my tenure as a dad, depending on who you ask — than to demand they take the tackling outside.

My wife doesn’t want to be saddled with permanent bad-guy duty, either, but there really is a limit to how many football games you can allow in a room full of glass tables and wobbly lamps before somebody has to be the heavy.

So we came up with a system.

When our sons want a call on something like sleeping over at a friend’s house or pushing the lawn mowing out a few days, the missus and I hear them out, step away for closed-door deliberations and then emerge with a unanimous ruling.

Even if it’s a ruling that has one of us struggling hard against an eye roll, we keep dissent to ourselves. As much as we love our boys, sometimes the only way to stay ahead is to treat them like military adversaries, picking battles carefully and masking exploitable weaknesses in our united front.

The system also has the happy effect of hiding which of us is the heavy and which is the pushover on any given decision.

I guess I’ve been so busy patting myself on the back for all this that the latest thing I’ve found myself far from fully alert about is an important truth of adolescence: A kid who notices that the limits of his liberty are slowly expanding will sometimes want a heavy to yank them back.

The reminder came one night when I was up late reading in bed and half-listening to one son’s laughter drifting into my room as he battled video game monsters with friends online.

It was getting to be an irresponsible hour for games on a school night, but the boy had been keeping up on all his responsibilities and he’d earned some slack.

“I gotta go, guys,” he told his friends suddenly, “my dad is yelling.”

His dad, in point of fact, was at this moment stifling laughter, a feat that got tougher when the kid doubled down with what I later learned was an answer to a friend’s question about why I was being so unreasonable.

“I don’t know,” he said through an exasperated sigh just before he shut down the game and climbed into bed, “but I have to go.”

As the parent of teenagers, I can resolve to sit out any battle with them that I don’t consider worth the fight. But like the kid made clear, I’ll get drafted anyway if they need a bad guy.

Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com. And follow him on Twitter at @respinozakc.