How To Tell Your Parents You Have A Boyfriend

Hi, my name's Niki and I'm a counsellor and psychotherapist, and I work a lot with teenagers. I'm here to talk to you about some of the issues that you might find that you're dealing with as a teenager and to hopefully give you some tips that might be useful. Okay, I'm going to talk to you about how to tell your parents that you've got a boyfriend, which can obviously be a pretty daunting time and it can bring up a lot of fears and anxieties in people who are thinking about telling their parent.

But if that is the case, what is it that you're worried about? Are there reasons that your parents would be anxious about you having a boyfriend? What might be going on as far as that would be causing concerns? Is it the age of your boyfriend, that he's ten years older? In which case there's obviously going to be good reasons for your parents to be concerned. Is it a boy that they know and they maybe don't hear good things about? Or is it other things that would be causing problems for your parents to accept that you've got a boyfriend? I mean if you're gay and you're worried that your parents wouldn't accept you bringing a boyfriend home if you're a guy then that's obviously a whole different area that you're going to have to deal with. But if you're a girl and you're bringing a boyfriend home perhaps the parents are worried, already thinking does this mean she might get pregnant, or might be pressurized into sex before she's ready, or they're just trying to get their heads around that you're now becoming a young adult and can make decisions and have a sexuality and are attracted to people which they've obviously never had to deal with before when you were a child.

Is it that other factors which might get in the way or influence how you tell them is obviously your parents religious beliefs or cultural beliefs that might mean that they don't feel you should have a boyfriend until you're a certain age or not at all, in fact, until you're married. But if you decide to tell them, then its important that you pick the right time, and that you've rehearsed what you're going to say. Practice it over with friends, practice it over with talking it through yourself or with someone in the family that you can trust and is okay about you having a boyfriend, or even find someone like Childline and talk it through with one of the counsellors on the line confidentially.

So when you've rehearsed it and when you've worked it out what it is you want to say and how you want to tell them this, also think about what type of questions are they going to ask you? What are their fears? Kind of almost prepare yourself for the sorts of questions they're going to give to you and the worries that they're going to have. So this will mean you've got answers ready which might help reassure them and make them feel more at ease with you having a boyfriend. Also, start letting them know about the boyfriend, bring him to life.

I mean, it might mean you want them to meet him. If that's not possible for whatever reasons, then at least you can tell them a little about him, what he does, who he is, some of the things made you like him in the first place, how he makes you feel when you're with him. Listen to their questions, accept that they've got the right to have an opinion, even if it's not the opinion you want, and answer and be calm about it.

Decide how much you want to tell them, you may not want to tell them everything, but you certainly need to tell them enough that they're going to be reassured about you being mature enough to have a boyfriend and they might want to know if you're protecting yourself; if you are going to have sex are you going to do it in a careful way? Then they might want to know that you're not going to have sex at all, and this is about romantic kind of relationship. But be positive, let them know what you really enjoy about being with him, so that you can really try to help them understand what it is that makes you like him i