The grazed knees a child suffers while learning to walk are not only small and temporary hurts, but essential learning aids. Most of the heartaches and quarrels of adolescence can be seen the same light. There are, however, a few experiences we would all do without, such as causing or having an unwanted pregnancy. There are three ways in which you can attempt to avoid such an event. You can apply rigorous control and discipline on your youngsters, putting the fear of all kinds of retribution into them, and deliberately frustrating any sort of con the opposite sex. You can put your daughter on the pill or sure your son with condoms. Or, you can alight anywhere on e line between these two extremes.

Pet loss of your companion animal is difficult enough to get over when you are an adult and are aware about the concept of death. However, grasping the concept of death for a child can be next to impossible.

Perhaps the most difficult and contentious area for you and your teenagers to discuss is their sexuality. While teenagers can be experiencing difficulties in coming to terms with their burgeoning sexual awareness, you may have the very real difficulty in even accepting that such feelings do or should exist in them. Sex may well be an area in which you do not feel entirely comfortable or well-informed.

Liberty of speech and expression is one of the most vital rights that we have in this country. Censorship is a total contradiction to this idea which has assisted in making America the best country in the world.

Young people will be acutely sensitive about their 'crushes'. They may want to share their enthusiasm with you - showing you pictures and telling you the fascinating details of’ the loved one's' life, thoughts and ambitions. You may well find the subject tedious, the person unattractive and the whole thing either embarrassing or ludicrous. Make this clear, and you won't be telling your teenager that the two of you have different tastes; you will be telling them that they have lousy taste!

Parents might look anxiously for a boy or girlfriend, even though they may not want to cope with the attendant disagreements, because it at least reassures them that their teenager is 'normal', and not homosexual. Most young people experiment with members of their own sex, without this necessarily being their permanent sexual orientation. But the recent change in the law that lowered the age of consent for gay sex to eighteen (soon, perhaps, to sixteen in line with heterosexual age of consent) affects the fact that most boys who are going to find their sexual partners among their own sex are hardly likely to have a sexual moratorium in their teenage years.