[Short-term follow-up to] "[Serious] Parenting advice needed, what to do with my 13-year old son, whom I just caught sneaking back into home @ 4:am? (x-post from r/askmenover30)"

Original post: http://ift.tt/2c8Kgsy here's a short term follow up, and please don't expect much more, as parenting is an ongoing thing.My wife and I, being a long way from our parents, who are anyway way too old (because we decided to have kids in mid-30ties) and from another part of the world, have turned to the internet for the answers.I asked for your opinions, and my wife found some good info in the amazon comments for some books.We have incorporated a lot of the stuff that we scooped from the replies to the two posts to r/askmenover30 and r/parenting.One of the things that hasn't occurred to us, was the fact that we assumed that other parents would be similar t us, but of course, that is not necessarily the case.The other boy’s mother knew about “the incident”, and we didn’t know the girl’s parents, nor could get their info without interrogating the girls, so we decided to drop the idea of the “parent/teenagers pizza gathering”.How we decided to deal with it, boils down to the approach in which we were expressing our love and concern for his safety and the safety of his friends, our understanding that puberty is tough, and it makes you do things that only later might look stupid or dangerous (something we know from our own experiences), that the they are not invincible and indestructible, although it might seem to them like they are, how our main concern is that they are well and alive, and, if possible happy, and how it is important that he becomes a member of humanity who will make this world a better place, by not necessarily being a hero or a big shot, but by being a decent human being to people around him.This message was repeated a number of times, over a number of hours, by my wife, or myself, or both of us, interrupting each other looking into his tear-filled eyes (although he toughed it out and hadn’t openly cried).He wasn’t punished this time and I made, and am still making points that this was exception and not a rule, and that if stuff like this continues there will be consequences, although it would not make us happy to be way stricter, we will have to be to keep him safe and on the path to a decent human being. We also repeated that he and his friends are more than welcome to spend time in our house, during the reasonable hours and we came home yesterday to a house full of kids.Time will only tell, if we did the right thing.Parenting is tough, kids don’t come to you with a fail-proof manual, and I just want to extend a big “Thank You!”, to all of you who took a moment out of your busy lives to try to help a stranger.You make this world a better place!P.S. - We have also for an n-th time repeated the "sex talk", that sex is something that happens between CONSENTING individuals, and that protection is extremely important not just because of unwanted pregnancy, but also because of rampant STDs that are becoming immune to antibiotics, and that he should google some of the STDs if he doesn't want is wiener to fall off. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2bKxqCF