Survival Guide, Teen

As a dad, you're biased when it comes to your kids' first dates. When your boy goes out, he's undertaking a rite of passage, winning over his first girl and doing his old man proud -- just like you did. When your girl goes out, though, she's running off into the world with some grungy, shifty punk you can't trust, and what's she going to do when Dad's not there to protect her?

One great way to bring out the youth in your kids (and the youth in yourself) is through magic. Pull a quarter from behind an unsuspecting ear, flip a chosen card out of a deck or make a six-foot scarf disappear, and your kids will think you're out of this world. Besides, any good father and prospective old man have to have a few magic tricks in his repertoire.

Hillary Clinton once said that "it takes a village" to raise a child in today's world. I don't know about an entire village, but enlisting the help of your child's school teachers is certainly an ideal way for your child to become a productive human being with manners and respect for others. The best way to involve the teachers, though, is to become partners with them.

When someone tells you they have the roughest job in the world, they obviously haven't tried to raise any teenagers. Garbage men, Navy Seals, human testers for non-lethal weapons - none of these guys have anything on a dad trying to communicate with a 15-year-old.

Education is the central most important aspect of your child's upbringing, and as such it is one of the most important concerns that you, as a Savvy Daddy, have. You want your child to become not only a productive adult but a successful one, and a proper education is central to meeting those goals.

Going off to college is a big step in the life of a teenager. It's also a once-in-a-lifetime moment of pride - and fear - for a father. A dad watching his son go off to college remembers his own glory days: his first moments of independence, his first college girlfriend, his first party, his first influential teacher, his first intellectual wake-up call.

Getting your teen into a good college can be a rough experience when neither of you are prepared. The first thing you have to assess is your teen's level of commitment. Does he or she even want to go to college?

Teenagers do need their parents, however. Remember, you're one of the two most important people in his life, whether he wants to admit it or not. Your perception of him molds his perception of himself, and even if he continues to adamantly deny it, he does look up to you.

It's often a parent's worst nightmare when their child starts hanging around the wrong crowd. All those years of work trying to teach the differences between right and wrong and how to respect others can go out the window when they start trying to impress their "bad" friends.

You've survived the toddler years and the childhood years. The "Terrible Two's" were nothing compared to the teen years. These years can be even worse when it comes to discipline and punishment. If you haven't found out already, you teen knows everything there is to know and you're merely a dumb ol' parent that knows nothing.