understading your teen better

All teenagers share 5 major goals:

1. Becoming
2. Power
3. Protection
4. Withdrawal
5. Challenge

These goals can be achieved in both negative and positive ways. It is our goals as parents to try to prevent bad things from happening with these 5 steps of prevention:

1. Identify potential problems and risks
2. Share your thoughts and feelings and awknowledge teen's thoughts and feelings
3. Generate guidelines through brainstorming and agree on guidelines through negotiation
4. Decide on logical consequences for violations
5. Follow up later

"TO TEACH IS TO EMPOWER"

1. Motivate your teen to learn something new
2. Find a time that works for both of you
3. Break skill down into smaller steps
4. Demonstrate the skill
5. Let the teen try
6. Encourage, encourage, encourage!!!
7. Work or play together

By teaching your child to learn new things, new doors open up to them and they can discover ways of achieving their major goals in positive ways.

communicating effectively with a teenager

When communicating with others we need to make sure that we are using “I” Messages. An “I” Message is when you state things in terms of how YOU think/feel about a situation and not what someone else is thinking. For example if someone has just made a huge mess in the kitchen you may be tempted to say, “You’re so messy! You need to clean this mess up right now. You don’t care about others, do you?!” there’s a lot of “you’s” in that sentence. Instead you could say something like, “I have a problem with this mess. I have a problem because it makes it hard for me to get things done in here. I would like it if you could please clean it up right now.” This way you are owning that problem. You have a problem with the mess and want it gone and so you are expressing your grievances about the mess instead of about the person who made the mess.

Effective communication with teen also includes these 5 basic steps:

1-      Listen actively (don’t let it affect you personally but try to listen to what they are saying so you can figure out their problem).

2-      Respond to feelings- verbal and non-verbal ques.

3-      Look for alternatives/ evaluate consequences (make sure if there is a consequence for your child’s actions it is a logical one and fits the action to which they are being punished for).

4-      Offer encouragement (expressing confidence in a teen empowers them with the power to make the right choices).

5-      Follow up later – this shows your teen you care enough to remember things going on in their life and you really want to help them overcome their struggle.

Problems with Assuming

Communication is one of the most amazing things we have for understanding each other. Everything we do, say, or don't say is a form of communication. I think it would be an accurate statement to say that we never stop communicating. The problem with there being both verbal and non-verbals ways to communicate is that not everyone interprets messages the same. Communication varies by culture, gender, relgion, families, and individuals. What happens in communication is that we all have some sort of attached meaning to different verbals and nonverbals based on our prior experience with those interactions and from those interactions we derive a certain meaning. One very important thing we must understand is that not everyone shares our same meaning behind certain words or body languages. When we assume that people do share the same meaning as us then we begin to draw conclusions and make assumptions about what another person is trying to say to us. This type of miscommunication can produce a lot of confusion and damage if we are not careful. It is better to assume people have good intentions while interacting with us rather than to assume the worst. If we do think someone is conveying a certain message we are unhappy or unsure about we can always clarify with them to make sure we are interpretting them correctly. There are times we will need to make sure we clarify messages to make sure that people on both ends of the communication interaction are on the same wave length especially if those people are not interacting face to face. It has been said that 14% of communication come from words, 35% from tone, and 51% from nonverbal means. Isn't that interesting?! That 86% of our communication is non-verbal! With that in mind, when we talk to people on the phone we are losing out on 51% of the message, when we text others we lose out on 86% and even when we are face to face our different interpretations of words, tone, and nonverbals, allow us to lose out on a certain amount of the meaning of someone's message as well if we interpret them differently than how they were ment.

It is important that we all try to improve our communication both by trying to more accuratly portray what we mean and not trying to have others assume the correct meaning as well as giving others the benefit of the doubt and seeking to clarify their meaning if we are confused or unsure to make sure there is a better communication occuring.

STRESS

When in conflict remember ABC-X.

Actual event
Behavioral response
Cognitions
________________
Total eXperience

A- What actually happend? What was the event or incident that spurred a conflict?
B- What did people physically do in reaction to the "event" to show how they felt about what happend?
C- What are people thinking/ feeling in regaurds to what happend? This is difficult to identify sometimes because cognitions occur within one's head but sometimes we can attempt to identify their feelings based on what they say.

AB and C all lead up to the total eXperience of the stressful situation. In order to understand the situation a little more clearly and to find out why people may be stressing out or developing conflict we need to understand WHAT happend, HOW people reacted, and HOW they are internalizing what happend. Being able to understand WHY people feel the way they do is helpful for being able to recognize and resolve the problem.

Sex Before Marriage

It is important to understand what types of things cause you to become aroused. Our bodies have been created in such a way that when we are aroused our bodies naturally want to proceed into sexual intimacy.  Therefor, keeping ourselves protected from arousal is the best way to prevent premarital sexual relations.
Our most important sex organ is the brain, which allows us to know when certain physical contact is going too far and we are becoming aroused. By recognizing that we are being aroused we can tell ourselves that this is a time to walk away or stop the interaction. Doing this will allow us to create and maintain a chase life which we will use even after marriage. Being chase allows us to think clean thoughts and maintain virture in our lives.

STRESS in Family Life

6/13/12

Taking responsibilities for how we act in stressful times---We all have stress in our lives, some of those stress causing factors are things we can control and others we can't. Yet, no matter what the situation or circumstance there is always one thing we can control, our attitude and behavior. If we blame our actions and thoughts on others or things that are happening then we are denying responsibility for our actions and not understanding that we all have our own agency to behave how we will and we must accept the responsibilities for those actions which may be the difference between being happy and not.

Part of being able to control our own emotions means not allowing others to influence our moods. It is often the case that people handle different situations in different ways. Some people laugh when they're stressed cause they don't know how to act, others get really angry as a way to mask what they're really feeling, while others internalize everything and battle out their frustrations in their minds while "acting happy" all along so that people don't catch on to their frustrations. Knowing this is helpful because it means that there is often an underlying reason behind people's actions. And if we are wise we will give people the benefit of the doubt for what may be perceived as rude behavior....maybe they're having a bad day, I wonder if they are feeling okay today?, They must be feeling stressed. If we adopt these thoughts instead of: they're rude, gosh they're angry today, Why are they treating me this way? By doing this we can separate ourselves from others emotions and we don't have to think of that person's emotions as linked to ours, instead we can help them.

Types of affairs

How does infidelity in marriage or dating occur? There are four different types of affairs people experience that draw them away from their loved one.

                                                Emotional                                           Physical

Detached                            fantasy                                                    visual

Attached                             romantic                                              sexual

There are emotional connections we make with others as well as physical ones and with each of these they can either be attached or detached connections. Yes, it is possible to have an affair in your mind. "Thought is the Father of action" and if your thoughts are far from your spouse you have already cheated on them in your mind.