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.