Listen to everything your teen tells you. I mean everything. Mind you, you aren’t listening to catch them in a lie; you’re listening to let them know you are interested in them. Okay, and sometimes to catch them when they’re not making sense, or possibly a lie.
When you listen, you should make mental note of [...]
When your teen does something, do you say, “You always do that?” If you thought about it, do they really always do that? More often than not if we take the time to actually chart how many times something is done rarely do we find that someone always does the behavior and yet that is what we think [...]
Congratulations you are the proud parent of a teen! A sure way of knowing this is the silence that now follows after your questions, or maybe it’s the tense body that you hug or kiss, that is, if you can find your teen. One of the hardest things teen parents do is manage the hurt [...]
There is so little time in the day that you actually spend with your teen especially if you work outside the home. For some this may be a good thing, but with the demands of the day, it can be difficult to just check-in. How do you let your teen know that you are thinking [...]
Every parent has a different way of showing love to their teen. There’s the saying, “Do you think I would provide for the roof over your head if I didn’t love you?” This is a bit like the excuse your spouse used to explain why they forgot your birthday or why there were no roses on [...]
Parent: “How was school today?”
Teen: “Fine.”
Sometimes this is the way conversations go with teens. As a parent, you can get frustrated and stop asking. “If you don’t want to talk then I will stop asking.” A parent can’t really do this. Teens need a connection to others. This is the reason for their self-expression through their [...]
He told me his Dad died of a heart attack a year ago. He was doing fine and chuckled that he knew it seemed like everyone he was close to had died, but he really was doing well now. On the day his father died, he had not done so well and never imagined he [...]
Has your teen ever been upset and when they told you what it was about you almost blurt out, “Oh that. Is that all? That’s nothin’. I thought you were pregnant or something.” Thank goodness they had nothing very serious going on, but now you have completly invalidated your teen’s feelings with what is basically [...]
When the teacher walks up to you and tells you great things about your teen, the pride on your face is hard to hide. When your teen does something less respectable the frustration of the moment can sometimes make it seem like they’re always doing something wrong. Some parents view this as such a reflection [...]
Parents don’t like being shut out of their teen’s lives. They tell their teens they want to know what’s going on. They tell me they want to know what’s going on. There are terrible stories of parents invading their teen’s private things for no reason other than being nosey. I’m always trying to figure out [...]
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