Posts Tagged: parenting teens

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8
Jun 11

How to Be Your Child’s Friend

There is a need for you to learn to be the best friend your child could ever have if you want to be the best parent you have been aiming to be since your decision to start to procreate.

It’s just a pity that some parents have not learn to see things from this perspective.But this is the exact way to view the relationship between you and your child or children from now on if you want to be successful as a parent.

Our parents’ time were different from ours,and everybody must recognize this fact of life for us to make a headway in the everyday stress of parenting the young ones around us.

Now the question you may want to ask is…

Why must l be my child’s friend being the parent?

The simple answer to that will be listed below for your understanding:

- It will stop your child from depending on his friend’s advice especially where the friend’s advice is not the same as yours.

- The child we learn to be self-confident and be able to question adults
who may guide him aright.

- You will have the opportunity to question your child easily about their reason for taking some actions that are somehow injurious to them from your on understanding of the possible result and guide them appropriately.

- Your child will always feel free to let you know whatever may be worrying him before it turns harmful and beyond control.

- It provides avenue for you to monitor the friends your child is moving with and possible opportunity for you to get to know them and their background.

Finally….

Being your child’s best friend makes for a very happy home environment and less worry for both of you at your work place and his own school.

The reason for this…

Well…

People usually find it somehow very hard to do the things that will hurt the friends.

How about this for developing a friendly attitude towards your child and be your child’s friend?

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17
Sep 10

3 Tips on Managing Defiant and Aggressive Behavior in Teens

A friend of mine has been working with defiant and aggressive teens for years. Adam Jones is the president of the Harbor House Foundation, “a ministry dedicated to the health and well being of parents and students.”

Through the years of working with struggling and aggressive youth, Adam learned very important truths for managing defiant and aggressive behavior in teens. I had the privilege of corresponding with him a couple days ago. I asked him, “If you had to choose, what are the top 3 ways that a parent or guardian can manage a teen’s aggressive and defiant behavior?”

Over the next couple of weeks, we will get more in depth on how these tips or strategies play out in your home. Here are the 3 valuable tips:

The Parent Should Always Control Themselves

Conversations and arguments WILL get out of control with your teen if you are not controlling yourself. A lot of the time, or most of the time, adolescents push their parent’s hot buttons. For some it is intentional, and for some it isn’t. Some teens act defiant and rebellious simply to inspire a reaction out of you. As a parent, you cannot react to your teen or their rebellious behaviors.

If you are always arguing with your teen, or if you lose your cool because your teen is openly defiant, you have just taught your teenager that it’s OK to behave that way. Whether you see it or not, your teens look to you as an example, even if their harsh words don’t say it.

The Parent Needs to Recognize the Signs of Potential Aggressiveness in Their Teen

We’ll break this down in future articles so that you will be able to fully understand the signs of aggression. Briefly, recognizing the signs of potential aggression in teens is often referred to as WAVE: wind up, agitation, verbal abuse, explosion.

If the Parent is the Source of the Problem, They Need to Remove Themselves

If the parent is not controlling themselves, and if the parent is instigating, this will cause a teen’s behavior to be aggressive, defiant, and rebellious. An instigating parent is the worst ingredient for managing aggressive behavior in teens. Adam also provided three points of focus for this one tip. We will study them soon.

Those points are prevention, intervention, and post-vention.

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12
Aug 10

The Risky Business of Teenagers

Every year, as high school ends for the year, the level of teen partying increases. Warm weather summer evenings are for outdoor gatherings and the celebrating of another year’s end. Who can blame them? They just want to have fun. Unfortunately, along with the energetic, enthusiastic celebrating inevitably comes a tragedy – a fatal car accident, a drowning, major property damage, or a fatal drug overdose.

The most puzzling and dismaying part of these unfortunate tragedies is that sometimes normally responsible teens can do some unbelievably risky things – with horrible consequences. As a parent of teenagers, most of us can think back and shudder at the many risks we took when their age. Do you remember retelling those stories of crazy things done as this kind of ‘rite of passage’ or some other justification for our outrageousness? Afterwards, upon reflection, we may have known we were acting really immaturely, foolishly and dangerously.

So why do perfectly normal, usually responsible, teens act at times like little kids? Why do they loose their good judgment? A flurry of research of the brain over the last decade provides many of the answers. While a teenager may resemble an adult on the outside, a peek inside his/her brain tells a very different story. The cerebral cortex is still growing and undergoing massive change.

Neurotransmitters radically transform in number and type, creating a desire for risk taking. New connections are being forged to areas of the brain responsible for higher conceptual thinking. The prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher judgment, wisdom and forethought, is the very last area of the brain to develop. A mature frontal cortex can multi-task, evaluate, and decide with relative ease. Whereas, the newly forming frontal cortex of a teen, is much more easily stressed. Ask them to multi-task, evaluate and decide and they are likely to fall apart or throw a temper tantrum. Impaired with alcohol, or distracted by cell phone while driving can be disastrous.

Risk taking and thrill seeking are not always destructive. They also have the positive function of helping teens explore the world, cultivate interests and eventually leave home. Teens need parents, teachers and adults to help them manage their lives while the brain matures. We need to act as their prefrontal cortex at times. Despite what they may want, we are not just here to serve them — provide the car, fill the fridge with food they like, and dispense money like a human ATM!!

What can a parent to do reduce the risks?

Know their friends.
Friends look out for each other. When parents know and like their teenager’s friends, it is easier to feel confident that the peer influence will be positive. Remind your teenager of the importance of friends helping each other make good choices.

Don’t try to control your teenager. Try to have influence.
Control from above will result in power struggles. The influence of you as a coach from the sidelines will be more effective. Nurture respect, acceptance and other positive aspects of your relationship. You have to give respect to get it. When they are not with us, we hope that our ideas (influence) will be whispering in their heads when faced with difficult choices.

Help them be assertive to negative peer pressure.
Are you confident that they know the dangers they may face? More importantly, do they know what to do or say to be assertive with peers who may be pressuring them to do something they think is dangerous, like getting into a car where the driver has been drinking or trying a new drug.

Make it clear to them that there is no shame in calling for help.
We want our teenagers to call us or another responsible adult when in trouble. Try to help your son or daughter see you as non-judgmental, so when they do something foolish, drink too much, for example, they will call you. Reassure them of their good judgment to call when they do.

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28
Mar 10

Tips to Recognize the Signs of Aggressive Teens

More times than none, aggressive teens are not having a need met. This need that is not being met usually shows itself after the need has gone not met for too long. Don’t worry, it isn’t too late to address the need and to begin growing and nurturing that relationship with your troubled teen.

You are now hopefully asking, “Well what need does my teen have right now that I can’t see?”. Or, “How can I meet this need that they have?”. Big questions are great, because they require big answers. For starters, all parents who are parenting aggressive teens, whether single, married, divorced, etc.., need a value system that their family abides by. Do you have one? Good. No? You need to figure out what your family values.

To learn or identify your family values, start by asking yourself what your rules are. Once the house rules are identified, ask yourself why? The answer is your value. These values need to be communicated and understood. For example, why should your teen clean their room? Cleaning the room is the rule, but what value is being supported? Could it be that you don’t want cockroaches crawling on your floor? You don’t like the smell of a dirty room with leftovers sitting everywhere? Chances are, your teen doesn’t want insects everywhere too. So cleaning the room is in support of a family value of not have bugs crawling through the whole house.

Identify the need. Maybe your teen wants to see their parents interact respectfully. Maybe your aggressive teen picked up their behavior from somewhere and they don’t know how to handle their anger and they become hostile. You teen’s consequences probably aren’t working, because the only reaction your teen knows, is to become aggressive.

You can communicate with your teen and teach them new ways of interacting, new ways of dealing with disappointment, discouragement, and anger.

Find resources for parenting Troubled Teens and learn how to manage a teen’s aggressive behavior.

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17
Mar 10

Teen Parenting – A Hard Look at Real Numbers

Despite widespread availability of sex education in our middle and high schools, the incidence of teen parenting is still far too common?today.?As raw and unbiased statistics will show, unwed teen parents and their children will face huge hurdles in life and will most likely experience lowered expectations in their health, finances and education.

Health Problems Due To Lack Of Prenatal Care

Due mainly to the lack of proper prenatal care, teenage mothers face higher pregnancy health risks than women who deliver children at a later age, including anemia, pregnancy-related high blood pressure, underweight birth, premature delivery, and even death.

Teen parenting statistics reveal that up to 40% of teen mothers do not receive adequate, high-quality medical care during pregnancy. There is some debate as to whether this prenatal medical care is simply unavailable to these teen mothers-to-be, or the care is simply not actively sought during pregnancy. Without proper prenatal care, many children born to teen mothers come into the world in poor health.

Education Suffers

Alarming statistics show that teen parenting leaves many victims in education as only 50% of teen parents will graduate from high school before age 30. And, the real tragedy is that being a teen parent without even a high school diploma almost guarantees that the teen and her baby will live a life of poverty, dependent upon marginal government handouts as peers progress into adulthood and on to successful families and careers.

Teen mothers are encouraged to stay in school, by way of numerous state and federal programs, and 80% of them do – for a while. Unfortunately, the realities of caring for another life so early in the teen parent’s lives definitely takes a toll, as most will not earn their high school diploma.

Good Jobs Hard To Find

The lack of a quality education due to teen parenting translates directly into difficulties locating and keeping well-paying, steady employment. Without even a high school diploma, the teen parent is doomed to fill mostly low-wage service or light manufacturing positions – jobs that traditionally pay low wages and have high turnover. Even if the teen parent is able to find and keep one of these low-paying jobs, the low wages and lack of promotion to higher-paying positions (due to lack of education) makes it tough to make ends meet.

Due to the consequences of teen parenting, the teen and his or her small family with a job is in a catch-22 position – making too much money to qualify for government help, not making enough to rise out of poverty.

To make economic matters worse, only 10% of teen mothers receive any financial assistance from the father. 40% of teen mothers receive benefits from various government programs, thus beginning (or perpetuating) a vicious welfare lifestyle, that has claimed generations of teen parents, and doomed them to a marginal life of low expectations and government dependency.

One statistic to consider – women who deliver their first child between 20 and 24 years of age statistically have a much better chance of earning a college degree than teen parents, thus almost guaranteeing their lives (and the lives of their children) will not be spent in hopeless poverty.

The Child Of The Teen Suffers

The real victims of teen parenting are the children themselves. These children usually exhibit lower cognitive development (the development of thought processes) than those children of non-teen parents. Due to the poorer socioeconomic conditions these children grow up in, they tend to be underachievers in school and are more likely to not earn a high school diploma than their peers.

Children of teen parents also tend to have sexual relations earlier than their peers, and chances are much greater that these “children of children” will go on to be teen parents themselves.

Some Advice

The best advice? Don’t become a teen parent! There are so many strikes against teen parenting that the teens who do get pregnant in high school never realize just how bad things will get for them – until it actually happens to them.

These teen parents (and their parents) almost never take the unborn life they are creating into consideration – that no matter how much love and attention the child is given, teen parenting’s high costs will be born largely by the child created. And, that child has no choice in the matter – but the teen parent does. Consider adoption as there are many well-qualified two-parent families who will be able to give the child a real chance in life, and break the cycle of teen parenting.

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6
Feb 10

Preparing Your Teenager and Yourself For the Teen Dating Concept

At some point, your teenager is going to want to start dating. This will happen whether you want it to or not. Keeping your teen locked up from the concept of dating is not going to make for a healthy relationship between you. It’s important that you work through the teen dating scene with excellent communication skills to ready them and you for a smooth experience.

Deciding on an age to start dating should be more like a guideline for you and your teen. For example, if you stated that they should be 15, but when they reach that age you decide they’re not mature enough to handle it; you change your mind and that could bring you some problems. They could rebel because you went back on your word.

Sit down with them and explain that you could discuss the matter further when they get close to the age you have in mind. Let them know that they need to be mature enough to handle their dating experience and explain why. This way, if they’re not emotionally ready at the proposed age, then they would be a little more willing to wait.

As they get closer to their proposed age, you will want to discuss the rules you have laid down for when they start to date. Don’t wait until the last minute to tell them what they are. You can add as you go, but at least give them a sneak peek at what they will have to abide by when they do go on their first date.

Keep in mind that the pressures you experienced when you were a teen are different than the ones they’re going to have to face. Be prepared and make sure those issues are addressed when you do have your discussion. Your teenager needs to know the good and the bad of dating, so be sure to set aside enough time to talk and answer questions.

Things to Discuss

Sex- Make sure they know that they shouldn’t feel pressured into having sex and that if this should occur, they should call you right away to come pick them up. Be sure they know that anyone who is physically, mentally, or sexually abusive is not a good candidate for dating. The first time something like that happens, they should call you, no matter what time of the day or night.

Meeting Their Dates- Always be sure you meet the first date candidate before they go out. Get to know them a little bit to get a feel for how much you can trust them with your child. This should go for both girls and boys. If you choose to always meet their dates, then make sure your child knows that.

Chaperones- If your child is going to date in their early teen years; then this should be considered. If there’s an older sibling that’s willing to go along, that would be best to help your child be comfortable. If not, then you or another adult should go along and hang back while they have a good time.

Cell Phones- Consider getting one for your child and make sure they take it along on their dates. Should something happen while they’re out, they need a way to contact you immediately no matter what the problem is. Let your child know that they can call you at any time for any reason when they go out.

Dating Plans- You should know where your teen and their date are planning to go. Let your child know they should call you if the plan changes while their out. Being aware of where they’re at all times when they’re gone, will help alleviate some of your stress during this time.

Allowing your teenager to date in this day and age can be scary. Teen dating nowadays isn’t the same as when you were their age. Try to keep your relationship open, honest, and loving so they can be more comfortable coming to you to discuss anything. Learn to trust your parenting, and they should be just fine.

If you’re looking for great information on ways to fully understand your teen, you can get it right now…any time of the day, any day of the week. Real Life Guidance to Understanding Your Teen is available for easy and instant download to your computer.