Family Matters

Archive for the ‘Teens / Teenagers’ Category

As an author, people ask me about the origin of my stories. Almost every person who has read my stories has asked, “Are they real?” Maybe this is a good opportunity for me to write how I came up with them, because some of the stories are so real it was painful. All my characters are based on real people whose personalities I borrowed without their knowledge, but some parts of the stories are twists I created to convey a message.

I am sometimes surprised to meet new clients who cannot understand how they got themselves into an abusive relationship. As you can imagine, getting a women out of an abusive relationship is much harder than not getting into such relationship in the first place.

Some time ago, my teen daughter went to a teen motivation seminar (that shall remain anonymous at this stage). Gal and I were very happy she was going to participate. As you can imagine, us two life coaching parents are happy with every opportunity for our kids to hear some of our “preaching” from someone else. However, she came back so disappointed, our heart dropped.

If you have ever wondered how dumb parents can be, wonder no more. I believe the parents in the story “Parents Fight over Which Gang Toddler Should Join” take the lead for more than one reason. If there is ever a parenting qualification exam, they would fail miserably. This may be how it seems, but is it the whole story?

Years ago, someone showed me this book called “I’m OK, You’re OK”. In the book, the author describes 4 psychological positions and their effect on communication and relationships. What I read in that book has helped me a lot over the years and is a handy way of explaining relationships to clients, especially parents.

It is days before your 13th birthday and you are approaching the line. 12 sleeps from now, you will enter the scary age of being a teenager. For years, you have been a kid, a child. You have liked most of it and thought there would be magic when you celebrated your first teen birthday.

Last week, I talked about the 8 worst ways to treat your teens. These were nagging, telling them what to do, punishing them, lecturing, screaming/shouting/yelling, using guilt, begging and bribing.

As I promised, I will dedicate this post to the best ways to treat teens. I do hope you get lots of inspiration and understanding from it and establish a better communication with your teens.

Only 3% of teens going into higher education straight after high school actually finish their choice of study and work in that profession for about 5 years after finishing studying.

Without being taught parenting skills, many parents miss clues that their kids are having a problem. They just move along, expecting their kids to behave “normally”, which the kids can do for a while, but then the burden becomes too heavy for them to carry and they lash out, withdraw or show other signs of distress. The parents are then surprised and get upset at the “unacceptable behavior”. Sounds familiar?

Teens are a challenge for many parents. With growth of hair and size (my 13-year-old son is 15cm taller than I am already), with the development of their emotions and thinking, parents go through growth too and the communication between parents and teens changes.