teen books Tag

Posts tagged 'teen books'

Peer Pressure: The Power of the Group

Teens are often criticized for not being able to stand up to peer pressure. In my parenting workshops I show parents and teachers how much they, as mature adults, grownups and parents, submit to group pressure. They are usually very shocked to discover how many things they do that do not match their own thoughts and beliefs, and how strong their desire is to be accepted, not judged and not criticized by the people around them.

Being social creatures makes us compromise our thoughts and beliefs to match those of the society we live in. It is in some way a survival mechanism that got out of control. In the beginning, we did it to survive in the group. Later on we have to obey the group if we want to be accepted in.

The power of peer pressure was examined many years ago in a famous study called “Asch’s conformity experiment”. This short video can explain how easy it is conform.

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Be Yourself: Everyone Else is Taken

We all go through a journey to define ourselves and develop our self-identity. Be the person you want to be instead of the person others want you to be.

During a very tough time in my life, I started a search to find out who I was and define my “self”. Much like everyone else, I grew up in a society in which the “self” was a very vague concept that kids never considered. I was 16. I went through a bit of crisis when I discovered that I did not know who “I” was. I needed to find and define “me”, to make the choice to be myself.

The second step of my journey was during the first year of my degree. I was studying psychology with one of the most incredible teachers I have ever met when I realized that self-concept, regardless of when you start defining, is something we all have to figure out. In our very first lesson, the teacher walked into a room full of students and asked, “Who are you?”. It sounded like such a simple questions, but we struggled, big time!

This post is part 1 of 2 in the series Be Yourself

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Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss (13): Parenting Teens

Parenting teens is considered the most scary period for every parents. I heard endless times the mantra “Wait until your kids become teenagers” and when Eden was young, I did find this warning scary. After all, I had not been an easy teen for my parents (not that I had been an easy kid either).

Yet, the more Eden grew, the more I realized that for my parents, my teen years had been years of reason, success and happiness. While other parents had talked about their kids turning into monsters during their teen years, my parents had found joy parenting me for the first time in, because I had finally done well socially and academically.

This thought made me dedicate a big chunk of my education career to teens and even today, I often deal with parenting teens in my parenting workshops. I even wrote a book for parents, educators and teenagers to bust the myth of “those obnoxious teens”.

I asked our Top Parenting Bloggers what they think about parenting teens. Some of them are parents of teens, other are not yet, but it is interesting to read what they think.

This post is part 13 of 14 in the series Top Parenting Bloggers Discuss

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Teen Suicide

Someone very close to us lost her son to teen suicide. Her son was 18 years old, a great kid who took his dad’s gun one day, sat in his parents’ car in a park and shot himself to death.

He is gone and is probably not suffering anymore, but a whole family he left behind is still picking up the pieces of their shattered life and cannot find comfort.

I am writing to you because I pray you never have to be in the same position.

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TV Diet (2): Health Concerns

Many studies have been done on the influence of TV on viewers (in fact there have been 4,000 studies on the effect on children alone, which you should not read if you love watching TV). Excessive TV viewing raises concerns in five major areas: Health, Behavior, Outlook on life, Relationship and Education

This post is part 2 of 18 in the series TV Diet

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Hormonal Teenagers (my brutal opinion)

Two weeks ago, I had a session with Ben, one of my clients, who talked about his daughter misbehaving, throwing temper tantrums and being very disrespectful. I think what hit me was when he said, “You know, teens are just hormonal”.

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Confession of an Author

Although my mom could not read properly, my dad read a lot of books. He was a crossword puzzle and word search person and eagerly solved everything in the daily and weekend papers when I was a kid. Most of the books in our home library he won by sending his answers to the newspapers. Inside each one was a sticker saying he had won this book as a first, second or third prize. So you see, for me, books were rewards since before I was able to read.

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Losing Your Teen 101

Teenagers have been asked about the attitudes of their parents that are the source of their bad relationships. It was amazing that they all expressed the same frustrations, same difficulties, same attitudes they hate. To them, all parents were the same. Here is a list of things parents do or say that teens find frustrating.

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Just Wait Until Your Kids Become Teens

Over the years, many people have said to me, “Just wait until you have teens, then you will really have a hard time”. I usually smile and say, “Thank you for the compliment”, because they think I look young, but I already have 2 teenagers – 19 and (nearly) 13 years old – and there was nothing horrible to wait for. Their teen years are just as pleasant and fulfilling for me as a parent as their early childhood, if not more.

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14 Ways to Teach Your Kids Resilience

As much as we would like to defend our kids from the difficulties in life, from experiencing crisis, change or loss, we cannot! However, we can give our kids the tools to recover from difficult times when those hit.

Many people say to me, “They are just kids. What horrible things can possibly happens to them?”

My answer is, “Let’s not wait to find out”.

For children, what seems like a simple thing might be a horrible problem. We have good friends whose 18-year-old son took a gun and shot himself in the head because he was not accepted to the course he wanted.

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