Top Five Tips for Skillfully Meeting the Challenge of Raising Teens Today

Unique valuable insights into positive, assertive parenting, particularly the pre-teen and teen years, from a Mum who knows.

Support your children in becoming capable and confident with healthy self esteem.
Teens learn through their experiences of the world around them.
Children need parents/guardians to model good coping and relationship skills.
Understanding the needs of teens and the role of the ‘good enough parent’ is not to be a perfect parent and meet the child's every need, but to provide enough support and nurturing to the best of the parent/guardian's ability.
The Adult is protective, yet increasingly supportive, letting the teen go to make their own experiences. Not too near, not too far.
Building healthy self-esteem requires parents/guardians to provide the teen with a safe environment and predictable routine where they receive lots of praise and encouragement. Teens in particular need to know that they matter and their parents care about their well being.
Positive attention is an essential ingredient to raising confident, happy children.
Children need attention to live.
A child that receives regular positive attention learns that they are a valuable human being and learns ‘ I am worthwhile, I am an interesting person’.

Reminder - Teens self-esteem grows when they hear good things about themselves and other important people in their lives

Build solid family relationships – how to stay connected
Say Sorry when you get it wrong, say “I apologise, I made a mistake”.
Use this as an opportunity to model good behaviour. Children need to know that you can get it wrong and that it is all right to make a mistake, admit it and move on.
The '20 – minutes Tool' - Spending 20 minutes a day listening and talking with the teens about what the they want to talk about. The most important aspect is that the parent remains in present time with the Child.
Understand the 4 core human emotions:
Anger is our instinct for freedom. Fear helps us avoid danger. Sadness helps us to ‘let go’ and move on. Joy is what we experience when we can express our emotions freely. Understand your teen's relationship with anger.
Many experience depression at some time in their lives. It is a reaction to the external factors such as grief, poverty, unemployment and separation from community or family.
Depression is caused by chemical imbalance in the brain. It is treated wonderfully by homeopathy or herbs and acupuncture and massage.

Enhance family communications – managing conflict
For many parents today their family type does not match that which is perceived to be the norm.
Parents – whether they are parent, separated or divorced – which is often difficult territory, need to deal with explaining their family situation to their children in a way that fosters respect for the other parent and allows children to feel good about their unique family situation. In other words, being able to talk to a child positively about their family situation allows trust to develop between a parent/guardian and child. The approach that is successful is the teen's right to know and allow parents/guardians to participate in the process at the level where everyone feels able. The goal is to allow parent/guardians to ‘open their thinking around the issues and allow the possibility of change’ rather than the parent/guardian take the high moral ground on how things should be done.

To reach this goal we will have to challenge the historical gender stereotypes as the mother being naturally more able to care for a child and that caring and taking responsibility for children is not a ‘macho’ thing for men to do.


Challenging these sterotypes and encouraging parents to change their thinking around these issues and beliefs greatly benefits teenagers. This approach and action will model new ways for being a parent/guardian to their children. Children are like sponges.
Most of the child's learning is done not from books or experts, but from what they hear and see. For many years you are the expert to your children. What you say or do has a powerful impact on your teen's behaviour.

Understanding the needs of teenagers/parents – what’s it all about ?
It is good to take the time to understand how our minds and the teenager's mind is developing and working. The left brain thinks logical, rational, facts, knowledge, serious, linear, sequential, 2-d thinking, book-learning, monochromic time, creativity, implementation, structure ‘Whats the bottom line?’

The Right brain thinks illogical, irrational, fantasy, intuition, playful, holistic, 3d thinking, common sense, polychromic time, creativity, spontaneous, flexibility, 'have a heart'
Levels of learning, learning about things, learning to do things, learning to become yourself, learning to achieve things with others

Effective discipline – negotiating rules and boundaries
Some teens mis-behave sometimes and some teens mis-behave a lot. When thinking about the reason why children mis-behave, they may not be mis-behaving at all. It may be an expression of excess energy or enthusiasm rather than any desire to mis-behave.
Author Steve Bidduph says "The 5 common reasons why children mis–behave are Boredom, Power, Contest, Revenge Seeking, Showing Feelings of Inadequacy.
Bad behavior is actually the result of healthy forces going astray.
Children play up for one reason or another because they have unmet needs. Identifying those needs and finding positive ways to help teens meet them is a parents/guardians role.
Children need to learn about their limits and the responsibility of being a social being. Mis-behaviour may be the expression of the need for a limit or boundary to be set.
When there are no limits, teens feel unbalanced and unsafe.


Assertive Parenting skills
Be calm yet confident where the tone of the voice says ‘I mean business and I am as calm as a cucumber’. Assertive Parenting helps the teen to know where they stand and everyone gets to have a life that is not full of constant nagging and scolding. Assertiveness is a skill set that can be learned and given patience and persistence, can transform the relationship between parents and teenagers.

There is a belief floating about that parents/guardians that seek out knowledge for parenting courses is an admission of failure as a parent /guardian. There is another belief floating about which demands parents to be perfect
This is a great mis-understanding. It is an act of maturity to attend a number of parenting courses over the course of the children’s lives, because different knowledge and skill sets are required at different child development stages so that the relationship between the adult and child can blossom and grow in balance.