simcha's postings about love, connection, parenting & personal growth
Terri Apter, PhD, a University of Cambridge researcher and leading authority on mothers and teen girls, offers a four-point plan to improve your next conversation. These ideas are taken from the May 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.
I would only add that many of these ideas are equally applicable to speaking with your teenage sons about sex.
Parenting with Love and Logic® is a nation-wide program founded by Jim Fay and Foster W. Cline, M.D. to help parents raise happy, responsible children (and to make parenting more enjoyable as a bonus). The following are some of the program’s key concepts, guidelines that can help parents take control of their home life in loving ways.
Children who misbehave usually do so for a purpose, taught U.S. psychiatrist and educator Rudolf Dreikurs. Misbehaving children and teens are acting out a feeling or need that they are unable to convey or express. Such a need might be: a need for attention when s/he is feeling ignored or neglected; a resentment over being controlled; a fear that s/he is not loved or lovable; or a feeling of inadequacy or helplessness.
The Monitoring the Future study, sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed and conducted by the University of Michigan, has been polling teens since 1975. Its most recent survey reports that alcohol and cigarette use by students in grades 8, 10, and 12 are at their lowest point since the project has been collecting the data. The good news is offset by a finding of high rates of abuse in other tobacco products, marijuana, and prescription drugs.
Giving up control, threats, punishment and “logical consequences” (a disguise for punishment) as methods to discipline your teen is NOT about settling for broken agreements and unkept promises. Rather, it opens the door for alternatives that can actually teach your teens to accept responsibility and achieve cooperation.
Parents struggling with challenging adolescent behavior are often asking themselves (and their therapists) the wrong questions.
They ask:
How do I make my teen listen to me?
How do I make my teen understand that “no” is “no”?
How do I get my teen to cooperate and do what I say?
How do I make my teen’s problematic behavior go away?
What would be an appropriate punishment or consequence for this particular behavior or situation?
“How can a boy kiss a girl who wears braces?”
“I have enormous ears…. Is there an operation to whittle them down to size?”
“I am in terrible trouble and I don’t know where to turn. I’m 14 and I’m pregnant.”
“Should I sleep with my boyfriend?” (asked by a 10-year-old girl)
During the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 70s, questions arose as never before about formerly forbidden topics such as sex. Thousands of teenagers and their parents, unable to find answers elsewhere, sent letters (first on paper and later by email) to Elizabeth Winship’s “Ask Beth” column in The Boston Globe, seeking her frank, detailed, sympathetic, and often witty advice on how to deal with delicate topics.
College tuition rates are soaring. More and more students go to college every year, and a bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. After all the efforts invested by parents and high school seniors to find the “perfect” college and after the tens of thousands of dollars invested in attending that college, are undergraduates really learning anything at all? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive “no.”