Empowering mothers to have a relationship with their children where they can calmly, clearly and easily communicate and the relationship is up-lifting...although we know at times this can be difficult!
Good parent-child connections don’t spring out of nowhere, any more than good marriages do. Biology gives us a head start, if we weren’t biologically programmed to love our infants the human race would have died out long ago but as kids get older we need to build on that natural bond, or the challenges of modern life can erode it. Luckily, children automatically love their parents. As long as we don't blow that, we can keep the connection strong.
Websites Offering Support:
Teen Mental Health
The question, ‘will we ever understand teens?’ is as puzzling as the question of which came first, chicken or the egg? While we might not ever truly understand teens, we can learn more about what makes them behave the way they do.
You might be wondering if the teen in your life is going through a tough time. Are they just going through those ‘teenage years’? Or is there truly something wrong?
Teen Mental Health has a slideshow crash course in teen development, and to explain how some adolescent behaviours are completely normal and happen as a result of brain changes, which include attention, motivation and risk-taking behaviour.
Hey Sigmund – Where the Science of Psychology Meets the Art of Being
Just one of the many pieces designed to improve our understanding of our kids and how to parent them:
Phew! It’s Normal. An Age by Age Guide for What to Expect From Kids & Teens – And What They Need From Us
“Understanding what our kids are wrestling with and the developmental goals they are working towards will make their more ‘frustrating’ behaviours easier to deal with. Things will run smoother if we can give them the space and support they need to do whatever it is they need to. Of course, none of this means the total surrendering of boundaries around what’s okay and what isn’t in terms of behaviour. What it means is responding with greater wisdom, clarity and with more appropriate consequences. Life just gets easier for everyone when we are able to take things less personally.”
Books on this subject:
Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood
Leading clinical psychologist Lisa Damour identifies the seven key phases marking the journey from girlhood to womanhood, and offers practical advice for those raising teenage girls.
We expect an enormous amount from our teenage girls in a world where they are bombarded with messages about how they should look, behave, succeed. Yet we also speak as though adolescence is a nightmare rollercoaster ride for both parent and child, to be endured rather than enjoyed.
In Untangled, world authority and clinical psychologist Lisa Damour provides an accessible, detailed, comprehensive guide to parenting teenage girls. She believes there is a predictable blueprint for how girls grow; seven easily recognisable ‘strands’ of transition from childhood through adolescence and on to adulthood. Girls naturally develop at different rates, typically on more than one front, and the transition will be unique to every girl.
Each chapter describes a phase, such as ‘contending with adult authority’ and ‘entering the romantic world’, with hints and tips for parents and daughters, and a ‘when to worry’ section. Damour writes sympathetically and clearly, providing a practical and helpful guide for any parent, and for teenage girls too.
The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Proven Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind
In this pioneering, practical book for parents, neuroscientist Daniel J. Siegel and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson explain the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. Different parts of a child’s brain develop at different speeds and understanding these differences can help you turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child’s brain and raise calmer, happier children.
Featuring clear explanations, age-appropriate strategies and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child will help your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives using twelve key strategies, including:
Name It to Tame It: Corral raging right-brain behavior through left-brain storytelling, appealing to the left brain’s affinity for words and reasoning to calm emotional storms and bodily tension.
Engage, Don’t Enrage: Keep your child thinking and listening, instead of purely reacting.
Move It or Lose It: Use physical activities to shift your child’s emotional state.
Let the Clouds of Emotion Roll By: Guide your children when they are stuck on a negative emotion, and help them understand that feelings come and go.
SIFT: Help children pay attention to the Sensations, Images, Feelings, and Thoughts within them so that they can make better decisions and be more flexible.
Connect Through Conflict: Use discord to encourage empathy and greater social success.
Secrets Of The Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect and Communicate with your Baby
Tracy Hogg knows babies. She can calm even the most distressed or difficult infant, because she understands their language. Hence, her clients call her ‘The Baby Whisperer’. Her incredible sensitivity and ability to read infants’ cries, coos and assorted baby noises quickly earned Tracy the admiration and gratitude of high-profile couples, including a host of celebrities.
Kids Don’t Come with a Manual
- Help your children to become happy, confident and self-reliant.
- Step-by-step solutions to common parenting and family challenges including whining, arguing, homework, tantrums and lack of cooperation
- Build a stronger relationship with your children and maintain it as they grow
- Take the blame out of your relationship if you have conflicting parenting styles
- Tailored to children aged 1 to 18
- Based on the latest research in child psychology and neuroscience
Through a series of easy-to-apply tools, insights from the perspective of parents and children, and real-life examples, Carole and Nadim Saad have helped thousands of parents with their parenting programme that equips parents with all the support they need to let go of the guilt and find better alternatives to time-outs, threats, rewards, yelling, giving-in and punishing.
How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk
From curfews and cliques to sex and drugs, bestselling authors Faber and Mazlish give parents and teens the tools they need to communicate and navigate the often stormy years of adolescence. Packed with practical, accessible advice and guidelines,you’ll learn how to:
- Engage cooperation.
- Take appropriate action.
- Avoid lectures.
- Express your feelings and understand each other.
- Work out solutions together.
How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk
The number one practical guide to making your family life less stressful and more rewarding.
In this international bestseller, experts Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish provide effective step by step techniques to help you improve and enrich your relationships with your children.
Learn how to:
- Break a pattern of arguments
- Cope with negative feelings
- Engage your child’s cooperation
- Set clear limits and maintain goodwill
- Express your emotions without being hurtful
- Resolve conflicts peacefully
Growing Happy, Healthy Young Minds
The world is getting harder for young people, and for the people who care about them: parents, teachers, school counsellors and concerned relatives. Generation Next is an organisation that gathers experts in several fields to provide information for professionals – now that expertise is gathered in this volume for everyone else. Each chapter contains easily accessible information, along with more detail and resources for those who wish to find out more.
In this comprehensive volume there will be the latest information on many topics, including:
Helping young people get help for mental health problems
Bullying
Anxiety
Depression
Understanding self-harm
Child sexual abuse
Alcohol and Drugs and how to communicate with young people about them
Teens, Parties and Alcohol: A practical guide to keeping them safe
Eating Disorders
Body Image
Resilience and Positive Psychology
Understanding the Teenage Brain
Online Time Management
Grounded for Life?!: Stop Blowing Your Fuse and Start Communicating with Your Teenager
offers advice on improving communication with teenagers by giving them more responsibility for themselves and by allowing them to learn from their actions through natural consequences.
Get Out of My Life
updated with how to deal with everything from social media to online threats and porn, as well as looking at all the difficult issues of bringing up teenagers, school, sex, drugs and more. But it’s the title of the second chapter, ‘What They Do and Why’ that best captures the book’s spirit and technique, explaining how to translate teenage behaviour into its true, often less complicated meaning. One key mistake, for instance, is getting in no-win conflicts instead of having the wisdom to shut up when shutting up would be the most effective, albeit least satisfying, thing to do. Another is taking offence when the teenager views you, the adult, as idiotic. And there’s advice on what to do when this happens. The message is clear: parenting adolescents is inherently difficult. Don’t judge yourself too harshly!
Conversations That Matter: Talking with Children and Teenagers in Ways That Help
So many children and young people in our society are hurting. Research indicates that more children are depressed, anxious or locked in anger than ever before, with all the problems that creates at home, school and in society at large when emotional pain gets expressed through behaviour or physical symptoms. Many well-intentioned adults really want to help when children suffer because of parental conflict, divorce, family financial worries, loss and bereavement, trauma, bullying, isolation, general growing up issues, and worse. But we often lack the confidence and key skills to know how to help in ways that will genuinely support the child or teenager to properly process what is troubling them, and so reach a more positive place of genuine hope and optimism. Conversations that Matter, the latest book by Margot Sunderland, offers a wealth of tools and techniques to empower parents and practitioners to connect to children and young people through conversation, in life changing ways. Dr Sunderland is widely acknowledged as one of the UK’s leading experts in child counselling and therapy, as well as being a best-selling author of books for parents and professionals and co-founder of both the Institute of Arts in Therapy and Education and The Centre for Child Mental Health, London. Her life’s work has been to find the most effective ways of helping children and young people in distress, underpinning her practice with cutting-edge findings from the fields of affective neuroscience, developmental psychology and the study of trauma. She is also a passionate advocate for the healing power of the creative arts as a means to reach troubled children, when words are not enough. This long-awaited book will give readers a thorough, evidence-based and inspiring grounding in every aspect of talking with children who are hurting, from how to build a trusting relationship with the child, how to deepen the dialogue between you and make it meaningful, when to work directly or indirectly, how to handle the various inevitable challenges that will arise when talking to children about the difficult stuff, and more. Packed with creative possibilities, and illustrated with numerous ‘conversations’, this book can be re-turned to again and again whilst helping children and young people work through any life issue, past or present. The book also contains photocopiable worksheets, and introduces a completely new therapeutic story specifically written to help children who are struggling with trauma and shock. Dr Sunderland’s book will be of benefit to professionals as well as parents, carers and other adults who want the conversations they have with children and teenagers to genuinely help, and to matter.
Beyond Toddlerdom: Keeping five- to twelve- year-olds on the rails
A Survival Guide to Parenting Teens: Talking to Your Kids About Sexting, Drinking, Drugs, and Other Things That Freak You Out
Turn back the clocks! Your sweet child has morphed into a teen. And it’s no longer just a messy bedroom or an attitude with a capital “A” causing concern. There’s a whole new range of issues on the horizon.
What if your daughter texts a naked picture to a “boyfriend”…which he then forwards to the entire class? What if your son becomes increasingly withdrawn…Or your child is being bullied online? Would you know what to do? You could read a whole book on teen psychology–but who has the time! As a parent, what you need most is quick and candid advice for dealing with the issue at hand. After all, if you say the right thing you will open up the lines of communication, but say the wrong thing…and WATCH OUT.
A Survival Guide to Parenting Teens is the solution. Covering a broad range of issues from the terrifying (sex, drinking, drugs, depression) to the frustrating (defiance, laziness, conformity, entitlement), parenting expert Joani Geltman approaches each of the 80 topics with honesty and a dash of humor. Want to understand why teens do what they do? Joani reveals what they are thinking and feeling–and what developmental factors are involved. She then explains how to approach each problem in a way that lets your kid know you “get it” and leads to truly productive conversations.
From lying to sexting to falling grades, the teenage years can be an uphill battle. Here is the no-nonsense guide you need to get your teen talking, listening, and back on track.
Videos on this subject:
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