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As parents of teenagers, you can think of many things that cause you worry and anguish. Likely near the top of such a list are their interactions with bad teen friends. Years of effective parenting can unravel with a few bad choices made via the influence of negative peers.
Luckily, you have many practical steps you can take to help guide your teenagers through this time when peer influence is at its strongest.
Building teen trust can be hard at times. Your teenagers are experiencing a transitional stage of life, enjoying more freedom than they had during childhood, and the taste of freedom can be addictive. As the parent, you place a certain amount of trust in your teen, hoping they will not abuse their freedom. But sometimes poor choices are made and that trust is broken.
I understand dealing with the shifting dynamics of trust between parents and teens can be difficult. As I have advised many parents of troubled teens, I have compiled some advice for you parents out there who are struggling with trusting your own teens.
Being a parent is not easy and this is especially true in the age of social media, smart phones and the Internet. More than ever, parents need to monitor their children and what they are looking at online. Plus, there is the added challenge of talking to kids of all ages about gender roles and discipline in the home.
Eric Gati, the founder of CynicalParent.com, has published the results of a new study that touches on the above subjects. Gati says he “learned a lot in this study, like the fact that there are more than a handful of very common fears that parents have about their kids using smartphones and social media, either from too young of an age or for too many hours per day. We also learned that 98% of parents find it important to monitor this, we were amazed at how conscious parents are of the inherent risks of social media”.
If you are the parent of a teenager, you’ve probably been asked to “Leave me alone!” — but only after you drop them off at the mall and buy them the latest iPhone. Yep, get used to being to being despised.
As hard as parenting emotional teenagers can be, staying present and keeping the lines of communication free flowing is crucial. A study by the Council of Economic Advisers found that teens who reported not feeling close to their parents were more likely to smoke, drink, abuse drugs and engage in sexual behavior. Yikes! Guess we better figure this thing out.
One of the keys to parenting teenagers with sanity in tact is humor. Laughing about the struggle will not only bring you much-needed stress relief, it will lighten up the whole situation. And if you are looking for ways to laugh your way through the treacherous teenage years, having a repertoire of comebacks is just the thing. Here are six one-liners that will take your teen off guard and might even elicit a laugh or two.
A small trip in nature is the best way to spend more time with your loved ones. The ideal destination would be a place with a clean air where the whole family can have a lot of fun!
The room to describe different destinations is small, since there are so many wonderful places you can visit. I recommend you to find a place for yourself, get away from the city hustle and bustle. Stop for a moment right there and take a deep breath. Listen to the sounds of nature and enjoy with those you love. Let these small trips become your new ritual.
Remember that it doesn’t have to cost you a lot to have a good fun. For that purpose, I compiled a list of fun and inexpensive day trip ideas for you and your family. Enjoy it!
In hard economic times, deciding to turn away a salary is a huge decision to make. Therefore, deciding to become a stay at home parent can be difficult and scary for any man or woman. There are so many things that come into play and so many things to consider.
So, is it a good idea to become a stay at home parent? How do you decide whether or not it’s right thing for you? Hopefully, this will help.
You are a family, yes, even when it stops feeling that way. The kids are growing up, your partner is buried in work and you are absorbed in your everyday. You not spending time together as a family is something that becomes virtually inevitable. It is down to you now, to put back together what seem like pieces of your family. This is no mean feat and will require some effort from each of you. It is, nevertheless, achievable.
Here are 10 things to do together that will help bridge the gap.
Some teens have experimented with prescription and recreational drugs without becoming addicted or suffering other negative consequences. But, they aren’t the norm. For numerous others, the addiction kicks in after the very first time they use. For these teens, drug use leads to problems with home, school, work, relationships, shame, helplessness and isolation.
As a parent, you’re always worried about teen peer pressure that could lead to using drugs. And, if you find that your teen is using, it’s your parental responsibility to get him the help he needs fast. The best way to help your teen is to become educated about the warning signs and steps to take to guide your teen into living a drug free lifestyle.
I like to walk around our beautiful neighborhood in the morning. It is one of the things that make me happy. I do it to warm up my body and mind, get my creative juices flowing (into the voice recorder on my mobile phone) and be ready for another great day.
About half way through my walk, when I was already going at a good pace and feeling pretty pumped, I saw a young Chinese woman leaving one of the houses and saying goodbye to a young man standing on the doorstep.
Suddenly, the young woman noticed a bus at a stop about 200 meters away. She became visibly uptight, her pitch rose and she looked like she was asking the young man what to do (as I do not speak Chinese, this is all my interpretation).
The man gestured towards the bus and looked like he was urging the woman to run for it and try to catch it. She kept pleading with him until he joined her and they started running toward the bus stop.
By the time they decided to run and crossed the street, I had been half way to the bus and it was still there. There were no passengers in sight, its doors were closed and it kept waiting.
In our time, pressure seems to be everywhere. There is a wealth of information like never before, which means we could find out about anything we wanted, only this takes time, so we look for “drip feeds” that will give us up-to-the-minute updates and we assume our sources do a reasonable job at finding and telling things as they are.
Reality is a bit different, unfortunately. Most of our information feeds are controlled by a fairly small group of huge profit-driven conglomerates, which make their money by selling. To sell well, they need people to “see red”, so they inspire fear via TV news broadcasts, bold newspaper headlines and various other methods.
The result of this is the general view that violent crime is everywhere, that different people cannot live together in harmony and that all too often, the only way to sort things out is to wage war on another ethnic group or country, even at the cost of “friendly” life.
So what can you do?