The following article was published in several Auckland publications recently....
How to Have a Great Relationship with your Teen: Part 1
Do you often wish you had a better relationship with your teen or knew better how to help them? Many parents struggle in their relationship with their teenagers and wish they had that magic key to understanding how they work and how best to help and support them. With the teenage years, come teenage hormones, emotions, tantrums, resistance, and good ol’ self-doubt and self-criticism.
Welcome to the World of Teenagers! Wouldn’t it have been great if they had come with a parent’s instruction manual?! Unfortunately, you, and every other parent there ever has been, have had to learn by experience, and trial and error (and that includes your parents!)
The following tip, and the ones that follow in future editions, are designed to help you improve your relationship with your teen. They are trialed, tested, and proven to create miracles in relationships!
The first thing to know, is that you have done a really great job already! Not many people enter parenthood with any idea about how hard and challenging it is going to be! Not only have you provided them with life, but you have also given everything you’ve got to provide for them, and that really takes something. So give yourselves a pat on the back for everything you have done so far!
Parenting Tip for March
At the heart of it, all kids want, is to know they are loved, valued and appreciated. Communicate with your children in a way that leaves them with no question about that. Tell them. Regularly. When they do something great, no matter how small, tell them.
Be a hound for finding ways to acknowledge them. It isn’t easy being a kid or a teen.
Don’t assume they already know.
Try it out for a month, test it, play with it. And please, call or write to me and let me know how it goes. I love hearing feedback!
Jasmine works as a Personal Development/Life Coach, with both adults and teenagers.
If you would like more ideas, tips, or coaching on your relationship with your child/teen, call Jasmine today on 361 6560 or 021 1522 697 for a complementary 60 minute Coaching Session
Transform and Revitalize Your Life and Have It Be One You Love
How to Have a Great Relationship with your Teen: Part 2
In the first part of this article, I discussed how what your child wants most, is to experience being valued and appreciated by you. My suggestion was to look hard and find lots of little things that they do that you can acknowledge and appreciate them for.
This month’s tip is designed to shed some light on understanding your teen during those ‘difficult moments’! With any luck, it might also provide something around relationships with difficult work-mates or partners too!?
One of the best skills that you can learn in developing a great relationship with your teen (and anyone else in your life), is to begin to really understand human nature and how people work.
This months tip, is based on an old-age fact about human nature.
Now, while it may not come as a shock to you, it might start to make some stuff that they do and say make sense… Are you ready?
Fact
People (including your teen) are primarily interested in themselves- not in you! They are not particularly interested in what you think. People are about 50,000 times more interested in themselves and what they want and think, than they are in you and what you think.
For the most part, we think that what ‘we’ think is more important, more accurate, and typically ‘better’ than what ‘they’ think. The only problem with that the person that we are speaking to is certain that what ‘they’ are thinking is the correct ‘version’ and WE in fact are the ones who have it wrong! (And notice how that never goes well!)
Tip for April
Stop talking. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen for what is important to them. Ask them questions. Listen for what they want you to understand about them. Listen for what they are trying to say, and for what you may not have heard in the past. They have been trying to get you to understand them for a long time. Stop, open your heart to them, and really listen. It is the best gift that you can give them.
Jasmine works as a Personal Development/Life Coach with both adults and teenagers.
If you would like more ideas, tips, or coaching on your relationship with your child/teen, call Jasmine today on 361 6560 or 021 1522 697 for a complementary 60 minute Coaching Session
Transform and Revitalize Your Life and Have It Be One You Love
Absolutely. I work with a vast range of children and teens from high-achieving, gifted 'leadership' kids, to kids referred to me by the Police Youth Aid section.
Please feel free to call me if you have a child or children you would like to discuss. 361 6560 and 021 1522 697.
Thank you for the recent referral. I have been working with 'A' for the past 12 weeks.
She has been achieving fabulous results - her confidence, self esteem, self awareness and ability to communicate effectively with her parents and peers have all improved dramatically.
So thanks again. I really appreciate it. We should get together and have that coffee we spoke of!
wouldn't this sort of communication be better done directly with Barbara rather than via the forum? Good marketing opportunity would be lost, of course, though.
I have the pleasure of having a daughter who was diagnosed as being gifted at the age of 8, now 14 she was having extreame difficulties at mainstream school, and now in a 'wrap around' programme is not coping either.
Any ideas, where are you located?
Apologies it has taken me several months to reply - have only just seen your message!
If you wish to have a chat over the phone regarding ideas and suggestions, please email me at jasmine@jasmineplatt.co.nz, and I will give you my contact details. I am based in Auckland.
