Provide Feedback to Your Teen

Constructive feedback can light the way for the most positive and rewarding moments in parenting teens. Well-timed, well-worded feedback is a powerful tool in the parental tool box that can help encourage good decisions and shore up wobbly relationships.              The key to helping your teen benefit from positive feedback is to deliver it at the right moment, in the right way, and with the right motives.Here’s my blueprint for constructive feedback:

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver. Proverbs 25:11 (NIV)

Constructive Feedback Is…

Focused - Talk about behavior and choices, not their person. Give feedback regarding their actions, not their character.

Helpful - Positive feedback should be designed to serve the needs of th   Teen Parenting Help continued >>

Guardian Grandparents

I know how special grandchildren are. I have two young granddaughters, and my heart jumps a beat every time I get to see them. The relationship between a grandparent and grandchild is very special.

Grandparents can also have a strong positive influence on their grandchildren. One rather well known example is President Barack Obama, who lived with his grandparents for several years.  More and more I am hearing from grandparents who are raising their grandchildren in their home.  When birth-parents are no longer able to care for a child,  grandparents must sometimes fill the void and do double-duty as guardians, instead of letting their grandchild child enter foster care.   Teen Parenting Help continued >>

Teens Can Learn By Your Mistakes

Do you understand what your teenager is thinking?  Probably not. Maybe you wonder if your teenager is thinking at all!  Though the evidence may suggest otherwise, your teenager is probably thinking too much about the world around them and wondering too much about how they will fit in.

A teenager’s culture can dramatically affect how they think and act.  And today’s culture is far different from when you and I were teenagers.  What’s similar is their need to fit in and to be liked by their peers, which can trump all other needs in their life.  But can you appreciate the unusual pressures they face today, like their wondering if the economy will ever recover and whether or not they’ll get a job, go to college, or have what you had in life?   Teen Parenting Help continued >>

Dealing With Teen Anger

Anger in your teenager can take on many faces.  It can be a seething anger kept quietly below the surface, or a tidal wave unleashed on everyone around them. Anger can manifest itself in a covert refusal to comply with your household rules or wishes, or it can lead your teenager to outwardly undermine their own future or even strike out in violence.

Anger in teenagers usually comes from some unmet need or heart-longing. Such “wants” can be immature and selfish; like wanting more material things. Or the more complicated want for control and independence.  But these can also be a smokescreen for deeper wants, like the want for love, acceptance, or even clearly defined rules to live by.  Or, it can be a want for life to be the way it was before a major event took place, like the breakup of your family, the loss of innocence, or a betrayal. Anger can also come from the want to not be ridiculed or bullied or the want to be “normal” as defined by today’s teen culture.    Teen Parenting Help continued >>

Managing Conflict With Your Teen

When having conflict and struggle with your teen, it’s easy to feel as if the entire family is falling apart.  I’ve found that a better view of handling conflict is to see it as an opportunity to pull your family together, like never before!

Conflict Can Be the Precursor to Positive Change

I believe that relationships that stick together through conflict and hardship become closer relationships. In fact, the teens in our Heartlight program that I remember the most fondly are the ones that caused me to want to pull my hair out when dealing with their constant arguing and bad behavior.   Teen Parenting Help continued >>

Teenage Girls and Inappropriate Behavior

Here’s a question I received this week from an assistant principal of a Christian high school who is struggling with a student displaying inappropriate sexual advances to the boys in her school.  His question is followed by my advice.

Dear Mark,

I am looking for resources, articles, books, counseling ideas for situations that we are dealing with at our school.

For instance, we have a fifteen-year-old young lady who struggles with attraction to boys that ends up in inappropriate behavior.  She asked for help after she was caught kissing boys on the bus and in the band hall.  She says she is overly-interested in male attention.
  Teen Parenting Help continued >>

Step-Family Teen Troubles

Step-parents often experience rejection and anger from the step-child in the teenage years.  After giving so much loving care over the years, it can be more than a parent can bear when the child seemingly turns against them in the teen years. 

In our Heartlight residential program, I daily help step-families in the midst of such turmoil.  Our work begins following a plea for help, similar to the note I received today…

“My husband and I have been married since my daughter was two years old.  Her biological father has had very little to do with her.  My daughter constantly argues with her step-father and will not stop.  He sometimes responds by becoming angry.  I simply cannot handle this any longer. ”

Step-parents can take it very personally when a step-child seemingly rejects them.  It’s hard for them to understand how a child they helped raise could so suddenly become hateful, mean, and angry.   Teen Parenting Help continued >>

Heartlight: Help for Troubled Teens

Parents frantically look for solutions when their teenager displays anger, rebellion, runs away, gets involved in drugs or sex, or otherwise shows self-destructive behavior.  And if things have gotten beyond a parent’s ability to control the child, or if the child is flirting with the law and could face jail time, parents seemingly have nowhere to turn.  That’s why we created Heartlight, 20 years ago.

Since 1988, we’ve helped more than 3,000 troubled teens who have come to live with us at Heartlight, all of whom have struggled immensely.  We’ve shed many tears with their parents, who, at the time, didn’t see the path to make it through the struggle.  These parents were so tired of being called every name in the book, challenged on every thought they’ve ever had, and absolutely depleted because of all the hardship caused in their home by their troubled teen.  Many had lost hope and didn’t think they were going to make it.   Teen Parenting Help continued >>

Stops and Starts for Parenting Teens

Parents who are dealing with an out of control teenager tell me that they just don’t know what to do anymore.  They’ve tried everything they can think of, but things keep getting worse, not better.  When they ask for my advice, we start looking at the situation from a wider angle to set the stage for working with the teenager.  So, I tell them something like this…

If you believe God is in control of all things, then your situation is not hopeless. And, we can help you get through it. But a first step is to look to see if God may be calling you to do something different in your own life.  This isn’t to say that you’ve caused the current problem, but what you do and don’t do now can be a catalyst for it continuing, or getting to the other side of it.

Another way to say it, is that doing something different can involve stopping and starting…   Teen Parenting Help continued >>

Power Parenting

The most powerful thing you can do as a parent is to empower your teenager.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to help the parents of teenagers, whether through our residential program, through books, our blogs, seminars, or our two national radio programs.    Teen Parenting Help continued >>