Welcome to my parenting teens and tweens blog!

Well, parenting certainly doesn’t get easier as the kids grow up. Remember when your kids were little? Remember how exhausting it was to deal with their crying? Their whims? Their upsets when they didn’t get what they wanted? I remember thinking about how much easier it would be when they weren’t toddlers anymore or when I didn’t have to chase them around and tend to their every physical need. People who would see me somewhere struggling with 5 little kids used to always say to me “Little kids, little problems.”. Well, they never had a 3 year old who would only use public toilets with white seats (!). (I still don’t know what that one was all about). But now that my kids are older and my house is filled with tweens and teens it is not hard to see how parenting changes over time and how we as parents must change too.

The middle school and high school years present a unique challenge. Our kids have changed and so, we as their mentors and teachers and nurturers have to change right along with them - and that’s not always easy. It’s not easy to know what they need from us, and it’s not always easy to deliver it when we do. When kids are younger, their demands are more about physical maintenance – feeding, cleaning, playing. As they get older, they require something deeper from us – character development, morality, guidance. As challenging as it can be to deliver on these things, I know that the most fun I have ever had has been in playing with my kids and the most satisfaction has come from the moments when I manage to be the parent that they each need me to be for them.

Parenting offers perhaps one of the greatest and most overlooked opportunities for personal satisfaction and fulfillment in life. Unfortunately, is can also be the most frustrating and demanding job that you’ve ever had that you can’t ever leave! As a coach, my training is all about helping people experience fulfillment in their lives. I have spent the past three years developing programmes to help parents reach their potential and to help tweens and teens discover and strive toward theirs. This blog is place for me to share what I have learned, as I am learning it through my own parenting experience and through my experience of coaching  tweens, teens and parents in my one-on-one coaching sessions and my group classes. I hope that you will take the time to post responses and your own experiences and opinions, and I hope that what I write will be in some way useful to you in your parenting journey.

Well, it’s another new year and another chance for a new beginning. As we go from an old year to a new one, it is natural to reflect upon ourselves and upon our lives and make plans for the future. Many of us are in the habit of making New Year’s Resolutions and these can often include things like how we will treat and care for our bodies, our finances and even our spirituality. Most of us identify bad habits that we would like to let go and good habits that we would like to begin.

Even though sticking to those resolutions can be challenging, the process of going through how things have been working in your life, evaluating that and making decisions about changes for the future is as healthy a life exercise as I can think of.  As you go through all of the areas of your life where you would like to make changes, I encourage you to take a moment out to consider your parenting life as well.

Parenting is hard to look at and hard to really see apart from the rest of our lives. It is so deeply ingrained in our day to day life, and into who we are, that it can sometimes be hard to look at as a separate, distinct activity that we do each and every day. For many of us, while we consider the role of “Mother” or “Father” as the most important role that we will play in our lifetimes, we often fail to take the time out to seriously evaluate how well we have been playing that role, and to make changes and improvements when necessary. The New Year is always a great time for self reflection and evaluation, and so, as you consider this new year and all of the changes that you would like to be making in your life, here are some questions to consider about your parenting habits.  

What are your best parenting habits? What bad ones do you need to let go?

Have you parented the way you wanted to last year? What would you like to change?

Is your relationship with your children as fulfilling as you would like it to be? What one thing could you do to improve that?

While identifying problem areas is certainly easier than finding solutions for them, it is an important starting place. If you are struggling with a troubling habit – your own or your child’s, I want to help you with it. Feel free to email me with any of your struggles and I will do the best I can to help you come up with a solution. In the coming year, I hope to answer many questions and delve into as many parenting habits as possible to help you make 2010 your best parenting year yet!

When You Are Stuck In “The Parenting Hole”

Have you ever gotten to the point where you wonder if it was all worth it? Where your frustration and stress and hopelessness reach the point where you look at the child you are working so hard to raise, and wonder if you can do it? Where you are practically ready to wash your hands of them or run away from home and join the circus? Where you feel like the whole darned thing has been a complete waste of time and that nothing you do, or have ever done, or ever will do, will make the slightest difference, or have the slightest impact on who they become?

I call that place “The parenting hole”, and if you’ve ever been there, you know how scary it can be. It is dark, it is lonely and it is terrifying.

Parenting, once you’re in it, simply isn’t optional. I have coached married couples considering divorce, and the truth is, that your spouse is optional – you can leave if you really really want to. But you cannot leave your kids. Somehow or another, you have to find a way to make it work; to find a place of living peacefully and respectfully at least until they are 18.

When you are in “The parenting hole” it is hard to find the strength within yourself to create that peace, to seek and find a way to live in that place of mutual respect. It is hard to find your better self and it can even be hard to find your love. So what do you do then?

When all of your usual parental fallbacks fail you or you can’t seem to find your way to them, there is that little voice of faith that calls out to us. Becoming a parent is a leap of faith. We embark on the whole thing not really knowing what we are doing or how we will learn what we need to know. We feel  that we have something to share, something to offer and love to give to another human being. And we have faith that if we are guided by that love, that somehow or other, it will be enough, we will be enough, to raise that child to become a decent person.

When you are in “The parenting hole” it is hard to remember your faith. And, the thing about faith is that it is a long term proposition, a big picture way of thinking. In a science experiment, you do x and expect y as a result. In parenting and in faith, you do x, y, z throw in some a, b, & c and then you wait. You hope, you try, you tweek things, learn things, try some new things. You work on yourself, your child, your spirit, your knowledge, your weaknesses. You do it all. But result y doesn’t necessarily come right away. You have to wait to see how it will all turn out.

My mother used to tell me that she did the best she could with us kids, and she knew that she had made mistakes with us. But, she told me, everything she did, she did with love and she had always believed that the love would make up for the mistakes; that love was bigger and stronger than all of the parenting techniques in the world.

So if you are in “The parenting hole” right now, I wish you faith and I wish you a long term focus. Keep trying, keep working on yourself and on your child and remember to look at your journey in the grander scheme of things.  Your child may not be perfect. He may not even be nice to be around right now. You may not be the perfect parent. But in the long run, in the big picture, just by reading this article and struggling and trying and learning you are bringing them that much closer to becoming the adult you hope them to be.  Love and faith may be airy fairy concepts and they may not be enough to raise a child but they may be just what you need to fuel you on when the going gets tough. So, find your love, and find your faith and let them be your ladder out of  “The parenting hole”.

If your house is like mine, it is right about this time in the new school year that it really starts to hit. The first few weeks are still la la land. We are still easing into the new schedules and getting used to the new school year.  The loosey goosey schedule of the summer continues to reign but the promise of “things will be different this year” still rings in our ears. We promised ourselves that this year we will be more organized, there will be assigned chores, there will be set homework times, less TV & computer time, more exercise, easier morning routines, less yelling and fighting. But here we are, it’s the first week of October – which is when we usually start to feel it – and we’re just slipping right back into our old routines. You know what I’m talking about. The messy rooms. The homework arguments. The morning routine that leaves everyone late, frazzled and angry each day. There is the sense of being out of control all the time and the feeling that you are failing somehow. The kids feel it too. Whether they will admit it to you or not, school matters to our kids and they began the school year with promises & resolutions of their own. As the school work starts to pile on, they notice themselves doing the same things that they have done in the past. In short, it begins to dawn on everyone in your household that it’s time to hunker down, get organized and make things happen.

But, how do you do that?  How can you make good on those new school year promises and resolutions and make them a reality once and for all? How do you get your kids to buy into the whole thing and actually participate in these resolutions?

Here are some tips:

1. Decide : It sounds simplistic, but the very first step is that you, as the parent, as the leader, must decide that things will in fact be different this year and that you will do what’s necessary to make that happen. Change happens in an instant and that instant is when you decide that not another day will go by without change happening. Are you there yet? You may want to ask yourself – what is this disorganization costing me? What does it cost my kids? What would a more smoothly run home and schedule do for them? For me?
2. Invite participation: you don’t have to do this by yourself and you don’t have to come up with all the answers by yourself. Invite the members of your family to provide their input and enlist their assistance in figuring out a solution to whatever issues you are struggling with. If it is homework time ask your kids – “How can we solve some of our homework time issues? How can we make homework time run more smoothly and efficiently?” I encourage you to consider the family meeting as an excellent way to achieve this. (Email me and ask for my short report “Running The Family Meeting & Setting The Family Rules” for some ideas on how to do this)
3. Reward yourself and your whole family when you do well. So often we notice and punish ourselves and our kids for poor behaviour and poor results but forget to reward the good stuff. Notice yourselves doing well and reward that – whether that means taking everyone out for an ice cream after one smoothly running week or simply commenting on how well you are all doing, take the time to notice and reward your collective successes.
4. Keep at it – this stuff is hard. If it were easy you would have done it long ago. So keep trying, keep tweaking and keep going – you can do it!

Research abounds on the merits and benefits of having clearly set, reasonable, measurable and attainable goals on overall success. We all know this and set goals intuitively, as do our children. The fall is a great opportunity for kids as they venture back to school with virtually, a clean slate. The new school year is a chance to improve grades, make new friends, change behaviours that didn’t work well in the past, have new relationships with new teachers, and enrich existing friendships. Most tweens and teens head back to the start of a new year with worries about friendships and heavier workloads, as well as a strong desire to improve themselves both in school and beyond. They want to do well in sports, music and other hobbies as well as improve their academic performance. School matters. It matters to them.

 So how can we as parents help our young teens and pre-teens prepare themselves to actually have a great year? In my “Coach Your Kid” Teleclasses and workshops I teach parents  the skills that professional coaches use with clients and how to apply these to coach their own tweens and teens to success.

Here are some simplified steps that you can try to help your child focus on what they want and how they might go about getting it this year.

1. WHAT? : What do they want? Help them to get clear about what are they shooting for. What would need to happen over the course of this year for them to feel like the year was a huge win? Getting clear also means getting specific. Kids tend to be pretty vague about what they want and use language and parameters that are either too general, such as “do better in school” or too unrealistic – “get all A+’s”. Help them articulate what they want for themselves.

 2. WHY?: Why do they want that? What’s important about that to them? Help your child become clear about why s/he wants the success. By focusing on the why, you help them to become clear about what is motivating them. When they are clear about why they want it, they can better keep themselves on track later on when the going gets tough. It’s easy to want an A in math, but it’s hard to do the work it takes to get that A. You can help them become more clear by simply asking them questions. Like “What’s important about that for you?” Be really curious. When I have worked one on one with the young people from my set2succeed programme, I have frequently found that school marks had a lot to do with pleasing parents, having better self esteem and even in earning the respect of friends. So be curious. What’s behind the desire to get an A in math?

 3. HOW?: Help them to develop a strategy – Once they are clear about what they are shooting for, and why they want it, help them figure out a way to get there. If they are going for the basketball team, what do they need to do to now to help ensure that they make the cut? If it is an A in math, what will they need to do to make that happen? What will it look like? This may be as simple as studying math for 15 minutes each day, or it may be getting a tutor once per week. Whatever it is, allow your pre-teen/teen to come up with it on his/her own. You will be surprised by their ingenuity. 

4. WHAT IF?: Develop a contingency plan. Plans are great, but what happens when schedules and circumstances change? Tweens and Teens are great at coming up with a plan for themselves, but often have difficulty anticipating and planning for the things that will get in the way. When these barriers do come up, without a contingency plan in place, many kids simply abandon their goal because they don’t know how to change their original plan to make it fit with their lives. Kids are more likely to stick with a plan if they have anticipated the barriers and have created a contingency plan. You can really help them by pointing out areas in their plan that you know won’t work. If for example they plan to get to their homework done by 4:15 each day, and you know that they have hockey at 4:00 three days a week, without shutting them down, remind them of the obstacles and ask them how they might deal with that. What could they do on hockey nights? How could they work that obstacle into their plan so that they can stay true to their goal? You can also remind them of competing interests like playing with friends after school, or a favorite tv programme that comes on at 4:00. How will they deal with these things? How can they set themselves up to succeed? 

 5. IF, THEN?: Develop a reward system that is based on behaviour not results. Your son/daughter is learning how to direct his/her intention toward something that is important. Whether the desired end result is attained or not, teach them to reward themselves for the sustained effort along the way. This accomplishes a few things. For one, it rewards the behaviour, not the result thereby teaching them that sustained and focused effort is even more important that the A. It also teaches them a powerful way to keep themselves motivated even when they may not be seeing results yet. Some goals take a while to be realized. It may take 5 months of consistent studying before better marks show up. If there is no reward for daily math study along the way, it will be very hard to stay motivated to stick with the plan. A way of structuring a reward system can be something like ” IF I stick to my study schedule for 2 weeks straight, THEN I will get to stay up late to watch a favorite programme” or play video games for half an hour or go out for an ice cream cone or have a friend sleep over. The list is endless, and should be small, have little or no financial investment, be easily delivered and have the child focused on rewarding him/herself rather than being rewarded by you. This last one is the most important. You, as the parent need to have almost nothing to do with the reward structure. 

6. BY WHEN?: Help your child come up with timeline and a method for evaluating their plan. How long will they give it before they decide whether the plan worked or failed? How much time do they think it will take to reach the goal?

Setting goals and creating plans to reach them is one of the most valuable life skills that you can teach your children. Gaining control over themselves and directing their energies and actions toward things that are really important ultimately amounts to the difference between success and failure. If you would like to learn more about coaching your child to success, please take a moment to visit my site and learn more about the programmes that are available for kids and parents.

It goes something like this: “I failed the exam for sure and now I’ll never go to university and I’ll be a failure for the rest of my life!” “My friend didn’t call me back because she is dumping me. I have no friends left!” “My teacher wants to talk to me about my essay because she hates me and my work. I’ll never get a good grade in her class!”

All of these statements are things that any tween or teen might say. Parents are often inclined to dismiss it as exaggeration or melodrama or hormones but it actually points to a style of thinking that can very much get in the way of your child’s happiness and success in life. Psychologists call this type of “worst case scenario” approach to explaining unknown or feared events “Catastrophic Thinking”.  In it, the individual takes an unknown and explains it in terms of the worst possible outcome. Whether it is to try out how they may need to respond  or it is to lower expectations in order to ward off disappointment,  catastrophic  thinking  is highly associated with depression and often leads to self defeating behaviours and decisions.

Think about each of the statements in the first paragraph. Just saying each one out loud produces a strong emotional reaction – things like hopelessness, fear, anger, despondence, panic, anxiety. The truth about all of these scenarios is that these are possible explanations or predictions about why something happened or may happen in the future. Your tween or teen doesn’t know if he’s failed the exam until he gets his result back. She doesn’t know why the friend hasn’t called her back until she asks her. He doesn’t know why the teacher wants to talk to him until he has spoken to her. Yet in each of the catastrophic explanations or predictions despite the lack of evidence, highly negative feelings are produced as if the worst case scenario had actually happened. As anyone who has attended my parenting workshops or my Set2succeed workshops for kids has heard me say over and over again – events don’t produce feelings. Events occur, we have thoughts about them which then produce feelings and we take actions based on our feelings. So when our kids catastrophize, their actions will be based on those highly negative feelings produced by their thoughts, even though their thoughts have not been substantiated and may not even be true.  Obviously the actions that arise from feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, panic and anxiety are not going to be productive ones.

So, how can we help our kids learn a better way of thinking about and explaining or predicting outcomes to events?

1. Understanding – help your child understand the whole concept of events leading to thoughts and thoughts creating feelings and feelings influencing decisions.

 2. Awareness – Bring their catastrophic statements to their attention – Let them know when you hear them making these kinds of statements and help them to experience their feelings when they do. Ask them – “How do you feel when you say that?” They may answer with things like – pathetic, like a loser etc. Then ask them “What does that make you want to do about the situation?” they may say things like- nothing, give up etc.

3. “Is that really true?” Teach them to ask themselves if their catastrophic thought has any basis in reality. Is it really true that your friend hasn’t called back because she is dumping you?

4. “What else might be true?” – Teach them to then search for alternative explanations – Why else might your friend not call you back?

By regularly repeating these exercises your child can learn a more optimistic explanatory style which is highly correlated with greater success in work and life and has even been shown to increase health and longevity.

As adults we have been conditioned by popular media, by our kids and by memories of our own youth to think that our kids friends are vital to their happiness and enjoyment of life. For many kids and their parents, the thought of having time alone with just their family and no friends tagging along sounds like a nightmare. The funny thing though is that although friendships, in the long run and in the grander scheme of things, are really important at this age, time away from them is important too.

In the middleschool and early teen years our kids are working hard to figure out who they are and who they want to be. As much as they enjoy and love their friends, you may have noticed that they behave differently with them than they do when alone with your family. The family vacation and even the family day trip or outing is a vital time for families to reconnect and when done in the absence of friends, provides your child the opportunity to be your kid again – free from the fetters and pressures of being a “pre-teen” or a “teen”. Free to do the activities that they enjoy without embarrassment or pressure. Free to be a kid again.

With the days of summer waning, I hope that you will find the time to take a day or two away to be alone with your family and connect with your kids. As important as peers are to them, you are still more important. As much as they want to spend time with their friends, they need to spend time with you.

On Being the “Good” Child, the “Bad” child and other labels…..

Do you have labels for your kids? Even secret ones, like “This one is the easy one” or “This one is the smart one”?  We all have ways that we define and label our kids, and naturally so. It is how we as human beings make sense of our worlds. Given that we are the ones working with our kids on a daily basis to guide and mould their characters, it is understandable that we have expectations about how they will react to things, how they will behave in certain situations and how they will be with different people. But are our labels correct, and what is their impact on our kids?

Recently I have been reminded of an interesting little theory about child development and behaviour that goes back to psych 101 class. It is called the Pygmalion Effect- or self fulfilling prophecy. The theory posits that when we have a specific expectation about how a child will perform we communicate that to the child in subtle and obvious ways and thus bring about the exact behaviour that we expected them to exhibit. Whether it is academic performance, behaviour, or even their emotional response to things, we impact the child with our expectation of how and what they will do. The theory goes on to say that children with poor expectancies internalize their negative label and perform at a lower level and those with more positive labels succeed accordingly.

 Over the past 2 weeks I have had the unusual experience of having conducted an accidental experiment with one of my kids. As a joke regarding her other siblings having gone away during the summer, I hugged and kissed my 14 year old and told her that she was the “good” child because she had stayed home with her Mommy. It began as a joke. Every time I was missing her siblings I would tell her that she is the “good” child, and every time I reprimanded her for something, she would remind me that I couldn’t find fault with her because she was in fact, the “good” child. It was just a joke originally, and yet, I watched it have a huge impact on her. I saw her revel in the notion of herself as being the “good” one and I realized that she didn’t and hadn’t thought of herself that way before. Suddenly, she became more talkative, more willing to spend time with her family, less surly and moody, nicer to her siblings.

Had I labelled her a bad child? Had she labelled herself? Had the new label been internalized?

All I know for sure is that trying on a new, more positive label for a while had a very positive effect on her and allowed her to try it on herself and define herself in a new and more positive way. There is something very empowering in feeling like we are ahead of the race that makes us want to keep pushing through and something so disheartening and hopeless when we feel like we are behind everyone else that makes us just want to give up. Maybe my daughter felt like she was finally at the front of the race for a change and that spurred her on to newer and better feelings and therefore behaviours. With summer being a break from school expectations and pressures, it is a great time to try this out with your kids too. Here are some suggestions:

1. Notice- What labels do you have for your child already? Are they positive or negative? Are they accurate and fair? Does it help you or your child to define them this way?

2. Experiment- Try a different label on for your child – even if it is hard for you to buy it at first, try having a different way of defining them. For example – if your current label is “He is the one that never listens” try on something like “He’s the helpful one”. Find what’s true about that label for him right now and watch to see the impact that the new label has on him. You may be surprised by how that label becomes more and more true the longer you both stick with it.

It’s a funny thing that happens to us as our kids begin to return home from their overnight camp experience. If you are like me, you just can’t wait to hug and squish them and have them back and hear about their whole experience while away from you. The funny thing that happens though is that after their tales of “this funny thing that happened” and “these great friends who did this” are over, I always have the vague sensation of dissatisfaction with what they are telling me. It’s like I want to know something more or something different than what they are saying. There comes a point in the whole returning home process that often leaves me not knowing what to talk about or what to ask them, and yet there is something, some burning interest that I have – So what is it that I want to know?

Faced with this scenario the other day I was finally able to answer this question for myself.  As my 12 year old went on and on about the camp play, and her swimming lessons and her new friends, I had to pause and marvel at her. I realized that the thing that I really wanted to know about her time away was not so much about what she did there, but more about how she managed to be so far away, without siblings or friends from home and to still have a great time. What did she have to overcome to do that? How did she have to manage herself? I mean, the truth is that most adults I know wouldn’t be willing or able to leave the comforts of home – friends, family – knowing nothing about the place where they are going or the people that they will be with. Most adults wouldn’t be willing to make a virtually irrevocable 4 week commitment, sight unseen, on the promise of “you’ll have fun”, and yet here is this little girl coming home from just such an adventure.  So the thing that I really want to know about when my kids come home from camp has more to do with who they had to be when they were at camp and how does that enrich their lives? What do they take from the experience? What do they learn about themselves?

Want to know the best part of figuring that out? I asked her, and she told me. Just like that. So simple. I asked her what she learned about herself from her whole camp experience and much to my surprise, she was very willing and very able to answer me. What’s more, it was good for her to take a moment out to process through her experience, to think about what she had learned and to articulate it helped her to acknowledge her accomplishments and understand herself and her experience better. I encourage you to try it. To get you started, here are some questions that you might like to ask:

1. What did you learn about yourself from your whole camp experience?
2. How did you handle problems differently when you were away compared to when you are at home? How could that help you deal with problems at home now?
3. How did you manage yourself when you felt homesick? How could that help you manage problems in your regular life?

You will be amazed by how much conversation this can bring and how much you both will learn about who he or she is becoming.

Have you ever been there?

You know that deep dark parenting place where you suddenly look at your pre-teen or your teen and suspect that nothing you’re saying or maybe have ever said is getting through?

There are so many challenges that we face as parents of 11-15 year olds. I try to address these in my posts and in my articles and in my teleclasses for parents. This week, as I endeavoured to coach one of my own children I was reminded that the greatest challenge of parenting the pre-teen and teens in our lives is that challenge of getting through to them.

What is getting through? It is when we talk to them and they respond back. When we share our opinions, values and ideas with them and they respond in some way to us to show that we are in conversation with them. It doesn’t mean that they necessarily agree with us or that they will comply with what we’ve said. It is more a sense that they are in some sort of communication with us.

So, how do we get them to do that? How do we get the eye rolling to stop? The silence? The attitude to drop long enough for us to have an impact on them.

Here are my words of advice:

1. Keep at it- Your kids are listening to you even though they may not give you the satisfaction of showing it. This means that even when they are rolling their eyes and saying “Oh mother!!” on some level you are getting through to them. So keep trying. Keep sharing your opinions, values and beliefs, and don’t be scared off by the bravado of your “too cool” tween/teen. They are hearing you!

2. Try different ways of getting through – different kids respond to different ways of getting in. Some kids respond to the drama of the “sit down” where you sit them down for the serious talk with both parents. Some kids are the opposite and respond better to the casual conversation in the car on the way somewhere. Some kids need to be taken out of their regular environment and respond best when they are out somewhere with you, maybe over a hot chocolate or out for lunch. If you have been trying to talk to your child always in the same manner, try different locations and different levels of intensity. The face to face confrontational intensity of the “sit down” may freak your child out and make them defensive. If you move the same conversation to the casualness of the car, you may have greater success in getting them to open up to you and to hear you.

3. Don’t forget your feelings – You have feelings too. Don’t be afraid to share how you feel when your child dismisses you or doesn’t talk to you. It is important for our kids to remember that we are actual people with actual feelings that get hurt when we are spoken to in a rude or dismissive way. Your child is learning at all times about relationships from you. Many times when parents feel hurt by their child’s behaviour they don’t talk about their own hurt feelings and instead focus on behavioural issues like “rudeness” or “yelling”. It is important for your child to see and understand that their behaviour towards you has an impact on how you feel, no differently than it might if they spoke to their friends that way.

My real learning this week is that it is never hopeless and no matter how many indications there are to the contrary, just when you think you will never get through, that you never have gotten through and that the whole prospect of raising an attitude ridden teenager is impossible, lo and behold! You get through!!

Peer pressure.

Again that oh so familiar term that applies to the social pressure that is exerted, particularly on our young people, to conform to the values of their age group. We know how it is supposed to work. It is supposed to be that when the members of a peer group – friends, classmates etc, – are doing something, they will pressure other kids to do the same thing. Usually it will not be an overt pressure like “Do this or you’re not cool”. More often it is the subtle pressure that an individual kid feels to fit in and to be a part of the fun that the rest of the group is having. Either way, as parents I think that we are conditioned to think that if our kids are around other kids who are into drinking or drugs, that our kids will feel the temptation to also get into those kinds of things. It’s simple math right? Friends doing bad stuff + our kid = Our kid doing bad stuff.  But is it right?

Recently I had the experience of picking up my son from a grade 9 end of year party. Although the parents were home for this party, alcohol was openly served and many kids were drunk to the point of vomiting. I assume that the parents subscribe to the ever popular belief of many irresponsible parents who mask the inability to say “NO” with the “They’re going to do it anyways, so I’d rather they do it under my roof” philosophy. My opinion of this aside, the entire episode and what I gleaned from my son and his friends afterwards, made for fascinating parental learning that I’ll share with you.

So, my son didn’t drink. Several of his friends didn’t drink. Some of his friends did. I talked to them for a while about who did and who didn’t and I became very curious. Why didn’t he join in? Why didn’t his friends join in? It was there. Everybody else was doing it. It wasn’t even hidden or hard to get or even frowned upon where he was, so why didn’t he do it?  As it turns out, the truth that I knew myself at 15, but have forgotten in the haze of parent/adulthood, is that every kid has a line.  My son reminded me that even at the tender age of 14 or 15 kids have a line that they personally will not cross. Some kids (and adults) have very clearly cut lines and some kids (and adults) have lines that move and sway with the circumstances in which they find themselves. So the battle against peer pressure it appears lies not in simply keeping our kids away from bad influences (which by the way is not a bad idea) but more importantly lies in strengthening and solidifying that line so that when they find themselves surrounded by those influences, they will be able to resist them. 

So of course the million dollar question – How do we strengthen their line in the sand? Their resolve and their confidence to follow through? Here are some steps:

1. Formulation – help your child formulate his own ideas about drinking, drugs, sex, smoking etc. Help him draw upon his own set of values and yours and your family’s to develop a set of beliefs about these activities that are his own. Simply parroting your  set of beliefs will not be powerful enough to help him resist the temptations and peer pressure that he will undoubtedly face. By using the coaching skills of powerful questioning, being curious and deep listening (which I teach in all of my “Coach your Kid” teleclasses) you can really help your child become familiar with his own set of beliefs about these things. Challenge him or her – especially if the beliefs run contrary to your own.

2. Articulation – help your child to clearly articulate what her beliefs about drinking, drugs, sex, stealing, smoking etc. are. When a belief can be clearly articulated, a person is that much more likely to be able to make a decision that is in accordance with their beliefs in the moment.  Articulation is a way of making one’s beliefs accessible in the moment. A person is much less likely to violate a clearly understood and spoken belief than she is a fuzzy one. Keep using the coaching skills- Be curious.  Ask them powerful questions. Really listen.  What’s important about this belief? What does it say about a person who holds this kind of belief?

3. Argumentation/substantiation- help your child formulate and try out arguments that support his/her articulated belief. By having clearly formulated and accesible reasons  for what they beleive, kids are better equiped to handle temptations and stick with their original belief regardless of the pressure they may feel to do otherwise. Help them develop these arguments by offering them a variety of pieces of information. Different arguments will resonate with different kids. For example, “Smoking will mess up my lungs and ruin my performance” will make sense to the athletic kid. The socially conscious kid may get more out of “Doing drugs supports illegal violent gangs in my city and I don’t want to be a part of that”.

4. Start early – the time to begin these conversations is not when they are 15 years old the morning after the big drinking party. The time to begin helping your child formulate, articulate and substatiate their beliefs about drinking, drugs, sex, smoking etc. is better done when they are too young to face such issues. Start talking when they are entering the middleschool years. Most kids by grade 6 are able to start having these kinds of conversations and the conversations should never stop.

Keep coaching your child. The best predictor of a good solid secure line in the sand is the relationship that your tween and teen has with you.