The next Parent Class To Help Your Teen starts September 27th!
The sharp decline in adolescent mental health over the last 10 years is alarming and should be a concern to everyone, whether or not they have kids. Two key factors that contribute to this are chronic sleep deprivation and technology. The two go hand and hand of course. Below I’m going to share some important…
Parent: “How was your day?” “How are you doing?” “What do you think about…?” Do you want to…?” Teen: “Sure”, “Fine”, “I don’t know” “Huh?”, silent shrug. This aspect of parenting teens can be terribly frustrating. So how do we often deal with our frustration? Let it go until we can’t any more then… yell,…
A comprehensive survey about teens and social media was just released from Common Sense Media. There were a lot of interesting findings. Check out the infographic or the full report if you’re interested. It turns out that most teens believe that social media has a positive effect on them overall. It’s actually not even close. This is consistent with a Pew Research…
How are you feeling about school starting up? If you’re like most of the families I’ve been talking with, you may have felt like the summer has gone relatively smooth and your child has seemed happier and less stressed overall. You may also be concerned about the start of school and how this added stress will impact…
I hope as a starting point we can agree that your child staring at screens past bedtime on school nights is not a good thing. I find that parents are generally in unanimous support of this notion. Yet, sooo many kids are sleeping with their phones nestled next to them like their favorite blanky. If…
Perhaps the hardest thing about parenting teenagers is the amount of uncertainty involved. It can be incredibly difficult to know how your kid is really doing right? If they’re smoking pot, are they just experimenting, socializing or self medicating? Is it really affecting their brain (yes)? How much? Even if they are getting good grades,…
In the last article I wrote, I clarified what adolescence is and isn’t. I also broke down this long transition to adulthood into three phases (which I took from Laurence Steinberg in his book Age of Opportunity, the number one book I recommend for parents with teens). I focused on phase one which is about 12-14. Click…
If parenting adolescents were a sport, many would describe it as full contact without pads (resulting in numerous concussions), fast paced, no clear start or end point with vague rules that often change mid-game without notice. There’s nothing enjoyable about playing a game like this. Over the next few posts I’ll clarify some of this by providing…
A well meaning parent I once worked with tried to motivate her 15 year-old to improve his grades with an incentive system based on screen time. In this system, all A’s would result in unlimited screen time, A’s and B’s would lead to some restrictions, C’s more restrictions, etc. That seems perfectly reasonable on the…
“When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start…You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. But what matters…
