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Setting Limits with your Strong-Willed Teen: Eliminating Conflict by Establishing Clear, Firm, and Respectful Boundaries - Softcover

Mackenzie, Robert J.

 
9780804138765: Setting Limits with your Strong-Willed Teen: Eliminating Conflict by Establishing Clear, Firm, and Respectful Boundaries
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804138761 ISBN 13: 9780804138765
Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

From the bestselling Setting Limits series comes an invaluable guide for parents of strong-willed teenagers that explains how to effectively enforce discipline, encourage healthy growth, and create rewarding relationships with teens.

Parenting modern teenagers is an enormous challenge. Teens have always been prone to rebellion and limit-testing. But in today's world of Twitter and Facebook, enormous academic and extracurricular pressure, and corrosive media influence, raising a teen to be well-adjusted, respectful, and mature enough to make good decisions is tougher than ever. Fortunately, Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Teen offers powerful, time-tested tools for moving beyond traditional methods that wear parents down while getting nowhere, and zeroing in on what really works so parents can use their energy in more efficient and productive ways. By understanding how to draw clear limits without lapsing into punishment or permissiveness, parents will be able to foster good judgment, build stronger bridges of communication and mutual respect, and end destructive power struggles. This is an invaluable resource for anyone wondering how to effectively build a positive, respectful, and rewarding relationship with their teen.

In Setting Limits With Your Strong-Willed Teen, you will learn how to:

-Understand your Strong-Willed Teen
-Set firm and meaningful limits that your teen will respect
-Motivate your teen to cooperate and communicate respectfully
-Develop your own patience and a better tolerance for natural changes
-Hold your teen accountable with instructive natural and logical consequences
-Determine your teen's readiness for new freedoms and privileges
-Teach your teen valuable lessons about character and trust
· And much more!

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ROBERT J. MACKENZIE, EdD, is an educational psychologist and family therapist who founded the Setting Limits program. He is the author of Setting Limits and Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER 1

Who Is This Strong-Willed Teen?

Does your teenager challenge your rules and authority on a regular basis? Do you feel frustrated and worn down by the constant testing, arguments, and power struggles? Does your teen's behavior seem so extreme that you question if it's normal? If so, you're not alone. Consider the following.

Fourteen-year-old Corey is a workout! He doesn't hit the pillow on school nights until after 1 a.m. and gets up twenty minutes late each morning. The time would be later if his mother didn't prod him every five minutes after his alarm goes off. Corey usually functions on five to six hours of sleep. No wonder he's getting D's in two classes, his father thinks to himself. He's running on empty.

When Corey arrives at the breakfast table, he snarls at his two sisters, grumbles in his father's direction, then turns up his nose at the meal his mother prepared and complains that there is never anything good to eat. This is not a battle I want to fight, his mother says to herself as she prepares Corey his own special meal. She tells her husband that she worries about Corey's nutrition, but what she really worries about is all the grief Corey will dish out if he doesn't get his own way.

"I'm out of here," says Corey, as he gulps down his last bite and heads for the door.

"Wait a minute," says his mother. "You forgot to clear your dishes."

"I'll do it when I get home!" he shouts as the door shuts. Her husband thinks she's too soft on Corey, and so do his two sisters.

"It's not fair!" they complain in chorus. "He never has to do his chores."

By the time Corey leaves the house in the morning, his mother is ready for a nap, but she knows this is only the beginning. Round two begins in the afternoon, when Corey returns from school and the homework battles begin. She wonders how long she can take it.

Sixteen-year-old Kristal is sweet and cooperative one moment, angry and defiant the next. Little things set her off--unexpected changes, departures from routine, a misplaced hairbrush, a puzzled look from her parents, or simply not getting her own way. Emotional storms and meltdowns are common.

"Living with Kristal is like riding an emotional roller coaster," says her mother. "It's exhausting!" Kristal's parents alternate between punishing and giving in, depending upon how volatile Kristal appears or how worn down they feel; but nothing seems to make any difference. They wonder if Kristal's behavior is normal and question whether they did something to cause her to behave this way.

Thirteen-year-old Alex has a short fuse and often acts before he thinks. When things don't go his way at home, school, or in the neighborhood, Alex gets loud, uses profanity, calls names, threatens, and sometimes hits others. He's been suspended from school three times for fighting and talking disrespectfully to his teachers. It's only October.

"When we ask him why he behaves this way, Alex says he doesn't know," says his mother. "How can he not know?"

"It's too bad they don't spank kids at school anymore," Alex's father laments. "When Alex acts like that at home, we give him an earful, then we whip his ass. He has to learn. We've threatened to take away his TV, Internet, and cell phone privileges for the rest of the year if he's suspended again."

Lynn, age fifteen, is destined to be a great trial lawyer. She's bright, intense, and very persistent. Lynn will argue with anyone about anything if she thinks there's a chance of getting things to work out her way. Sometimes she just argues for the sport of it. In fact, Lynn has been known to change her position midway through an argument and argue the opposite position even more tenaciously. She's willing to use any tactic to win her case--anger, drama, rudeness, even dishonesty.

"I never would have imagined talking to adults the way Lynn talks to us," her father complains. "We reason with her every way we know, but everything turns into a heated argument."

Do any of these teens sound familiar? If your son or daughter resembles one of these, you're not alone. I see many teens each year that parents and teachers describe as challenging, difficult, spirited, stubborn, hell-raising, defiant, or just plain impossible. Although no single term adequately describes all, or even most, of the teens I see, the one that comes closest is "strong-willed." These are normal teens with extreme behavior. They are harder to raise, difficult to discipline, and at greater risk for behavior problems at home, at school, and in the community.

Strong-willed teens are not part of some conspiracy to make life difficult for others. They just do what strong-willed teens do. They test harder and more often, resist longer, protest louder, use more drama, take more risks, and carry things further than most of us would imagine. They are the supercharged versions of normal teens, the "movers" and "shakers" of the teen world who bring out strong reactions in others.

Teachers and principals know them as the 10 percent that cause 90 percent of school discipline problems. Parents know them as their biggest challenges. I know them affectionately as "my kids" because I spend a lot of my time with them. Yes, I'm the proud parent of a strong-willed son. My youngest son, Ian, is a delight, but during his childhood and teenage years, he also was a workout. He wasn't the least bit impressed by the fact that I write books on this subject. At home, I got no breaks or professional immunity. Ian pushed hard against my rules and authority. At times, I wondered whether his behavior was normal, especially when he became a teen.

Do you sometimes question whether your teen's behavior is normal? Perhaps you worry that you've done something to cause your teen to behave this way. If so, you'll be relieved to know that the problem, in most cases, is not parents. Most are doing the best they can with the information and guidance tools in their toolkits. The problem is not the teen, either. Most strong-willed teens are just being themselves and doing what strong-willed teens do.

The real problem is the parents' inadequate understanding of adolescence and a bad match between the teen's temperament and the parents' limit-setting style. The parents' information and guidance tools are not well suited for the job. The predictable result: conflict, miscommunication, and power struggles.

When parents arrive at my office looking for help with their strong-willed teen, one of my first tasks is to assist them in understanding their teen's temperament and this crazy time we call adolescence. Then we examine how the parents' limit-setting styles match up with their teen's temperament and discuss the predictable conflicts and friction points that develop around a bad match. That's what we're going to do in this chapter. A new perspective awaits you. You're not the problem, but you're a big part of the solution. A better understanding and improved match are well within your control.



Understanding Your Strong-Willed Teen

My youngest son, Ian, is a great force in our family and a great source of pride and joy. He's bright, adventurous, sensitive, a risk taker, and very determined. Sometimes I think he was more determined to train his mom and me than we were to train him. He kept us on our toes. If we were unclear, inconsistent, or indecisive when we asked him to do something, he would let us know. He'd continue testing and wait for a clearer signal.

Like most strong-willed individuals, Ian didn't wait until his teenage years to show his cards. He started out as a strong-willed infant. He was strong-willed throughout early and middle childhood, and he was a strong-willed teenager. Today he is a strong-willed adult. He's still the bright, intrepid, determined risk taker I've always known and loved, except now...

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Verlag
Harmony/Rodale/Convergent
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804138761
ISBN 13 
9780804138765
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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Verantwortliche Person
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