Tackling Rebellious Teens? Try Finding The Reason Before Passing Judgments

June 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Asian Teenager

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Parents find the difficult behavior of teenagers to be so complicated that they simply ignore the causes and describe it as difficult or obnoxious behavior. Well, each and every individual is permitted to be cranky once in awhile. This rule applies to your teenaged child as well.

However, you should be worried if the child insists on behaving in a rebellious manner at all times. Do you find your child to be a perpetual embarrassment in family gatherings? Does he or she show scant regard for the emotions and sentiments of others? Well, perhaps your child has been insulted or hurt and is simply retaliating.

Of course, the supposed insult or hurt may never have taken place. Or, it may be too smaller thing to worry about. However, the important thing is that your teenager feels that way and is behaving in retaliation.

A supposed insult made by an uncle or aunt maybe the reason behind this behavior. Or, your little big man may be simply feeling neglected because of your focus on your relatives and family members. Whatever the reason, simply ignoring it is not going to work. If you are finding the rebellious behavior to be unnecessarily complicated, simply having a word with your teenager will help.

Of course, don’t expect your teenager to confess everything immediately. You must use a combination of love and firmness to find the truth. Whatever you do, not laugh at the reason. Try to rationalize and reason with the teenager and hope that he or she sees sense after letting it out of the system.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Counseling, Parenting, Relationships Tagged With: , ,

Tips for Teaching Teens About Money Management

April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Money Management is one of the most useful tools to have as an adult. It is important to teach your children how to properly manage money now so that they will be financially successful and responsible when they are older. While teaching kids about money can begin at a young age by providing an allowance and a piggy bank, teaching teenagers about money is where you will really see the benefits.

The trick to teaching teens about money is to keep them happy as they are learning. Show them that managing money is in their best interest and will allow them to save up for things they really want. For example, set up a prom dress savings account. Instruct you’re teen to contribute to the account on a regular basis. When it’s time to purchase the dress, only spend as much money as what is in the account. The same tactics can be done for a new car fund.

If your child is saving for a new car, it’s a great time to introduce donating items to charity. An old car can be donated to Kars 4 Kids to help fund children’s programs. This will also teach your teen the importance of helping others. It will remind your teens to be grateful for what they do have while helping others that are not as lucky as they are.

Of course there are a lot of charities that can help your teen give back to the community. The main thing to teach your teen is that giving back is part of being a member of a community. There are many other children’s charities that need help.

Filed Under: Counseling, General Tagged With: , ,

Teens and Binge Drinking

March 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Binge drinking refers to heavily consuming alcohol over a short period of time. It is very easy for a teen to get caught up in the social scene and face peer pressure to drink.

Most teens drink alcohol out of curiousity; they want to know what it tastes like.  They have the wrong inpression alcohol will make them feel good, not realizing after those few feel good moments they can easily become sick or hung-over.  Some teens drink for the appearance of being older. While sadly a great many drink to reduce stress and forget their troubles.

Besides being hung-over or throwing up, teens don’t realize there are servere risks to binge drinking.

  • Binge drinking can lead to alcohol poisoning which has life-threatening counsequences. Excess alcohol causes the body to involuntarily reflex. A person can experience seizures and convulsions, not be able to awaken once passed out, or experience slow and irregular breathing.
  • Binge drinking also impairs judgement. An intoxicated person is more likely to drive while under the influence, have unprotected sex, and put themselves into higher risk situations.
  • A teen’s physical health takes a major toll from excessive drinking. A binge drinker has a tendancy to gain weight, develop high blood pressure, damage their liver, and have poor sleeping patterns.
  • Binge drinkers have a high risk of mental health issues. They lose the ability to concentrate, develop poor sleep patterns, and have significant changes in their personalities. This leads to poor academic or job performance, feelings of intense anger or moodiness, and severe depression with suicidal tendancies.
  • The ultimate risk of binge drinking is that it will turn into alcoholism. The person will no longer be able to go through a day without the need to consume one or more alcoholic beverages.
Filed Under: Advice, Counseling Tagged With: , ,

Teens: Dealing with Bullies

March 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Bullying has gained national recognition as a big problem facing children of all ages on a daily basis. Thousands of kids wake up each morning afraid to go to school or open their computer due to the ramifications of peer bullying.

Bullying occurs when a person is picked on constantly by an individual or group that is perceived to have more power in terms of social standing or physical strength.  Bullies like to pick on people that they perceive to be different due to looks, actions, race, religion, or lifestyle.

Attacks by bullies can be physical such as shoving, hitting, and tripping or psychological such as taunting, teasing, gossiping, verbal insulting, and cyberbullying. The person being bullied experiences a form of peer abuse and run the risk for mental health problems including stress, depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, and think about suicide.

Bullies thrive on reactions and the more you reaction, the more they will continue to harass. There are a few survival tips that can help combat verbal and psychological bullying. By doing the following, the bullies lose the reactions they crave and the problem will cease to exist:

  • Ignore and walk away from anyone bullying you. The bully does not get the reaction they crave and moves on.
  • Do not respond to harassing emails, texts, or notes
  • Keep your anger in check, control your emotions, and do not react.
  • Do not get physical or become aggessive towards a bully. This is the reaction they want and can physically hurt you back.
  • Practice being confident by walking tall, smiling, and not being afraid to hold you head up
  • Find support from a friend and confide your feelings. Let them assure you of your value and talents.
  • Let someone know when you are being bullied and talk about the situation without embarrasment
Filed Under: Counseling Tagged With: , ,

Study Tips: The Best Way to Study for Tests

March 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You are in a panic because the same day you have a math test, you also have major history exam. How is it possible to study for both and still make good grades?

The art of studying actually starts way before the actual scheduled test date. The best study technique happens in the classroom when you are actually learning the materials. Creating a better way at note-taking will help you more easily remember what was taught in class and the materials that you have read.

The key to good note-taking is to write down the facts that a teacher mentions or has written on the board. Don’t be afraid to ask the teacher to repeat something you miss or go over the facts again that hard to comprehend.

Studying also involves good time management skills. When it comes time to study for a test, determine how much time you need to devote to each topic. If you have a math and history test, but are better in math, you might want to devote more time studying each night for history.

Consider breaking topics into blocks or chunks. If your history test is over World War I, break it up by battles or periods of time.  Use an egg timer to schedule 45 minute blocks of time for study followed by 15 minutes for a break to reduce fatigue and help with concentration.

While studying for multiple choice exams, focus on studying the facts and details such as dates. For essay questions, consider what topics are more likely to be covered. Create practice essay topics and using the book, notes, or other references try to formulate and answer.

Make the extra effort to complete practice problems or practice questions at the end of each chapter. These practice materials are a summarization of what you should have learned from your reading and helps you to determine if you have retained the information.

Consider forming a study group with other students. Study groups are great for bouncing off ideas, understanding concepts, quizing one another, and finding new ways to study more proficiently.

Filed Under: Counseling, General Tagged With: , ,

Helping Your Teen Grow Up

February 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Two adolescent couples at the 2009 Western Ida...

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Teenagers are not adults, in spite of what their bodies (and their words) might try to tell you.  Just because your teen can outdo you in athletic contests, and even if they are better than you are at academic pursuits, they still lack a lot of the necessary experience that it takes to do well on their own.  Unfortunately, they are also at a point in their lives in which they see themselves as either your equals or your superiors, whether they actually are or not.  But you have got to do all you can, both to show them a good example of a calm person who stays in control of the situation, and to show them that their opinions matter.  Why the dichotomy?  Unfortunately, this is just how you have to play it, with people who are stuck between being adults and being children.

The process of growing up is a struggle for just about everyone.  With each age a person passes, there are more chances for them to become disillusioned with the way that life actually works.  While a baby can simply cry, and let a magical hand come around and fix every problem that they could possibly have, a child generally learns that problems can not always be taken care of that easily.  A teen then learns an extension to this fact- their parents may be able to fix most of their problems, but they are ultimately going to have to handle a lot of stuff by themselves.

It is for this reason that you have got to slowly allow your teen to take over their own lives.  It is not a sudden process, and if you do it properly they will barely notice that their responsibility level is slowly creeping upward.  And needless to say, as they gain the burden of more responsibilities, they should also gain a new and steadily growing set of additional privileges to sweeten the pot.  After all, your teen should be earning the right to be able to do more things as they get older.  In time, they’ll do it all.

Filed Under: Counseling, Relationships Tagged With: , ,

Staggering the Responsibilities

February 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
us/them rules of thumb

Image by Choconancy1 via Flickr

As your child gets into their teen years, you might be tempted to just put yourself out of the house, and allow them to run the entirety of your household, since they seem to suddenly know everything.  And while you know that while doing something of that nature would feel good for a moment (finally being free of the constant picking, when they may or may not even know what they are talking about), it would ultimately result in a very large series of disasters for both you and them.  Whether or not your teens want to admit to it, they do still need you to some extent.  Unfortunately, a lot of them might even need you to a point after college in their twenties.  But if you stagger their levels of responsibility, they will have the skills and mental tools that they will need to last on their own.

You might wonder what staggering their responsibilities means.  Simply put, it means that you have got to slowly add in responsibilities to the mix, from the very beginning (things like being able to walk around the house by themselves when they are 2 or 3) all the way up to when you send them off to college to live their own lives without any daily intervention from you.  Could you imagine if you tried to leap straight between those two extremes?  The results would be catastrophic for your poor kids.  Not to mention the fact that until they left, they would feel downright smothered, as you insisted on helping them to use the bathroom and brush their teeth, and other ridiculous things for someone in their teens.

So you have to make sure you add responsibilities slowly to the mix.  A decent rule of thumb would be one chore per year, until they know how to do everything necessary to run a household by about 18 years old.  At that point, other than financial things (which they will be able to manage, but not necessarily to earn enough for), they are going to be fully capable adults with solid skills.

Filed Under: Counseling, Relationships Tagged With: , ,

The Levels of Responsibility

February 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As children, people have few to no responsibilities for the most part.  And they generally like it that way.  After all, the less things that you are responsible for, the less things you can be blamed for if something goes wrong with them.  Unfortunately, nobody ever really grew up through having no (or even few) responsibilities in their life.  And if your teen is going to be able to survive and thrive out on their own, they are going to need to take on increasingly complex responsibilities as they grow older and develop their mental resources.  After all, this is the stuff that everybody needs to know in life.  Naturally, they are going to whine every time they take on a new responsibility, but whining needs to be something that falls off your back like water off of a duck.  You need to keep your skin thick, and administer tough love when they need it.

To start off, by the time they are teens, your kids should be able to take care of their basic personal grooming and locomotion.  You should also be requiring them to do physical work around the house (such as mowing the lawn, dusting, vacuuming, etc.).  Break down all of the different chores in the house into levels of intellectual difficulty, and these are at the low end.  You should be giving them an allowance for what they do, and compensating them according to the complexity of the job.  Properly cleaning the outside and inside of your car is more complex than sweeping the kitchen floor, after all.  But this is just the beginning.

When your kid starts thinking about getting a job, the real fun begins.  At this stage of the game, introduce them to taxes, and their rights as a worker.  The more they know, and the more they can do about such things, the better prepared they are going to be to demand what they are worth in the workplace.  By 16, they should be capable of handling grocery shopping, staying within budget, and supplying your household with its dietary and sundry needs.

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The Challenges of Responsibility

February 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A lot of people think that responsibility means nothing more than obedience.  And while that would definitely be nice, sometimes obedience can turn downright malicious, such as when a person completely obeys your every instruction, and does nothing extra.  When you raise teens, you are definitely going to get passive aggression of this nature from time to time.  Of course, while you can possibly punish away some of the symptoms, the underlying cause (your teen feeling as though you do not trust them) is still going to remain, nonetheless.  The only real way to take care of this problem once and for all is to show your teen that you trust them, by giving them absolute control over something.  Some parents do this with their teen’s car, but that can backfire if your teen paid for and already maintains it.  What can you do, steal it from them?

Responsibility is a strange thing, because it opens up a lot of differnt avenues for both success and failure.  On the one hand, keeping your lawn well maintained means that your teen is going to have something nice that they can point to and say, “that’s my responsibility.”  But on the other hand, you can do better than that.  Say you want to reward good things and punish bad ones.  Have your teen participate in taxes, all the way from thinking through what might be deductible, to scanning your receipts, all the way to going with you to your accountant’s office and and sitting in on the process.

You might be wondering how in the world you could ever motivate your teen to do any of this.  You could allow them to keep a portion of what you get back from the IRS, for one thing.  This is a skillset that everybody is going to need to have at some point.  So you might as well get them into the habit at a young age, and teach them that intellectual responsibilities are just as important (if not moreso) than physical ones are.  Most 13 year olds can probably handle responsibilities like that.

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Allowing Some Rebellion

February 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It is a foregone conclusion that at some point in their teen years, every kid is going to rebel to some extent.  After all, that is a part of the process by which they are eventually going to separate from you completely.  In order for your teens to eventually go their own separate ways, they are going to have to rebel against you to some extent.  The trick is in picking your battles, and not sweating the small stuff.  Naturally, this is one of those things in life which is going to be easier said than done.  There are going to be times in which you would really rather not be bothered in the least by what they want, and where you might even stop them from doing something trivial.

There are a couple of types of rebellion.  The first is overt rebellion, which means that your kid is facing you straight on and telling you what they want to do, even though they are pretty sure that you are against their plans.  In some cases, it is best to flat out override them.  If they press you and you have a logical explanation for your executive decision, feel free to explain it.  They most likely won’t listen, but at least it is better than the old standby of “because I said so.”  If they can explain why their idea is okay, and it really works, allow it.

The other type of rebellion is the secret kind.  Now, since you were once a teen (and you undoubtedly had plenty of teenage friends), you know that this is no secret.  Lots of teens sneak out at night to go do things that may or may not be as much fun as they initially perceive them to be.  And a lot of teens do things that they naively assume you are never going to find out about.

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