Parent Teenager Relationship Quotes

It is a healthy approach not to expect persons to turn out precisely how you would have wished.

Please don’t hate you??!! I hate that I love you. Loving you made me waste a year of my life. Loving you made me be passionate about nothing but you. Loving you made me take risks I never would have otherwise. Loving you made me give it up to you. Loving you made me neglect my parents and Amy. Loving you made me not care that my grandma just died. Loving you made me turn out bitter and hopeless like her. Loving you made me hate myself for being dumped by you. Loving you made me deluded, irrational, inconsiderate, and a liar. And because I love you, you’re always going to haunt me.

When you blame others, what you are really saying is what is inside of you can’t be fixed, so you have no control of your own happiness. Therefore, you have made the conscience choice to give focus and fuel to a bad situation that will take you nowhere and give you nothing, but ignorance and pain.

We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.

Secretly, I still get proud of the ways Rosie and I loved each other. We had no one else to learn from - none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success - so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.

I didn’t bring you up to speak as if your mouth were filled with sewage.

Father to teenage son: "My relationship with you is more important than anything I've got to say to you.

With a lack of jobs and a great deal of uncertainty about participating in contemporary society, however, the adolescent period may in many ways be even further prolonged. Because modern cultural practices do not offer transitional relationships with non-parental adults to help acknowledge and facilitate the adolescent period, we have some major challenges as adolescents in our modern times.

Why do you think, A.J.," they say in unison, "that you find these boys so attractive?" I didn't say that this fiery chemical explosion leaps from somewhere inside me. Parents don't want to hear these things. I shrugged and said nothing. "Maybe you should try sitting on the intensity," Mom suggests, "just until your feelings catch up with reality." "We could chain you to the water heater," Dad offers, "until these little moments pass." You see what I'm up against.

Your opinion should be an opinion and not an attempt to change someone's opinion.

Whoa! The idea that your partner is really a composite of your parents can be a bit upsetting at first. Though we love our parents, most of us got over (consciously) wanting to marry them when we turned five or six. Then, when we hit our teenage years, all we wanted was our freedom. But the fact is, we’re unconsciously drawn to that special someone with the best and worst character traits of all of our caregivers combined. We call this our “Imago”—the template of positive and negative qualities of your primary caregivers.

Amma wanted her daughter to be free, feminist and powerful Later she took her on personal development courses for children to give her the confidence and articulacy to flourish in any setting Big mistake Mum, Yazz said at fourteen when she was pitching to go to Reading Music Festival with her friends, it would be to the detriment of my juvenile development if you curtailed my activities at this critical stage in my journey towards becoming the independent-minded and fully self-expressed adult you expect me to be, I mean, do you really want me rebelling against your old-fashioned rules by running away from the safety of my home to live on the streets and having to resort to prostitution to survive and thereafter drug addiction, crime, anorexia and abusive relationships with exploitative bastards twice my age before my early demise in a crack house? Amma fretted the whole weekend her little girl way away

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn’t deprive herself, but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork. In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate. I’ve realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it. I wonder what she does when I’m not there to do so. Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it’s proportional. As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast. She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she’s “crazy about fruit." It was the same with his parents; as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, rotund stomach and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking making space for the entrance of men into their lives not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave. I have been taught accommodation. My brother never thinks before he speaks. I have been taught to filter. “How can anyone have a relationship to food?" He asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs. I want to tell say: we come from difference, Jonas, you have been taught to grow out I have been taught to grow in you learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much I learned to absorb I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters and I never meant to replicate her, but spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits that’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades. We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit weaving silence in between the threads which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house, skin itching, picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again, Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled. Deciding how many bites is too many How much space she deserves to occupy. Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her, And I don’t want to do either anymore but the burden of this house has followed me across the country I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry". I don’t know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza a circular obsession I never wanted but inheritance is accidental still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated and fraught with the effects of moments from the past. My mom knew this and wanted me to know it too. On one visit home, I found an essay from the Washington Post by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen that had been cut out and left on my desk. My mom, and her mom before her, loved clipping newspaper articles and cartoons from the paper to send to Barbara and me. This article was different. Above it, my mom had written a note: “Dear Benny”—I was “Benny” from the time I was a toddler; the family folklore was that when we were babies, a man approached my parents, commenting on their cute baby boys, and my parents played along, pretending our names were Benjamin and Beauregard, later shorted to Benny and Bo. In her note, my mom confessed to doing many things that the writer of this piece had done: checking my hair, my appearance. As a teenager, I was continually annoyed by some of her requests: comb your hair; pull up your jeans (remember when low-rise jeans were a thing? It was not a good look, I can assure you!). “Your mother may assume it goes without saying that she is proud of you,” Deborah Tannen wrote. “Everyone knows that. And everyone probably also notices that your bangs are obscuring your vision—and their view of your eyes. Because others won’t say anything, your mother may feel it’s her obligation to tell you.” In leaving her note and the clipping, my mom was reminding me that she accepted and loved me—and that there is no perfect way to be a mother. While we might have questioned some of the things our mother said, we never questioned her love.

Talk with your children about how important honesty is in your family. Make it a value. Let them know you put more emphasis on honesty than on the punishment for bad behavior. If you confront your kids accusingly with anger or threats and are punitive when they misbehave, they might become afraid to tell the truth. If you make it safe for them, they will be honest. Remember, it takes a lot to confess or tell the truth for anyone at any age. It doesn’t always come naturally. It’s up to us to teach them to be courageous enough to be honest and vulnerable and confess when necessary. Be nonjudgmental. This kind of honest relationship, if fostered well, will be paramount during the teenage years.

Give me the unedited draft of why you’ve never had a girlfriend. Blurt it out.” “Because… So many reasons. Because I’m seventeen. Because I don’t mind being alone. I like it actually. I’ve been surrounded by teenagers who are always in and out of these dramatic, toxic relationships and that’s never held any appeal for me. I want what my parents have. Extraordinary love.” “You understand that you’re missing out on a lot of awesome stuff by choosing to be that way, though, right? Sometimes you don’t know things are going to be extraordinary until they are.

I'm going to throw some suggestions at you now in rapid succession, assuming you are a father of one or more boys. Here we go: If you speak disparagingly of the opposite sex, or if you refer to females as sex objects, those attitudes will translate directly into dating and marital relationships later on. Remember that your goal is to prepare a boy to lead a family when he's grown and to show him how to earn the respect of those he serves. Tell him it is great to laugh and have fun with his friends, but advise him not to be "goofy." Guys who are goofy are not respected, and people, especially girls and women, do not follow boys and men whom they disrespect. Also, tell your son that he is never to hit a girl under any circumstances. Remind him that she is not as strong as he is and that she is deserving of his respect. Not only should he not hurt her, but he should protect her if she is threatened. When he is strolling along with a girl on the street, he should walk on the outside, nearer the cars. That is symbolic of his responsibility to take care of her. When he is on a date, he should pay for her food and entertainment. Also (and this is simply my opinion), girls should not call boys on the telephone-at least not until a committed relationship has developed. Guys must be the initiators, planning the dates and asking for the girl's company. Teach your son to open doors for girls and to help them with their coats or their chairs in a restaurant. When a guy goes to her house to pick up his date, tell him to get out of the car and knock on the door. Never honk. Teach him to stand, in formal situations, when a woman leaves the room or a table or when she returns. This is a way of showing respect for her. If he treats her like a lady, she will treat him like a man. It's a great plan. Make a concerted effort to teach sexual abstinence to your teenagers, just as you teach them to abstain from drug and alcohol usage and other harmful behavior. Of course you can do it! Young people are fully capable of understanding that irresponsible sex is not in their best interest and that it leads to disease, unwanted pregnancy, rejection, etc. In many cases today, no one is sharing this truth with teenagers. Parents are embarrassed to talk about sex, and, it disturbs me to say, churches are often unwilling to address the issue. That creates a vacuum into which liberal sex counselors have intruded to say, "We know you're going to have sex anyway, so why not do it right?" What a damning message that is. It is why herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases are spreading exponentially through the population and why unwanted pregnancies stalk school campuses. Despite these terrible social consequences, very little support is provided even for young people who are desperately looking for a valid reason to say no. They're told that "safe sex" is fine if they just use the right equipment. You as a father must counterbalance those messages at home. Tell your sons that there is no safety-no place to hide-when one lives in contradiction to the laws of God! Remind them repeatedly and emphatically of the biblical teaching about sexual immorality-and why someone who violates those laws not only hurts himself, but also wounds the girl and cheats the man she will eventually marry. Tell them not to take anything that doesn't belong to them-especially the moral purity of a woman.

Humans never outgrow their need to connect with others, nor should they, but mature, truly individual people are not controlled by these needs. Becoming such a separate being takes the whole of a childhood, which in our times stretches to at least the end of the teenage years and perhaps beyond. We need to release a child from preoccupation with attachment so he can pursue the natural agenda of independent maturation. The secret to doing so is to make sure that the child does not need to work to get his needs met for contact and closeness, to find his bearings, to orient. Children need to have their attachment needs satiated; only then can a shift of energy occur toward individuation, the process of becoming a truly individual person. Only then is the child freed to venture forward, to grow emotionally. Attachment hunger is very much like physical hunger. The need for food never goes away, just as the child's need for attachment never ends. As parents we free the child from the pursuit of physical nurturance. We assume responsibility for feeding the child as well as providing a sense of security about the provision. No matter how much food a child has at the moment, if there is no sense of confidence in the supply, getting food will continue to be the top priority. A child is not free to proceed with his learning and his life until the food issues are taken care of, and we parents do that as a matter of course. Our duty ought to be equally transparent to us in satisfying the child's attachment hunger. In his book On Becoming a Person, the psychotherapist Carl Rogers describes a warm, caring attitude for which he adopted the phrase unconditional positive regard because, he said, “It has no conditions of worth attached to it.” This is a caring, wrote Rogers, “which is not possessive, which demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere which simply demonstrates I care; not I care for you if you behave thus and so.” Rogers was summing up the qualities of a good therapist in relation to her/his clients. Substitute parent for therapist and child for client, and we have an eloquent description of what is needed in a parent-child relationship. Unconditional parental love is the indispensable nutrient for the child's healthy emotional growth. The first task is to create space in the child's heart for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. She does not have to do anything or be any different to earn that love — in fact, she cannot do anything, since that love cannot be won or lost. It is not conditional. It is just there, regardless of which side the child is acting from — “good” or “bad.” The child can be ornery, unpleasant, whiny, uncooperative, and plain rude, and the parent still lets her feel loved. Ways have to be found to convey the unacceptability of certain behaviors without making the child herself feel unaccepted. She has to be able to bring her unrest, her least likable characteristics to the parent and still receive the parent's absolutely satisfying, security-inducing unconditional love. A child needs to experience enough security, enough unconditional love, for the required shift of energy to occur. It's as if the brain says, “Thank you very much, that is what we needed, and now we can get on with the real task of development, with becoming a separate being. I don't have to keep hunting for fuel; my tank has been refilled, so now I can get on the road again.” Nothing could be more important in the developmental scheme of things.

I discovered, in time, that the small infant I had been was still alive within me and that I was not, that no human being is, a single personality. During this internal exploration of my self I found that all people are, in a certain way of thinking, born multiple personalities, that the infant, the four-year-old, the teenager, all of the people we once were are still alive inside us. When we live at home it is our parents’ job to care for and respond to all these parts of ourselves. Our job as we age is to come to know ourselves, to make relationship with these parts of ourselves, to care for them, and to find peace with them. It is one of our most fundamental jobs as human beings to hear the voices of these parts of ourselves, to learn their needs, to meet them, to become our own best friend, our own parent. Only then, I later learned, can we be prepared to parent our own children. Otherwise our children only become opportunities for us to work out unresolved problems in ourselves, and the family parenting dynamics that we ourselves suffered from are passed once again into a new generation.

spontaneity begin to deteriorate. The goose gets sicker day by day. And what about a parent’s relationship with a child? When children are little, they are very dependent, very vulnerable. It becomes so easy to neglect the PC work—the training, the communicating, the relating, the listening. It’s easy to take advantage, to manipulate, to get what you want the way you want it—right now! You’re bigger, you’re smarter, and you’re right! So why not just tell them what to do? If necessary, yell at them, intimidate them, insist on your way. Or you can indulge them. You can go for the golden egg of popularity, of pleasing them, giving them their way all the time. Then they grow up without any internal sense of standards or expectations, without a personal commitment to being disciplined or responsible. Either way—authoritarian or permissive—you have the golden egg mentality. You want to have your way or you want to be liked. But what happens, meantime, to the goose? What sense of responsibility, of self-discipline, of confidence in the ability to make good choices or achieve important goals is a child going to have a few years down the road? And what about your relationship? When he reaches those critical teenage

The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.

What do you need to give me what I need?"... You're negotiating with your teenager not because you're a wimp, or because you're afraid of her, or because you don't care. No, you're negotiating with your teenager because imposing rules makes bad relationships worse, while negotiating solutions makes good relationships better.

Human beings have an intuitive understanding of the point at which vulnerability is too much to bear. Vulnerability due to fear of loss is inherent in peer relationships. In peer relationships there is no maturity to lean on, no commitment to depend on, no sense of responsibility for another human being. The child is left with the stark reality of insecure attachment: What if I don't connect with my peers? What if I cannot make the relationship work? What if I don't want to go along with things my buddies do, if my mom doesn't let me go, or if my friend likes so and so more than she likes me? Such are the ever-present anxieties of peer-oriented children, never far below the surface. Peer-oriented children are obsessed with who likes whom, who prefers whom, who wants to be with whom. There is no room for missteps, for perceived disloyalty, disagreement, differences, or noncompliance. True individuality is crushed by the need to maintain the relationship at all costs. Yet no matter how hard the child works, when peers replace parents the sense of insecurity can escalate until it is too much to endure. That is often when the numbness sets in, the defensive shut down occurs and the children no longer appear vulnerable. They become emotionally frozen by the need to defend themselves against the pain of loss, even before it actually occurs. Similar dynamics come powerfully into play in the sexual “love” relationships of older teenagers.

This new level of thinking is what The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is about. It’s a principle-centered, character-based, “inside-out” approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness. “Inside-out” means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self—with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. It says if you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves. Inside-out is a process—a continuing process of renewal based on the natural laws that govern human growth and progress. It’s an upward spiral of growth that leads to progressively higher forms of responsible independence and effective interdependence.

We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak, a hard man. In secondary school, a boy and a girl go out, both of them teenagers with meagre pocket money. Yet the boy is expected to pay the bills, always, to prove his masculinity. (And we wonder why boys are more likely to steal money from their parents.) What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity and money? What if their attitude was not ‘the boy has to pay’, but rather, ‘whoever has more should pay’? Of course, because of their historical advantage, it is mostly men who will have more today. But if we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of proving their masculinity by material means. But by far the worst thing we do to males – by making them feel they have to be hard – is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is. And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.

It has also clarified the continuing need for treatment of other problems such as developmental and lifecycle issues that are not symptom based, such as identity formation, intimacy and relationship problems, and loss and grieving. Common clinical scenarios include teenagers in conflict with their parents as they try to "find themselves," young adults with

In response to coordinated attacks against the parents of recent teenage suicides, say, I can’t think of a less convincing justification than “free speech.

Austen, I think I got it this time. Let me try to see if this fits. Here are some words for what you are describing. First, you are motivated to clean your bathroom because it does need it. You can even understand your mother’s demand that you clean it, because it is a pit! And it is your responsibility, right?” Austen nods approval. “And you feel a sense of urgency to get your laptop back, too. Right?” Austen nods in the affirmative again. “In fact, you would do almost anything to get your laptop back. Right?” One more time Austen is tracking my logic. “It’s just that you can’t connect cleaning your bathroom and getting the laptop back, because they aren’t related. Right?” “Sure,” Austen says. “It is so obvious that these things aren’t related, and Mother is always trying this stuff. It never works, so why does she bother?” I smile with Austen’s realization. “Actually, this type of approach is used by lots of parents, and it seldom works with teenagers. We parents think that if we withhold a privilege or a favorite item, we’ll get our kids to mind and do things like clean a bathroom. It doesn’t work, and all that happens is a power struggle. But let’s give Mom some slack here and work out your dilemma.” Austen is ready. I explain, “I think the problem is that we need to connect up your motivation to clean your bathroom to your responsibility to clean your bathroom with a call to action to actually clean your bathroom. That will satisfy the urgency you feel to get back your laptop. You’ll get a clean bathroom. You can please your mother. She will be motivated to give you back your laptop even though the laptop has nothing to do with a clean bathroom. This is a win-win solution Austen. You already have motivation, a sense of responsibility, and a feeling of urgency. The only thing that is missing for you is a call to action. That’s the missing piece you keep calling the “not doing it” part. Are you ready to connect the dots?” Austen’s eyes widen, and he smiles. “Yes that’s it!” he says. “I am missing the call to action part.

So let me try to understand this Austen. Your bathroom needs cleaning, right? And you would like to get your laptop back, right? But there is this in-between step that is missing for you—the ‘not doing it’ part. Am I getting your drift?” “Yes that’s it,” said Austen, and he perked up. “Of course I want my laptop back, but Mother’s taking it away won’t make me clean my bathroom. Her actions make no sense to me. I know my bathroom needs cleaning. In fact I want it clean. What’s that have to do with my laptop?” Very Aspie logic. “And do you know how to clean your bathroom? I mean some teenage boys don’t know how,” I offered while I searched for the missing element. “No really that’s not it. I know how to clean my bathroom, but I don’t. It’s the ‘not doing it’ part I need help with.” Austen was trying to explain the missing element when he didn’t have a word for it.

There are times to teach and train and times not to teach. When relationships are strained and charged with emotion, attempts to teach or train are often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection. A better approach is to be alone with the person and to discuss the principle privately. But again, this requires patience and internal control—in short, emotional maturity. BORROWING STRENGTH BUILDS WEAKNESS In addition to parents, many employers, leaders, and others in positions of authority may be competent, knowledgeable, and skillful (at day six) but are emotionally and spiritually immature (at day two). They, too, may attempt to compensate for this deficiency, or gap, by borrowing strength from their position or their authority. How do immature people react to pressure? How does the boss react when subordinates don’t do things his way? The teacher when the students challenge her viewpoint? How would an immature parent treat a teenage daughter when she interrupts with her problems? How does this parent discipline a bothersome younger child? How does this person handle a difference with a spouse on an emotionally explosive matter? How does the person handle challenges at work? An emotionally immature person will tend to borrow strength from position, size, strength, experience, intellect, or emotions to make up for a character imbalance. And what are the consequences? Eventually this person will build weakness in three places: First, he builds weakness in himself. Borrowing strength from position or authority reinforces his own dependence upon external factors to get things done in the future. Second, he builds weakness in the other people. Others learn to act or react in terms of fear or conformity, thus stunting their own reasoning, freedom, growth, and internal discipline. Third, he builds weakness in the relationship. It becomes strained. Fear replaces cooperation. Each person involved becomes a little more arbitrary, a little more agitated, a little more defensive. To win an argument or a contest, an emotionally immature person may use his strengths and abilities to back people into a corner. Even though he wins the argument, he loses. Everyone loses. His

When my son was a teenager, he would use the ‘poker face’ tactic when I was lecturing, nagging, or suggesting. As a parent, it was maddening because I could not read his reactions! His stoicism would sometimes deflate my efforts or make me surrender in laughter, changing the subject all together.

I remember hearing years ago about a centenarian being interviewed on her birthday. She was asked, “Throughout your life, you have witnessed amazing change and innovation. The past one-hundred years have brought the inventions of the car, television, air conditioning, and microwave ovens. What is the most extraordinary change you have seen in your lifetime?” Without missing a beat, she replied, “That a teenager can say “suck” in front of their parents and get away with it!” While cultural norms may have changed with the times, being considerate of fellow human beings is not an antiquated notion; its time hasn't ended. Quite the opposite is true. In our world today, kindness and politeness are needed more than ever.

Inside-out” means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self—with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. It says if you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves. Inside-out is a process—a continuing process of renewal based on the natural laws that govern human growth and progress. It’s an upward spiral of growth that leads to progressively higher forms of responsible independence and effective interdependence.

From 'Creating True Peace' by Thich Nhat Hanh To better understand the practise of protection, please study the Five Mindfulness Trainings in Chapter 3, particularly the third, sexual responsibility. By practising the Third Mindfulness Training, we protect ourselves, our family, and society. In addition, by observing all the trainings we learn to eat in moderation, to work mindfully, and to organise our daily life so we are there for others. This can bring us great happiness and restore our peace and balance. Expressing Sexual Feelings with Love and Compassion Animals automatically follow their instincts, but humans are different. We do not need to satisfy our cravings the way animals do. We can decide that we will have sex only with love. In this way we can cultivate the deepest love, harmony, and nonviolence. For humans, to engage only in nonviolent sexuality means to have respect for each other. The sexual act can be a sacred expression of love and responsibility. The Third Mindfulness Training teaches us that the physical expression of love can be beautiful and transcendent. If you have a sexual relationship without love and caring, you create suffering for both yourself and your partner, as well as for your family and our entire society. In a culture of peace and nonviolence, civilised sexual behaviour is an important protection. Such love is not sheer craving for sex, it is true love and understanding. Respecting Our Commitments To engage in a sexual act without understanding or compassion is to act with violence. It is an act against civilization. Many people do not know how to handle their bodies or their feelings. They do not realise that an act of only a few minutes can destroy the life of another person. Sexual exploitation and abuse committed against adults and children is a heavy burden on society. Many families have been broken by sexual misconduct. Children who grow up in such families may suffer their entire lives, but if they get an opportunity to practise, they can transform their suffering. Otherwise, when they grow up, they may follow in the footsteps of their parents and cause more suffering, especially to those they love. We know that the more one engages in sexual misconduct, the more one suffers. We must come together as families to find ways to protect our young people and help them live a civilised life. We need to show our young people that happiness is possible without harmful sexual conduct. Teenage pregnancy is a tragic problem. Teens are not yet mature enough to understand that with love comes responsibility. When a thirteen-or fourteen-year-old boy and girl come together for sexual intercourse, they are just following their natural instincts. When a girl gets pregnant and gives birth at such a young age, her parents also suffer greatly. Public schools throughout the United States have nurseries where babies are cared for while their mothers are in the classroom. The young father and mother do not even know yet how to take care of themselves - how can they take care of another human being? It takes years of maturing to become ready to be a parent.

We’re living in an acquisitive capitalist society that is fundamentally anti-family and fundamentally uncomfortable with just enjoying being human. We’d rather shop than live, acquire than love and stare into a screen than hold each other. The pressure parents put on teenage kids to get into the “right schools” is stressful and cruel. So please forgive me while I preach a little about the joy of children and grandchildren, because plenty of sensible people will tell you to do anything but commit to love first and to career, money and possessions second. And this isn’t only about heterosexual love. Everything I’m ranting about here is just as true for gay men and lesbian women who are in love and who want children and who like me also want to put their relationships ahead of stuff, prestige and ego. So I have news for us all: it’s the entire cycle of life that counts. And that cycle is the only real “biological clock” that matters. Everything else is just a footnote.

So, why is it important to be respectful and build strong relationships with your family, specifically your siblings, parents, and grandparents? Well, for one thing, your family members can be your biggest supporters in life. Your parents and grandparents have more life experience than you do. They can offer valuable advice and guidance as you navigate life. They can help you through tricky times, advise you when necessary, and celebrate your successes with you. Another reason building solid relationships with your family members is essential is that it can help you learn necessary life skills. For example, if you have a good relationship with your parents, they can teach you about managing money, navigating the job market, and dealing with difficult people. If you have a solid relationship with your siblings, they can teach you about sharing, cooperation,

you put more emphasis on honesty than on the punishment for bad behavior. If you confront your kids accusingly with anger or threats and are punitive when they misbehave, they might become afraid to tell the truth. If you make it safe for them, they will be honest. Remember, it takes a lot to confess or tell the truth for anyone at any age. It doesn’t always come naturally. It’s up to us to teach them to be courageous enough to be honest and vulnerable and confess when necessary. Be nonjudgmental. This kind of honest relationship, if fostered well, will be paramount during the teenage years. Read stories that encompass all emotions Read all kinds of stories to your child. Don’t be afraid if they don’t all have happy endings. Actively choose stories that have difficult topics too, and stories that don’t conclude in a “storybook” way. Children learn a lot from sadness and tragedy (being age appropriate, of course), and they open up honest communication between you about different aspects of life that are just as important as the prince getting the princess. Being exposed to peaks and valleys of life encourages empathy, resilience, and feelings of meaningfulness and gratitude for our own lives.

Whether they are teenagers or toddlers, we can’t forget how small they are. When they fall asleep in the car and you carry them to bed, take a second to notice their size. As you pack up their stuff to take them to college, take a look at just how little stuff they have—because their life is still so new. The smaller you realize your kids are, the kinder you will be. The more protective and patient you will be. The more you will appreciate how hard they are trying to figure things out—themselves, their relationships, the world. They are so tiny. Don’t forget it.

Don't make a young person's behavior be about you. Never, "Oh, you're hurting me so much! You're going to be the end of me, but "It's hard to watch you hurting yourself this way." Teens will like your concern more if they feel it's for them and not yourself. Other ways of expressing your concern include: "You deserve better," and "You need to take better care of yourself.

Clinical psychologist | Clinical Psychology services calgary | McAtee Psychology Gavin is a registered psychologist with over ten years of experience providing professional therapy and assessment services to children and teenagers along with couples & families. Gavin will help you gain clarity and move consciously towards what's truly important and meaningful to you and your family. Gavin's mission is to help you gain the knowledge you need to set goals, find solutions, and move towards actions that help you achieve a rich, meaningful, and full life. Gavin' expertise includes the following: - Relationship Issues (Couples & Family Therapy) - Children and Adolescent Issues - Parent Consultation & Strategies - Mood Disorders (Stress, Depression, Anxiety) - Developmental Disorders (e.g., ADHD, ASD) Working Phone No: 403 926 3738

Despite their eye-rolling, ear-plugging, and other superficial resistance, teenagers consistently say that they do want such information from parents, and that they benefit from it. I know from experience that's true: boys often told me that our conversations had a dramatic, ongoing, sometimes therapeutic, impact- and I was a total stranger. So rather than fixating on how discussing physical and emotional intimacy makes you- and your son- want to sink into the earth, consider the opportunity it creates for a closer relationship, to show him that you are genuinely there for him, to display openness, strength, and perseverance in the face of messy realities.

John’s life had been like so many of ours. He grew up in a middle-class family with a loving, nurturing mother and a kind but distant father. He knew his father loved him, but they hadn’t been close since John’s teenage years. When John came out to his parents, they were upset but seemed to get through it fairly well, although they didn’t ask about the details of John’s life. He introduced his parents to his first live-in lover, but after that relationship fell apart, he avoided telling them much about whom he was seeing. It just made him feel like a double failure: first, he turned out to be gay; and second, he couldn’t keep a long-term relationship.

A house divided could stand, and in fact had been doing so for time immemorial. Families had been tolerating differences while still standing strong forever. Any parent of a teenager learned this. Relationships weren’t based on total agreement. They required respect and empathy. What mattered most was not seeing eye to eye but seeing each other clearly.

First, finding a healthy outlet for uncomfortable feelings—discussing them, having a good cry, listening to sad or angry music, and so on—usually does the job, providing all the relief a teenager needs. Second, making ourselves available to talk with our teenagers about their ups and downs is one of the most enriching aspects of parenting, and it goes a long way toward strengthening our relationships with them. Third, demonstrating our loving interest in what’s weighing on our teens models the attentive compassion that they should come to hold as a standard for all of their close relationships. Fourth, trying to implement any of the strategies offered in this chapter almost certainly won’t work unless we have already given emotional expression a chance to work its magic.

The irony is, I was confused because I had carried over the unhelpful lessons from this teenage infatuation into other relationships in my twenties. My pattern was often the same: I’d date someone new, idealize them, keep parts of myself hidden, and perform the role of a woman more palatable than I believed myself to be. This woman never asked for anything.

I think it’s important to support and nurture our daughters’ spirituality, even if it’s not easy. It’s especially difficult if your daughter wants to go in a spiritual direction different from your own. It can feel like a personal rejection if, like Zoe’s Dad, you have no interest in the spiritual life, and your daughter does. Don’t take it personally. Because parents do matter. Researchers have consistently found that the greatest single influence on children’s spiritual development is their parents. “Contrary to popular misguided cultural stereotypes and frequent parental misperceptions,” wrote the authors of a recent large survey, “the evidence clearly shows that the single most important social influence on the religious and spiritual lives of adolescents is their parents.” To be sure, teens often deny outright any possibility that their uncool parents could possibly influence them in any way, and particularly in regard to religion. But the teens are mistaken. Parents are the most important determinants of their children’s spiritual life—or lack thereof.4 If you fail to nurture your daughter’s budding spirituality, it may be extinguished. And if that happens, then your daughter will be at risk for the all-too-common substitution of sexuality in place of spirituality. The spiritual and the sexual are often tightly linked, especially for teenagers and young adults. Some girls will try to find the deepest meaning of their lives in a romantic or sexual relationship. They will be disappointed, because no young man (or woman) can fill the niche in the heart that belongs only to the spirit. But those girls don’t know that. In the first thrill of sexual awakening, they may plunge into sex and romance with the zeal of a new convert.

Pray for your child Parents who are suffering pain and grief in their relationship with a rebellious child tend to interpret things through the lens of their pain and grief. This is understandable because we are emotional beings, but it is not helpful for healing the relationship and does not facilitate godly prayer. Prayer should not become a digest of our desire for our child’s change, and the ways that we are hurt and grieved. When that happens, prayer becomes more about us than the lost and needy child. Certainly, prayer for our own or our spouse’s agony over rebellious children is appropriate as we struggle with these emotions, but even in those appropriate personal seasons of prayer, God’s comfort and provision of Christ for our loss must be our focus. Pray that you will be freed from your preoccupation with your own devastation so that you can see clearly to pray for specific needs in your child. Think about the misery, lostness, guilt, and loneliness behind your child’s growling and disrespect. As you pray for the hold of sin to be broken in your child’s heart, pray that this weary, heavy-laden sinner will find rest for his hurting soul. Pray that God’s Spirit will bless your efforts to disarm your child’s sense of justification for their thoughts or feelings against you as you do the work of listening and asking for forgiveness. Pray that God will do that awakening work that only he can do by his Spirit, to authenticate the truth of the gospel to your child’s heart. Pray that you will have the endurance and confidence in God to see this process through, regardless of how long you must endure.

Everyone lies but it can be hurtful to be lied to. As a parent, you have to teach your girl about the dangers of it, so that she doesn’t grow up to use lying as a means to get away with things or hide things from you. She needs to know that lying breaks trust, adds stress, compounds the problem but doesn’t make it go away, ruins healthy relationships, and can always backfire.

My parents firmly believed that I could make up my mind to be happy. I understand now that they were offering me the tools they relied on: willpower, optimism, and self-reliance. But those tools kept slipping out of my grasp, so I reached for the more reliable bingeing and purging to tamp down the emotions trying to surface. My parents and I wanted the same thing: for me to be normal. I longed for a "normal me" more than they did, but none of us understood that I wasn't "moping" and that the attempts to stuff my feeling might come at a high cost. I also heard an implied request that I bury Hawaii and all its terrifying images. Beneath my parents' request thrummed a subtext: Don't think about it, or you'll get upset. Don't get upset, or you'll fall behind on the important work of being a normal teenage girl. Don't talk about it, or you'll upset yourself. Don't talk about it, or you'll upset me. I wanted to be a dutiful daughter, so I buried it the best I could.

US teenagers who retain and grow in their faith are most significantly influenced by their parents. But there is a crucial second tier of relationships in their formation: nonfamilial adults who encourage them and speak into their lives. Those religiously serious teens they call “The Devoted . . . have a larger number of nonparental adults in their lives whom they can turn to for support, advice, and help. Moreover, the parents of the more religiously serious teens are more likely to know more of the supportive adults in their teen children’s lives well enough to talk to them, expanding what sociologists call ‘network closure’ around religious teens. . . . In sum, the lives of more religious teens are, compared to less religious teens, statistically more likely . . . to be linked to and surrounded by adults, particularly nonparental adults who know and care about them and who themselves have social ties to the teens’ parents.”b

Too many of the teenagers I encounter in my practice and across the country are late in developing what it will take to function as an adult and create adult relationships: agency, independence, intimacy, fortitude, and self-reliance. Often it's because their community (not just parents but also peers, teachers, and extended family) is focused exclusively on the high-school paper chase and fails to encourage these qualities. I try desperately to convince these teens and their parents that delaying the emotional work of adolescence is dangerous. "We're discovering that the brain during adolescence is very malleable, very plastic," Steinberg says. "It has a heightened capacity to change in response to experience. That cuts both ways: On the one hand it means that the brain is especially susceptible to toxic experiences that can harm it, but it also means that the brain is susceptible to positive influences that can promote growth. That's an opportunity we're squandering.

In Ephesians 6, within the context of chapter 6 and the whole of Ephesians, the apostle Paul is talking about various relationships such as husband and wives, masters and slaves, and parents and their children. He moves to connect Ephesians 6:10-12 to these relationships to talk about how our battle isn’t against flesh and blood but against spiritual realities. Hence, what we encourage parents to do is see the spiritual war that is going on within themselves first, as they raise and struggle with their teenagers. (Boom!) It’s not their teenagers they’re fighting; their teenagers are not the enemy. They are fighting spiritual battles in their own hearts.

Unfortunately, the majority of young people in the United States don't receive comprehensive sexuality education that includes information on pleasurable and fulfilling sexual relationships. We also live in a sex negative culture that includes a lot of oversexualization, sex stigma, and body shaming so there are few positive and pleasurable representations of sexuality for young people. Many young people are curious about sex and how it works. As a result many young people turn to the internet and end up looking at porn to figure it out. That's like watching the Fast and the Furious to learn how to drive. Porn is not a realistic representation of healthy, pleasurable, communicative, and responsible sex.

If your relationship is injured because conflict smothers exploration and batters connection, she may get better at hiding her behavior and fail to identify you as a resource.

How would you describe yourself? 2. What was the happiest moment of your life? 3. What was your most embarrassing moment? 4. What is your first childhood memory? 5. Who has been the most influential person in your life and why? 6. What is something you did as a teenager that your parents never learned about? 7. What’s your favorite time of year and why? 8. If you were asked to give yourself a new name, what would it be? 9. If you were asked to give me a new name, what would it be? 10. If we hadn’t met each other, where would you be right now? 11. What was on your mind the last time we were having sex? 12. What is your favorite sexual memory of us? 13. What movie reminds you of us? 14. Which of your parents are you most like and in what ways? 15. What is your favorite thing I ever did for a special occasion for you? 16. What’s your favorite physical feature on you? 17. Who was your favorite teacher when you were a child? 18. Which significant other before me had the biggest impact on you? 19. What’s the angriest you ever felt? 20. Which of your personality traits do you wish you could change? 21. Which of your parents did you go to when you wanted to talk and why? 22. Which of your friends would you choose if you had to be on a desert island with just one? 23. When you were a kid, did you feel that you fit in? Why or why not? 24. If you could go back in time, what age would you be again? 25. If you could see into the future, what would you want to know? 26. What is the best thing about our relationship? 27. Are you an optimist, a pessimist, or a realist? 28. What things about me make you know I’m the one for you? 29. If our house was on fire and you had a chance to grab only five things before leaving, what would they be? 30. If you could be born again as someone else, who would you be and why? 31. What is your favorite song of all time and why? 32. What is the worst decision you ever made? 33. If you could hand-pick the leader of our country, who would it be and why? 34. What kind of animal do you see yourself as? 35. What kind of animal do you see me as? 36. If you could boil down your life philosophy into one sentence, what would it be? 37. If you could remain one age forever, how old would you be? 38. Would you be willing to live a year in another country where we don’t speak the language? Why or why not? 39. If you had one magical superpower, what would it be? 40. How do you think other people perceive you? 41. Aside from me, who really knows you the best? 42. What is the wackiest thing you’ve ever done? 43. Have you ever had a supernatural or unexplainable experience? If so, what was it? 44. What do you believe happens immediately after we die? 45. In what situations do you feel the most confident and sure of yourself? 46. In what situations do you feel the least confident? 47. What is the best thing you learned from your mom and dad? 48. What one major life regret do you have? 49. On an average day, what do you think about most? 50. What makes you feel most fulfilled in our relationship?

The drinking became a little more of a problem when I went to university. My parents had never been particularly present while I was growing up, so one might presume if I was going to go off the rails, why not do it at home, but I saved it for when I went away. I was enough of a disappointment to my father. I didn’t need to give him yet another excuse to help me understand I was not the daughter he wanted. My mother had left her native America when she fell in love with my dad while working for a year as an au pair in Gerrards Cross. She seemed happy when I was very young, then spent most of my teenage years in what I have always thought must have been, albeit undiagnosed a deep, and possibly clinical, depression. I can understand why. What I couldn’t understand is how she ever ended up with my father in the first place. He was handsome, and I suppose he must have been charming when they were young, but he was so damned difficult, I used to think, even when I was young, that we’d all be much happier if they got a divorce. I would sit with friends who would be in floods of tears because their mother had just found out their father had been having an affair, or their parents had decided they hated each other, or whatever the myriad of reasons are that drive people apart, and these friends would be crying at the terrible fear of their families breaking up, and all I could think was: I wish my parents would get divorced. It seemed to me that if ever there were two people on the planet who should not have been together, it was my parents. My mother is laid-back, funny, kind. She’s comfortable in her skin and has the easy laugh you expect from all Americans. She was brought up in New York, but her parents died very young, after which she went to live with her Aunt Judith. I never knew Aunt Judith, but everything about those days sounds idyllic, especially her summers in Nantucket. You look at pictures of my mum from those days and she was in flowing, hippie-ish clothes, always smiling. She had long, silky hair, and she looked happy and free. In sharp contrast to the pictures of her with my dad, even in those early days, when they were newlyweds, supposedly the happiest time of a relationship. He insisted she wear buttoned-up suits, or twinsets and pearls. Her hair was elaborately coiffed. I remember the heated rollers she kept in the bathroom, twisting her hair up every morning, spraying it into tight submission, slicking lipstick on her lips, her feet sliding into Roger Vivier pumps. If my father was away, she left her hair long and loose, wrapping a scarf around her head. She’d wear long gypsy skirts with espadrilles or sandals. I loved her like that most of all. I used to think it was her clothing that changed her personality,

Some of your children's rebellion against your spiritual lifestyle might be a necessary step in their finding an authentic relationship with God. But beware: If they find it, it might look quite different from what you've always thought it should be.