By Steven Griggs

 Principles and Strategies For Teenagers-Part III
I've been a child psychologist for 26 years. This is the
third in a series of articles on how to think and approach teens.
Please read the first two before proceeding...
I speak of this with a tongue-in-cheek style, just for fun,
but in all seriousness, my son had completed a biologic rite of
passage. After two years, he came out of his room three inches
taller, shoulders much broader, voice deeper and psychologically
much more independent. He was no longer my "kid" or
"my little boy." He was "something else;" no longer a fish,
but not quite a fowl. Parents struggle with what to call this
something else, because their children are clearly not little kids,
but legally and chronologically, they are still children.
Sometimes parents feel so hurt by their teens' new treatment of
them that they respond by returning the rejection. BIG mistake.
Teenagers know that they still need their parents even if they can't
admit it. The roller-coaster they put you on is the same one
they're feeling internally. As the parent, you need to stay calm
and try to weather this teenage rebellion phase. Most importantly,
don't take it personally.
At about sixteen, teenagers really separate from their parents.
If you thought at age thirteen they separated, wait until three years
later. Here's a typical example. Chelsea is a beautiful girl with
an outstanding personality. Everyone likes her, which is why she
frequents parties, is on the phone most of the time and doesn't do
her homework. She stays out too late and often fails to check in
with Mom or Dad. At this age, Chelsea is way beyond the influence
of star charts, such as those you might use to reward the behaviors
of little kids, and is even starting to be more resistant to the
threat of losing the cell phone (although this still works when
something drastic is needed to get her attention). Like most teens,
Chelsea suffers from the incomplete development of her self-esteem.
Its not that her self-esteem is bad, its that her self-esteem is still
developing, dependent upon external cues and very focused on relatively
immature things. Like her physical structure, her self-esteem is more
developed than younger kids, but still a long way from being finished.
So, I noticed these things and began a program of flooding her with
positive self-esteem messages, at the rate of 4:1. (See the ebook on
Changing Teenager's Behavior, which is linked from the author's
website, below.) For example, I told her about her shining
personality four times as much as I told her anything else, referring
to those otherwise errant behaviors. In my office, Chelsea's parents
complained about her plummeting grades, occasional brushes with alcohol
or pot and other testy behaviors. In my office, Chelsea also heard
about her wonderful, brilliant personality--four times as often as she
heard the complaints. I paired these selective praises to the parental
complaints, which made obvious the connection between her deviance and
her striving to compensate a normal but otherwise incomplete self-image.
I taught the parents that Chelsea would pay a lot more attention to them
and their rules if they reduced her natural resistance, but more
importantly, increased her rewards at the level of self-esteem, this
being her big need at this stage in her life. Thus, I paired Chelsea's
wonderful, natural personality and other talents with congruent messages
of same, in vivo. What that means, is that when Chelsea "screwed up,"
Mom and Dad were to not harp so much on her bad behaviors; rather,
verbalize that, yes, she blew it, but also yes, Chelsea has great
strengths in social arenas, personal communication and other
"personality" skills; things relevant to her developmental stage.
While Chelsea still has to pay the consequences of messing up, she now
hears about her many fine other qualities four times as often, and the
additional positive feedback about her bigger and better qualities are
paired with the awareness that she, in fact, still messed up.
-Dr. Griggs
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com/page18.html

For more information about this and other articles and ebooks by this author, start with:
http://www.psychologyproductsandservices.com
For more information about the author, go to:
http://www.drgriggs.org