Parenting Your Teens

Consequences are built on deterrence theory.  The idea is that if you cause pain to me, I will cause pain of equal or greater value in return. Structuring a behavioral modification plan for your teen around this concept is doomed for failure.  Over time your teen will develop consequence fatigue and lose interest in changing because the threat of losing no longer holds the same weight.

We have all heard, you are what you eat.  What we don’t often realize is that our minds operate on the same premise that what we feed it will be used to build it.  Now obviously our minds don’t actually eat, but they do process external messages and internal thoughts every moment of the day. So what do you do when you notice your teen has a poor self-concept, low self-esteem, or does not deal well with failure?

The risk posed by online predators to our sons and daughters is extraordinary.  These men often pose as teens themselves and promise money, escape, and the attention that so many teens desperately crave.  They have infiltrated every crevice of online life and are experts on how to appeal to the teen psyche.

It seems so long ago that we had to call a landline to get a hold of someone we wanted to have a conversation with.  Long gone are the days where parents acted as the gatekeeper for who their kids talked to.  Now it is as easy to talk to anybody you like with the click of a button, and with people posing as others on the Internet it is near impossible to be certain who your kid is actually talking to.