Surviving (Your Child's) Adolescence

Welcome to the hard half of parenting

Carl E Pickhardt Ph.D.

Adolescence and the Importance of Talking to Parents

In the great curriculum of family life that parents teach their adolescent, becoming practiced and competent at speaking up in a variety of ways has long term benefit.

When Parents Pay Money for Adolescent Cooperation

To more and more often parents pay for adolescent cooperation, performance, and compliance, the less their interpersonal influence tends to become.

Confronting Adolescent Lying and What Parents Might Say

Persistent adolescent lying is not only hard on parents at the time, it creates problems for the teenager now and later.

Adolescence and the Power of Promises

In a world of uncertainty, promises made and kept by parent and teenager provide stability and security during a changing time in their relationship.

Parenting Adolescents and the Choice-Consequence Connection

One parental goal with adolescents is teaching them to learn from their life experience, as choice by choice they make their way through the complexity of growing up.

Adolescence and Ambivalence Growing Up

Holding opposing or contrasting views or values within the individual at the same time, ambivalence can be uncomfortable to maintain. However, it can give a useful perspective.

Using an Object Lesson to Correct Adolescent Misbehavior

Giving an object lesson, the parent acts out wrongdoing that the adolescent has been doing to them with the hope the teenager will feel what that treatment is like and stop it.

What NOT to do after an Older Adolescent Leaves for College

Because trying to master more responsible independence away at college can be so challenging, knowing that one still has a bedroom at home to return to can mean and matter a lot.

The Challenge of Parenting a Strong-willed Adolescent

Willfulness is usually an inherited temperamental trait. It is part of the physical/psychological hand that the child has been dealt. Parents must teach how to play that hand.

Parent, Adolescent, and Managing the Generation Gap

To some degree there is always a cultural generation gap between parent and adolescent because changing times create changing models of popular influence with which to identify.

Preserving Intimacy with Your Child When Adolescence Begins

The loss of closeness with their little girl or boy can be hard. The challenge of maintaining closeness with their adolescent can be harder.

Adolescence and the Power of Empathy

Through giving and receiving empathy with each other, parent and teenager can remain emotionally connected as adolescence grows them apart, as it is meant to do.

Early Adolescence and the Risks of Learning

While the little child can engage with the joy of learning, for the adolescent, learning in a public forum like a classroom or in a group of friends can come with common threats.

Dealing with a Child's Entry Anxiety into Adolescence

Monitor an early adolescent (ages 9 - 13) to make sure that expected anxieties of the age do not become extreme and get in the way of meeting normal demands of growing older

Adolescence and the Power of Parental Supervision

Supervision is how parents back up what they want with insistence to wear normal adolescent resistance down by following through until what was asked for is finally accomplished.

Managing Expectations When Parenting an Adolescent

Expectations are mindsets that have unhappy emotional consequences when unrealistically set; so it's important that parents have realistic expectations for adolescent change.

Mid-Adolescence and "Tough Talking" in Middle School

Developmentally insecure young adolescents can resort to verbal toughness with peers for their social protection.

Parenting the More Unavailable Adolescent

Just because the more self and socially preoccupied adolescent tends to grow less available for communication and contact with parents doesn't mean they should live on these terms

Correcting Teenagers by Taking Away Freedom of Action or Use

While taking away a precious freedom or resource can be a powerful consequence for teenage misbehavior, parents should guard against its overuse.

Adolescence and Processing Painful Emotion

Since emotionality is a fundamental part of human nature, and adolescence is a more emotionally intense time, teaching teenagers how to process their feelings is important to do.

Adolescence and Repurposing One's Life

A young person can't grow up and still remain the same. They must become different. Repurposing redefines and re-energizes one's growth.

Adolescence and Lifestyle Lying

Like most any behavior, lying can become habit forming, never more so than when enabling and protecting the self-destructive behavior of addiction

Adolescence and Freedom of Choice

Ending adolescence and now assuming independent self-management responsibility, the young person painfully discovers the costs that come with freedom of choice.

Adolescence and Missing Childhood

Neither child nor parent can have it both ways. You can't remain a child once you enter adolescence. The price of growing up is loss.

Adolescent Substance Use and the Problem of Denial

Like it or not, adolescents today grow up in an increasingly drug-filled world. Parental denial of this reality provides no protection. They must be knowledgable and stay vigilant.

Keeping Emotional Sobriety When Parenting an Adolescent

Parents can sometimes emotionally "lose it" with the surprising adolescent, but they can also take steps to keep their emotions in check and their judgment in charge.

Adolescence and Conflicts between Constancy and Change

The art of parenting an adolescent is knowing the difference between what needs to change and what needs to stay the same.

Adolescence and the Positive Power of Mistakes

Painful though it can feel, mistake making is part of everyone's learning process in life. So the challenge is to make the best educational use of mistakes you can.

Adolescence and the Use of Parental Worry

Not fun to do, and often given a bad name, worry can be constructive for both parent and adolescent to do.

Last Stage Adolescence, 18-23, and What Is Consensual Sex

Keep sex consensual, because when it is not it becomes intimately hurtful and does a lot of lasting harm.

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