Keeping Our Teens on TrackA Call to ActionThe Six Keeping Our Teens On Track Workshops:- VALUES: Values, Philosophy, Perspective, Goals and Strategies
- IDENTITY: Identity, Communication, Attitude and Relationships
- ABILITIES: Talents, Passions, Dreams, Adventure and Mission
- ACHIEVEMENT: Resiliency, Self-Regulation, Persistence and Success
- FAMILY: Family Communication, Activities, Tavels and Belonging
- EMPOWERMENT: Lifestyle, Friends, Purpose, Service and Spirituality
These workshops are offered in three formats: 1. adults, 2. teens, 3. parents and teens
ADDITIONAL WORKSHOPS: Heather is a Facilitator trained by
Practical Parent Education
which is recognized by the Harvard Family Research Project, to present
over 50 topics for parents, teachers and those interested in helping
kids and teens. Email or call to request the full list of workshops. See www.practicalparent.org
As
Many of Us Have Concluded, American Adults Need to Know and Live
Methods that Ensure Adolescents Succeed in their Developmental Tasks to
Prevent:- Academic problems
- Aggression, violence, defiance, combativeness, harrassment
- Youth gang involvement, unhealthy friendships
- Alcohol, tobacco, prescription narcotics and other drug use
- Delinquency, truancy
- Problems in family functioning
- Isolation in Computers, Gaming and Virtual Reality
- Early sexual activity, exploitation, romantic enmeshment, pregnancy
- Obesity and eating disorders
Let's Focus on What We Need to Do About It!
We Can Logically Avoid the Problems By Developing Natural Abilities
NOW
WE KNOW HOW: The community of professionals which works
with famlies, parents, children and educators has completed fine
research and debvelopment showing us what is missing and how to prevent
the problems we have with our children and teens. I have a passion for
delivering the knowledge and resources which are now readily available.
Here are some of the nuggets from the research I have done with help
from my assistant, Cheanay Pritchett, BSc.
WHAT EMPOWERS
YOUTH? First, what are the important elements of empowering our
youth into growing their identity and abilities to succeed as adults?
How do we achieve this fostering of our teenagers? Here are some of the
best answers:
The Ten Tasks of Adolescence1. Adjust to sexually maturing bodies and feelings
2. Develop and apply abstract thinking skills
3. Develop and apply a more complex level of perspective taking
4. Develop and apply new coping skills in areas such as decision making, problem solving, and conflict resolution
5. Identify meaningful moral standards, values, and belief systems
6. Understand and express more complex emotional experiences
7. Form friendships that are mutually close and supportive
8. Establish key aspects of identity
9. Meet the demands of increasingly mature roles and responsibilities
10. Renegotiate relationships with adults in parenting roles
Most Needed Developmental Assets for Adolescents
Includes percentage of the youth surveyed by the Search Institute have this asset in their lives.
See search-institute.org
NINE
TOP NEEDS: Less than 30% of youths surveyed had these assets in their
lives. If you want to make a difference in our families, our
community, our people and our future, find a way to contribute to the
teens in your family or community. Here are the nine out of 40 areas
most lacking for our youth:
EXTERNAL ASSETS:
1. 26% Positive family communication
2. 24% Caring school climate
3. 29% Parent involvement in schooling
4. 20%Community values youth
5. 24% Youth as resources
6. 27% Adult role models
7. 19% Creative activities
INTERNAL ASSETS:
8. 24% Reading for pleasure
9. 29% Planning and decision making
Please note: what our youth lack and need most are Creative Activities.
Descriptions from The Search Institute:
EXTERNAL ASSETS:
3 Assets for Support:
26%
Positive family communication: Young person and her or his parent (s)
communicate positively, and young person is willing to seek advice and
counsel from parents.
24% Caring school climate—School provides a caring, encouraging environment.
29% Parent involvement in schooling—Parent(s) are actively involved in helping young person succeed in school.
2 Assets for Empowerment:
20%Community values youth: Young person perceives that adults in the community value youth.
24% Youth as resources: Young people are given useful roles in the community.
1 Asset for Boundaries and Expectations:
27% Adult role models: parent(s) and other adults model positive, responsible behavior.
1 Asset for Constructive Use of Time:
19%
Creative activities: Young person spends three or more hours per week
in lessons or practice in music, theater, or other arts.
INTERNAL ASSETS:
1 Asset for Commitment to Learning:
24% Reading for pleasure: Young person reads for pleasure three or more hours per week.
1 Asset for Social Competencies:
29% Planning and decision making: Young person knows how to plan ahead and make choices.
The
40 Developmental Assets for Adolescents (ages12-18) as well as younger
age groups: The Search Inssitute has identified these bulding blocks of
healthy development—known as Developmental Assets—that help young
people grow up healthy, caring and responsible. See
www.search-institute.org 800-888-7828
RECOMMENDED BOOK: I
highly recommend this marvelous book if you want something
practical written for teens and which is equally helpful to adults who
want to assist teenagers. It is organized around the 40 Developmental
Assets with facts, case histories, instructions, resources and tips for
readers (written for teens to use themselves) on:
What Teens Need to Succeed: Proven, Practical Ways to Shape Your Own Future
by Peter L. Benson, Ph.D., Judy Galbraith, M.A., and Pamela Espeland
from www.freespirit.com. Of course, they have also written an
edition for What Kids Need to Succeed.
The Five Basics of Parenting Adolescents Broadly speaking, the five components of the parenting role that emerge from research can be organized as:
(1) offering teens love and connection;
(2) monitoring teen behavior and well-being;
(3) offering guidance, including negotiating and setting limits;
(4)
providing information and consultation for understanding, interpreting,
and navigating the larger world, through a process of modeling and
ongoing dialogue; and
(5) providing and advocating for resources, including other caring adults.
Recommendations for Future Work NATIONAL REPORT: The following information is excerpted by Heather Carlile from the report by Rae Simpson,
“Raising Teens: A Synthesis of Research and a Foundation for Action,”
produced by the Harvard Center or Health Communication and funded by
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which seeks to
address the gap in our understanding about the role of the mass media
in parenting education.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION about the report: Download 101-page report at www.hsph.harvard.edu/chc/parenting
The MIT Center for Work, Family & Personal Life.
To learn more about the report's author: A. Rae Simpson, Ph.D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Room 16-151
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
Telephone: 617-253-1592
Fax: 617-253-2609
E-mail: rsimpson@mit.edu
IGNORANCE OF STRONG FINDINGS: Many parents and mentors
of adolescents are largely not aware that well-established research
findings exist, let alone what they might be. Even some of the most
basic principles that are reaching parents and policy makers regarding
young children—about brain development, about abuse, about the role of
parents—are in general not reaching parents of adolescents, policy
makers, and even the practitioners working with adolescents and
families.
What can be done?BRIDGES PLEASE: We
must build much more effective bridges among all those who are
addressing the raising of teenagers. We must promote an exchange of
information among researchers, parents, practitioners, and policy
makers, so that each group benefits from the others’ feedback. We must
create more effective means of consolidating information, making it
available, and conveying it back and forth; and we must support the
senders, the synthesizers, and the seekers within each group.
Together, we can make this work.
How can we do it?MEDIA: Conduct
media initiatives to disseminate widely the bottom-line messages on
parenting adolescents about which there is widespread research
agreement.
Getting the Message OutThe
task of getting messages of this kind to the people who need them is a
complex one, but many precedents demonstrate that it can be done with
proper planning, collaboration, expertise, resources, evaluation, and
time, as summarized in this Project’s previous report.
[1]
Well-designed campaigns have been successful in influencing public
attitudes and behaviors on a number of public health issues, including
parenting issues such as child abuse and infant health.
[2] In
this case, an essential component of the planning process will be
research on the diverse and complex target audience of parents and
others raising teenagers: what they know, what they would like to know,
and how they would prefer to learn it. This Project has uncovered a
number of studies of parents’ attitudes and behaviors toward teens and
family life.
[7] Also essential to media initiatives in this
area is a multifaceted and collaborative approach, integrating a
variety of strategies to target the great diversity of audiences that
is involved in raising adolescents and shaping programs and policies
that impact them.
Ultimately, entertainment as well as advertising
and informational media should be more engaged in this effort, given
the many ways in which teens and families are portrayed in
entertainment and news information and identified as a special target
for advertising.
[8] Particularly important in the planning and
evaluation of campaigns regarding parenting issues is monitoring to
assure that messages do not have a “boomerang” effect, in which parents
feel blamed, anxious, or demoralized because they are being asked to
shoulder responsibilities that require more support and/or must be
shared by the larger society. In other words, the planning of such
campaigns needs to be based not only on research about adolescence,
parenting, and effective communications, but also on research about
what actually supports, rather than undermines, parents in their
efforts to be better parents.
Strengths in the Media’s RoleParenting has become a staple among topics in many print media.
Parenting
books, magazines, and regional controlled-circulation papers, as well
as child and family beat reporters at major newspapers, have increased
dramatically. Almost every parent is exposed to printed information
about parenting, many repeatedly.
Parenting initiatives within the electronic media are expanding.
In
particular, rapid growth is occurring in public television, cable
television, local news, and the internet, and new developments are
occurring on the commercial networks as well.
The demand for media information among parents is substantial and increasing.
By
a number of measures, many parents have a high level of interest in
information about child-rearing, including information from the mass
media, on a broad range of topics. The extent to which particular
parents are reached, however, varies according to a number of important
factors, including age, gender, communication skills and style,
cultural and language preferences, and economic resources.
The
preponderance of professional opinion, supported by theory and
research, is that the media, as part of a complex set of factors, can
and does have a significant impact on parents and parenting.
Weaknesses in the Media’s RoleOn
the other hand, a number of drawbacks seriously undermine the ability
of the media to contribute effectively to the well-being of parents and
families. Of these drawbacks, four are especially important:
Easily accessible sources of information for the media on parenting topics are scarce and scattered.
Contributing
in particular to the inaccessibility of information is the fact that
researchers and resources related to parenting are embedded in hundreds
of organizations and dozens of disciplines, with no centralized access
to information.
Parenting advice conveyed by the media is often confusing and conflicting.
Parents of adolescents receive less information and support from the media than parents of younger children.
The
relative inattention to the parenting of adolescents occurs in spite of
the fact that adolescents have unique and critical developmental needs,
and the failure to meet those needs create serious risks for
adolescents, families, and society. Parents play a critical role in
influencing outcomes for teenagers, but they often lack the information
and support to do so effectively. Exacerbating the problem are negative
images of teenagers in the news and entertainment media, and misleading
cultural messages suggesting that parents are not important in the teen
years.
Entertainment television has been largely overlooked as a
source of influences on parenting and as a vehicle for supporting and
informing parents. What little is known about parenting in
entertainment programming is mixed, both reassuring and troubling, and
attempts to influence them largely untried.
RecommendationsStrengthen the knowledge base about parenting, in particular by holding consensus-building conferences.
It
is widely agreed that the time has come to bring together professionals
from a broad range of disciplinary and cultural perspectives in order
to consolidate, integrate, and analyze both research and practical
knowledge about parenting. It would be important for both researchers
and practitioners to be represented in the discussions, as well as the
media, policy makers, advocates, and parents themselves. The degree of
consensus that has been achieved in recent initiatives, such as
information on early brain development prepared for the “I Am Your
Child” Campaign, illustrates the potential for this kind of process.
Implement
a comprehensive, integrated communications strategy to disseminate the
emerging consensus about parenting in ongoing and targeted ways.
Information
emerging from clarification and consensus about the importance of
parenting and of particular parenting practices will only be as
effective as its dissemination. A carefully planned and executed
communications strategy is needed to ensure that, as it emerges, the
information reaches parents, media, advocates, policy makers, and
professionals who work with parents, such as parenting educators,
health care providers, early childhood educators, teachers, and mental
health providers.
Within the strategy, special attention also
needs to be paid to the areas where there are gaps in current media
efforts. This can be accomplished by designing and implementing special
initiatives to target parents who are not effectively reached by
current media efforts, including parents of adolescents; to engage
media that are not being effectively utilized, especially entertainment
media; and to create a permanent resource center to make information
accessible to the media and others in an ongoing way.
In other
words, this report recommends that significant attention be given to
the coherence and the accessibility of the knowledge base about
parenting, as well as to a few major gaps in the media’s attention to
parenting.
The stage is set to take media initiatives in parenting education to a higher level,
one that enhances significantly the media’s ability to support and
inform parents, and to reinforce and extend existing efforts on behalf
of today’s parents, children, and families.
In nearly every
category of mass media, from books and magazines to television and the
internet, messages are being directed to parents to an unprecedented
degree. Yet little attention has been given to the quantity of quality
of those messages, or to their impact on parents or parenting.
Similarly,
little attention has been given to the opportunities offered by the
media to have greater and more positive impact on parents and on the
growing parenting education movement at a time when, by all accounts,
such support is badly needed.Newest and Best Resources: Harvard School of Public Health
*Simpson,
A. Rae. Raising Teens: A Synthesis of Research and a Foundation for
Action. Project on the Parenting of Adolescents, Center for Health
Communication, Harvard School of Public Health. 2001.
Download 101-page report at www.hsph.harvard.edu/chc/parenting
Helping America’s Youth.
US Government Resources and National Programs List:
http://guide.helpingamericasyouth.gov/programtool.cfm
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy
Ten
Tips for Prents to Help Their Children Avoid Teen Pregnancy from The
National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
www.thenational campaign.org www.stayteen.org
www.teenpregnancy.org
Practical Parent Education, Plano, Texas. Over 70 programs and 100 parenting tip sheets. www.practicalparent.org
Search Institute publishes a catalog of material for all ages.
Search
Institute's 40 Developmental AssetsŪ for Teens are concrete, common
sense, positive experiences and qualities essential to raising
successful young people. These assets have the power during critical
adolescent years to influence choices young people make and help them
become caring, responsible adults.
See The Five Action Strategies
for Transforming Communities and Society: Creating a World Where All
Young People Are Valued and Thrive.
www.search-institute.org
Newest and Best Publications:Benson,
Ph.D., Peter L., Judy Galbraith, M.A., and Pamela Espeland.
What Teens
Need to Succeed: Proven, Practical Ways to Shape Your Own Future.
Search Institute and Free Spirit Publishing. Minneapolis, MN. 1998.
(Adopted by DISD.)
Cline, Foser, MD, and Fay, Jim.
Parenting
Teens with Love & Logic: Preparing Adolescents for Responsible
Adulthood. Pinion Press, Colorado Springs, CO. 1992, 2006.
Eberstadt,
Mary.
Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral
Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes. New York, Penguin Sentinel. 2004.
Kurcinka, Mary Sheedy.
Raising Your Spirited Child Workbook. 1998.
__________________.
Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child is More
Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, Energetic. 1998.
National
Clearing House on Families and Youth. Including
Guide to Starting a
Youth Program. US Department of Health and Human Services. www.ncfy.com
Nelson,
Ed.D., Jane.
Positive Discipline: The classic guide to helping children
develop self-discipline, responsibility, cooperation, and
probelm-solving skills. Ballanetine Books, New York. 1981, 2006.
________________,
Lynn Lott, M.A., M.F.T., and H. Stephen Glenn.
Positive Discipline:
A-Z: 1001 Solutions to Everyday Parenting Problems, Revised. Random
House, New York. 1993, 1999.
Nolte, Ph.D., Dorothy Law and
Harris, Ph.D., Rachel.
Teenagers Learn What They Live: Parenting to
Inspire Integrity and Independence, New York, Workman Publishing
Company. 2002.
Nowinski, Ph.D., Joseph.
The Identity Trap: Saving Our Teens from Themselves. New York, AMACOM. 2007.
Pearson,
Carol.
Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find
Ourselves and Transform Our World. Harper Collins, NY. 1991.
www.acs.appstate.edu
Pieper, Martha Heineman, Ph.D., and William
J. Pieper, M.D.
Smart Love: The Compassionate Aletrnative to Discipline
that Will Make You a Better Parent and Your Child a Better Person. The
Harvard Common Press, Boston, MA. 1999.
Pollack, Ph.D., William.
Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood. Henry Holt and Company, New York. 1998.
Popov,
Linda Kavelin with Popov, Ph.D., Dan and Kavelin, John. The
Family
Virtues Guide:Simple Ways to Bring Out the Best in Our Children and
Ourselves. New York, Plume. 1997.
Riera, Michael.
Uncomon Sense for Parents with Teenagers. Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA. 1995, 2004.
Wagle,
Elizabeth,
The Enneagram of Parenting: The 9 Types of Children and How
to Raise Them Successfully. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1997.
West,
Diana.
The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development is
Bringing Down Western Civilization. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
* See Strategies on pages 6 through 11 from the report on
Raising Teens at www.hsph.harvard.edu/chc/parenting
Heather Carlile, a certified LPC and LMFT Supervisor, whose private
practice is in Richardson, TX, specializes in depth psychology and marriage
counseling. Her unique transpersonal philosophy, which she uses to relieve
anxiety, depression, guilt, anger and grief, integrates archetypes and the Enneagram.
She created and co-facilitates Designer
Marriage with her husband, Dr.
Jack Waldenmaier in classes and on the radio.
more...
