Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen - The Essential Conversations You Need to Have with Your Kids Before

Informationen zum Autor Michelle Icard Klappentext The fourteen essential conversations to have with your tween and early teenager to prepare them for the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead, including scripts and advice to keep the communication going and stay connected during this critical developmental window.  “This book is a gift to parents and teenagers alike.”—Lisa Damour, PhD, author of  Untangled  and  Under Pressure Trying to convince a middle schooler to listen to you can be exasperating. Indeed, it can feel like the best option is not to talk! But keeping kids safe—and prepared for all the times when you can't be the angel on their shoulder—is about having the right conversations at the right time. From a brain growth and emotional readiness perspective, there is no better time for this than their tween years, right up to when they enter high school. Distilling Michelle Icard's decades of experience working with families, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen focuses on big, thorny topics such as friendship, sexuality, impulsivity, and technology, as well as unexpected conversations about creativity, hygiene, money, privilege, and contributing to the family. Icard outlines a simple, memorable, and family-tested formula for the best approach to these essential talks, the BRIEF Model: B egin peacefully, R elate to your child, I nterview to collect information, E cho what you're hearing, and give F eedback. With wit and compassion, she also helps you get over the most common hurdles in talking to tweens, including: • What phrases invite connection and which irritate kids or scare them off • The best places, times, and situations in which to initiate talks • How to keep kids interested, open, and engaged in conversation • How to exit these chats in a way that keeps kids wanting more Like a Rosetta Stone for your tween's confounding language, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen is an essential communication guide to helping your child through the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead and, ultimately, toward teenage success. Leseprobe Chapter 1 It’s Time to Learn a New Language You and your child have always shared a special language. When they were just an infant, it’s how you knew which cry meant “I’m hungry,” and which meant “I need a diaper change.” It’s how the mysterious squeal “Bargdor!” that stymied babysitters or grandparents was instantly clear to you as your two-year-old’s way of asking for her stuffed dog, Benjamin. From the day they were born, you and your child have been developing your own language, together. Until middle school. At around age eleven, kids begin the normal and necessary work of pulling apart from their parents. As tweens set their feet on the long path to adulthood, the first and most important thing they do is begin to establish their own identity. Simply put, this means figuring out who they are apart from you. Just as the job of language is to tie groups together, the job of tweens is to break ties apart. Although the process can be painful, kids who don’t begin to assert their independence in adolescence have difficulty establishing healthy partnerships later in life. A key element to avoiding toxic or codependent relationships is for each party to have a strong sense of self, but this only happens when we allow young people a chance to figure out their own styles, values, interests, and beliefs. While it helps to know this kind of separation behavior is on-track developmentally, and your child isn’t surly or contrarian for no good reason, it can still feel like rejection, made even more difficult when your child starts being exposed to a wider array of experiences, many potentially dangerous. It’s natural that you’ll want to protect and support them through it all. ...

Product details

• Authors: Michelle Icard
• Publisher: Rodale USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 05.09.2023
• EAN: 9780593137529
• ISBN: 978-0-593-13752-9
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 202 mm x 21 mm
• Subject: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Family