When Roseline came to see me she was stressed and frustrated with the way her relationship with her 15-year-old daughter, Tasha, was developing.
She said Tasha was driving her crazy. She'd noticed during the past 18 months that her daughter was more argumentative but less communicative, her moods were unpredictable and nothing Roseline could say would help. Tasha wasn't doing as well at school as they had hoped and she had become secretive. She wasn't coming home at curfew, homework wasn't completed and she made life hard for the family.
Roseline felt that if something didn't change soon the family would fall apart.
If all this sounds familiar, it could be time to change the dynamics of the family and to do this it's important to start at the top - with the parents. When parents respond using coaching techniques, then the teen will respond to the new methods.
I encouraged Roseline to learn some new methods and take a new approach, to become a parent coach rather than a controlling manager. We implemented 10 steps in the family. Here are three of them:
Mind matters: The first step in helping Roseline become a parent coach was to look at the transition in a child's mind once they become a teenager. A child between the age of seven and 11 has the cognitive development ability only to think in concrete operations. Concrete thought allows a child to classify objects in terms of dimensions such as size, but abstract problems remain elusive.
This is when life was quite easy for Roseline, because she was in control of Tasha, and Tasha responded in a way that her mind could grasp.