Article by Bob Lancer
(see many more articles at www.boblancer.com)

 How To Win With Your Teen

  PART 1

Winning with your teen is about you and your teen winning together. It is about winning for your teen, as your success with your teen aligns with his best interest.  It is not just about satisfying your desire to feel in control and looked up to, though that occurs naturally to a reasonable degree as you relate with your teen in a way that allows her to feel a truly loving connection with you.

By the time a child reaches the teen years, his actions largely depend upon his choices.  You have lost much of your power to make him do much of anything at all.  When parents fail to understand this, they invest too much effort into control, which ends up making them feel increasingly powerless, frustrated and flaberghasted and often incites more destructive rebellion from their child. 

To effectively lead your teen into responsible choice-making may require you to do the opposite of what your automatic, emotional reactions dictate.  It also may conflict with your logic and beliefs.  For instance, you might logically presume that reminding your teen that he has homework to do aligns with your desire for him to do his homework. But it can have the opposite effect.  You might believe that your teen deserves your angry diatribe you find out that he has not been doing his school work despite his promises to you that he has been, but this reaction may be the opposite of what he really needs from you to be honest with you and to work harder at school.

The two elements that prove essential for a teen's positive performance include the teen's sense of a great relationship with you, and his sense that you really, deeply understand where he is coming from.  In the absence of these two elements the teen feels unhappy, depressed, disappointed. He stops caring that much about his life, and this leads him to make poor, easy, lazy choices that express that lack of care.

Another essential element the teen needs is for his parents to model a sufficient degree of genuine happiness and care for their own lives and for the choices they make.  You cannot have a happy child who spends much time around unhappy parents.  The attitude of the parents rubs off on the child.  That is why invariably when you find a teen with an attitude problem it can be traced back, at least in part, to a parent's attitude problem. The parent is usually unconscious of that attitude problem within himself, and therefore projects that problem onto his child, not realizing that the negativity he is picking up on is first and foremost his own.

If you found this article helpful, Bob Lancer's full length book, Parenting With Love, Without Anger or Stress will surely be a book you will love.  It presents an in depth look into what causes children to behave as they do, and what you can do in a balanced, loving, conscious way to support the fulfillment of your child's healthy, happy, glorious potential.