Developing a child’s sense of responsibility is one of the most important skills parents need to instill, and the tween years are the perfect time to start! When you teach your children to take responsibility for their tasks, decisions and actions, you help them develop into conscientious human beings who know how to be successful as an adult. Of course,
Read moreSetbacks in life are inevitable. No matter how hard we try, we all fail sometimes. However, even though we all know that failure is a normal part of life, we fear it. We wonder how it will define us, what other people will think about us, how we will recover, and whether we will ever be successful. Ironically, despite our
Read moreIf you’re a frequent reader of this blog, then you are probably a little tired of hearing “be a role model.” It’s usually our first go-to with any behavior we want our teens to adopt. We’ve mentioned it for encouraging creativity, tolerance, healthy eating, exercise, compassion, adaptability, positive stress management, healthy relationships, honesty, money management… okay, you probably get the
Read moreResearch shows that teenagers with involved parents are more likely to make better decisions, stay out of trouble, and develop into successful, independent adults. However, during adolescence, parents and children often begin to spend more time apart. It’s natural for teenagers to explore relationships with friends and other people outside their families as they try to establish their independence. In
Read moreTo develop into a productive adult, teens need to learn to do things on their own, but it can feel hard for parents to give them that chance. Sometimes we think it will just be easier to get chores done ourselves, sometimes we don’t want to let go of control, and sometimes we don’t feel confident that our children are
Read moreToday’s blog tries to summarize strategies for successfully parenting teenagers found by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MIT’s Raising Teens Project was created to “make research more accessible and useful to those who work with and on behalf of parents, adolescents, and families.” In some of our previous blogs, we have covered many of these same ideas, but we
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