Michael Riera has amazing knowledge about teenagers. I highly recommend his book Uncommon Sense for Parents with Teenagers. Here is part 2 of 2 parts of a brief summary of his book.
From Uncommon Sense for Parents with Teenagers by Michael Riera, Ph.D
Writer and psychologist Theodore Lidz, gives a well-rounded description of the adolescent stage of life:
As a consultant, you must save your “power plays” for health and safety issues; everything else is negotiable on some level.
As a manager, you were quite content to take their feedback personally, as a reflection of you; as a consultant, you must learn to not take most of their feedback personally, since it is often more about them than about you.
A manager-parent tries to ensure that the child makes the “best” decisions.
A consultant-parent focuses on helping her teenager develop and exercise “decision-making muscles.”
Adolescence is, in part, an active training period en route to adulthood.
Thus, there is room for “bad” decisions that are really “good” decisions.
Or as Mark Twain once said, “Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.”
The seemingly conflicting issues of asserting independence and behaving responsibility are actually two integral parts of the growing up process.
As a consultant-parent, work to develop trust in your adolescents’ growing judgement, who to turn, work to keep their parents up-to-date on their developing responsibility skills.
Breeches of responsibility and independence are seen for what they are; missed opportunities not to be taken personally or to be construed as complete failure.
The consultant model avoids treating adolescents as children (over-parenting or over managing) and treating them as adults (under-parenting or abandonment.)
As a consultant, you willingly give up the illusion of power in favor of real influence.
Clinging to pseudo-power over a teenager is what inadvertently leads him into accepting sneakiness and lying as viable strategies within the parent-adolescent relationship.
In the long run, the shift from manager to consultant is vital and essential for the parent-adolescent relationship.
With consultant parenting, I (Michael Reira) am not advocating laisez-faire parenting; quite the opposite; for consultant-parenting is often demanding and time-consuming. Here’s the payoff, though; it is also much more rewarding for both adolescent and parent.
How challenging is it for you to shift from being a manager to a consultant? How do your kids know that you are managing too much?
I strongly recommend this book. I’ll be teaching how to create a closer and more cooperative relationship with your teenager in my 7-week complete webinar series Is My Teen Crazy or Am I? Be the Anchor in Their Storm. The webinar starts on January 29, 2013. Go to my website to find out how you can truly change a challenging parent-teen relationship and actually like each other, most of the time!
Follow this link: https://bridges2understanding.com/hp/webinar-details.
©2013 Cynthia Klein has been a Certified Parent Educator since 1994. She works with dads, moms and organizations who want more cooperation, mutual respect and understanding between adults and children of all ages. Cynthia presents her expertise through speaking, webinars, and private parent coaching sessions. She is a member of the National Speakers Association and writes the Middle School Mom column for the magazine Parenting on the Peninsula. Contact Cynthia at bridges 2 understanding, bridges2understa.wpstagecoach.com or call 650. 341.0779.
