Raising teens
Most young people and their families experience some ups and downs during the early teen years. The child in your care needs you now more than ever, even if it isn’t obvious in the way they behave. The compassion you show and the way you advocate for your teen in these first few years at high school and in their community are hugely important. It helps restore their optimism and pride, and gives them the strength and self-belief they need to think differently about their future.
Strategies for problem-solving
Learning how to cope with challenges and disappointments doesn’t come easily for anyone. Carers play an important role in helping the kids in their care learn how to solve problems.
At the beginning, you’ll need to help your teen work through their problems, using some of the tools and strategies described here. Eventually, you’ll be able to pull back and let them work through problems on their own. Being able to sort things out for themselves will be a big confidence-booster.
Take the fear out of failure
Sometimes kids with low self-esteem may take failure very hard, or might be too scared to look for a solution in case they fail. Help your teen understand that making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn. Tell them about the times you made mistakes or failed, and talk positively about what you learned and how you feel about it now.
Comfort the worrier
Reassure your teen that their brain is forever learning new skills and that they will get better at things the more they practise them. Finding answers and solving problems might seem hard now – but it will get easier.
Identify the problem
Problems are often wrapped up in a lot of emotion. It helps to put aside the arguments and focus on the facts. So instead of the problem being ‘Why don’t you care more about your school work?’ it becomes ‘What needs to change so that you start getting your school assignments done on time?’. Factual problems are easier to solve than emotional ones.
Look for reasons
Talk with your teen about how and why the problem has developed. Listen without interrupting – you might discover something about the situation that you didn’t know.
Make a list of solutions
Write down all the possible solutions that you and your child can think of. These could be realistic or crazy – it doesn’t matter at this stage and the more open you are to ideas, the more comfortable your teen will feel. Don’t offer any judgments or opinions while the ideas are being collected.
Evaluate the solutions
Go through the solutions and make notes about the positives for each one, and then the negatives. Solutions where the negatives really outweigh the positives can be crossed off the list. Then it’s a matter of going through the remaining solutions to decide which one is really the best one. It might help to give each solution a mark out of 10 to guide the discussion.
Make a plan
Once you’ve decided on a solution, you’ll need to work out how to make it happen. Talk with the child or young person about who needs to do what and when. If the solution requires having a conversation with someone, for example if your child needs to ask a teacher for more time on a school assignment, then it might help to practise the conversation.
Look back on the solution
Deciding on a course of action doesn’t mean the problem has been solved. Check back in with your child to see how things are going. If everything has gone well, then it’s worth stopping to talk about how problem-solving together helped. If it didn’t, then you might need to come up with a better solution.