Catch Me If You Can…You Can’t Control My Mind

Can you remember the first time your teen refused to do what you asked? Or you got the passive obedience treatment – “they told me to sit and not go anywhere. In my body I was sitting but my mind was walking towards the door”.

Teen years represent conflict years for both teens and parents. The teen is both an adult and a child. The problem is that since the teen is just coming out of the child stage, parents tend to still see them as children. The teen on the other hand thinks he is no longer a child and does not need to always be told what to do. Whether as parents, teen workers, teachers, controlling teens is a mirage. Even when they do what you ask, you may still miss the more important issue – owning the mind of your teen.

Instead of control, think connect. When you connect with your teen, you will be able to have conversations that lead the teen to take the action you are proposing. The modern era has opened the teen to a new world – a world where their opinion counts. Almost everything is decided with a vote, reality shows, elections, rightness of a lifestyle, best movies, best songs, best videos, the winning idea. If everyone else is saying their opinion matters they can’t understand why are you not?

When you aim for connection, your teen will be able to believe and trust that you want the best for them.

Psychologist often calls the teen years, the stage of temporary insanity. They want to dare everything and explore the entire world around them. Don’t kill the sense adventure but equip them so they can always make the right choices. Unless they make the decision, they won’t own it.

Connecting with your teen will help you equip them to make the right choice

Make that choice – lead by connecting not by controlling

Solid Foundation, a teen-focused NGO I volunteer with conducts trainings for parents, teachers and significant adults in the lives of teens on how to face challenges of raising teens in a contemporary world. A brief profile of the organisation is found here. 

When Silence is not golden …a tale of cuisines, cars and movies.

Solid foundation, a teen-focused NGO I volunteer with will be having its 22nd annual teen camp from August 24^th – September 1^st 2013. So for this month, I’ll be doing a couple of teen focused blogs

“I think the French make better sausages than the English and France is definitely a much interesting place to visit than England. For my eighteenth birthday, I would like a bug for a car – I really wish I would get that.” And so for the next one and half hour, she told me about her cuisine choices, holiday locations, movie interests and anything else that came along the way.

I must confess that this was not my intention. It was the penultimate day of this teen camp and I had just met her in last one week. Everyone had great reviews on who she used to be – a model Christian girl. Now she was sleeping around and everyone else made it a point of duty to tell her that she was doing the wrong thing. All this must stop, they all said. I agree but remembering the Jesus story with Samaritan woman I decided to go a different approach.

Back to our discussion, after over one hour of small talk I asked her in a straight give-to-me tone ‘have you had sex before?’ Yes she replied. “How many times?” I asked. “I’m not sure but it’s just with seven guys”. We went through the history of the different guys, the things she easily falls for and the very first time. The first time was not a sweet experience, she was raped.

After it happened, she ran to a friend’s house and that’s where she had to be picked home from. When she got home, neither of her parents was willing to talk about it. How she really wanted to talk about it. She had been saving her virginity all this while and it had been fiercely taken from her. To her, it meant they did not think it was worth keeping in the first place so she decided to freely share it with more people.

One of the challenges of parenting is that your teens think you should know the right thing to do at all time. Most times parenting is by trial and error. But one thing never to forget is that after experiencing hurt, most teens need someone to talk to. They tend to be quite cathartic. Don’t aim to get it right the first time but do it.

The story I just shared had its own happy ending. After we spoke, she made a decision not to do it again. To help her decision, we made a plan to talk at least 3 times a week for next couple of months. Over a year later, she called me up one night saying she felt the strong urge to do it. Guess what, I told her I was not afraid she would do it. By calling me, I told her I knew she wouldn’t go ahead. She didn’t and she’s a better person. It all started when someone spoke with her.

Make that choice to talk with the teenager around you; you never know it might save a life. If you have been touched this, do take time to leave a comment below