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On Taking People Seriously

On Taking People Seriously

by | Mar 22, 2018 | Mental Health, Parenting

Over the last few years, I’ve grow to be a huge fan of the band The Avett Brothers. For a while I didn’t know a ton about who they were – I just loved how their music sounded and pretty much had them on repeat at our house. In fact when one of the songs comes on the radio, my two year old daughter shouts the title at the top of her lungs. Yeah, we might have a problem…

Recently a documentary was released on the Avett Brothers called May it Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers – which I highly recommend. What struck me about the documentary was the relationship central to the band – the two brothers who are the primary singers/songwriters. They are four years apart and, well, brothers. How do they make it work? Most sibling-based bands don’t really last because, well, they are family. Families fight. Bands fight even harder. When you mix them, they typically don’t last very long. These guys have been doing it for almost twenty years!

So why have they stood the test of time? Well, I’m sure there are many reasons, but there was one specific scene in the documentary that told the story for me and got me thinking more about how we interact with teenagers.

The scene started with the younger brother sitting in the studio hammering out a new song, but he had gotten stuck on some of the lyrics. But what made this scene work is the older brother taking the song seriously. It was striking. It was obvious the younger brother was proud of the song, but really wanted the older brother’s finishing touches – even his blessing in a way. After the older brother listened to the song itself and understood what the song was was about, he was able to help the younger brother figure out the best path forward, and the two of them ended up creating an incredible song.

And in so many ways, this is what helps a sibling band – one that on paper is destined to fail – last almost twenty years.

And I believe that this idea is something that creates a protective factor for a teenager – adults who take teenagers seriously.

For most adults, teenagers are so easy to dismiss. I hear all the time people say, “Oh, they are just teenagers!” And sometimes it’s really hard not to take that stance.

Teenagers tend to be:

– Moody

– Unpredictable

– Inconsistent

– Hard to pin down

– Always trying new things

– Pushing back or against

– Contrarian

That is a lot to handle for so many of us. It is much easier to just dismiss than to actually engage. But, I think that is where we miss opportunities with teenagers. What if we took them seriously? It doesn’t have to mean they are right or they need to be corrected. Even if we think what they are going through is rather silly or unimportant – it’s still their stuff.

And, what has it meant to you when someone older or wiser takes you seriously? Maybe they thought what you were going through was rather silly or unimportant. But they still listened. They still empathized. They stayed and heard you.

My guess is it made all the difference for you.

And my guess is it will make all the difference for the teenager in your life.

So the next time a teenager is sharing something about their day or a problem they might be facing – take it seriously. It might surprise you how well they respond – and come back to you again.

Chris Robey, Teen Life’s COO, has worked with teens for over a decade and strives to help students see the best in themselves.
Defiance or Survival?

Defiance or Survival?

by | Mar 15, 2018 | Mental Health, Parenting, Support Groups

You are running errands at Target. You see a mom with her pre-teen. The girl mentions that she is hungry, and her mom explains that they are almost done at the store and will get some lunch once they get home. As you stand in the check-out line, you see her eyeing the candy. She asks for some. Again. Mom says, “No.” As you watch, you see the child has opted to steal the candy from the store as opposed to waiting until they get home.

Pause for a minute. How would you handle that situation? What if you were the parent? If you are like most parents I know, you proceed to lecture your child on stealing and add a few lines about how you told her she could eat at home. You drag her back into the store, purchase the candy, make said child apologize, and then take her home to do chores and earn the money back you just spent. Or you repossess her allowance money. You confiscate the candy and promise more consequences.

Now, think of the most challenging youth you know. It may be a student from your classroom at school. Maybe a teen from your church. It may be a youth who is involved with the legal system. It may be your friend’s child. It may be your own child. How do you really view their challenging behaviors? As defiance? As a lost cause?

Each day as parents, school staff, and youth workers, we confront behavior. Sometimes it’s minor disrespect. Sometimes it’s fighting in a hallway where someone is physically hurt.

Consider this:

Is a child or youth’s inappropriate behavior intentional defiance or is it a survival skill?

Even asking that question probably raises a few eyebrows. Most of us have the same gut response. I told (fill in a name) not to do that. They did it anyway. They have no respect for me and need to have (fill in a consequence). But is that really the full story? For our children, we know their story and their history. For other youth – students we see twice a week at a sports activity or church, students in our support groups – we usually only know part of their story. It is much harder to see their needs.

In the words of Dr. David Cross, “Having compassion and understanding helps us to see the need. Seeing the need is changing your frame of reference so you realize that these aberrant behaviors are survival strategies rather than willful disobedience. If you look at your child’s behavior through the lens of his history, his actions make perfect sense. We don’t know all of the potential hurt so we can’t always understand what it takes to survive. How we view behavior changes everything.”

Is the behavior functional? No, most likely not. However, it isn’t fruitful to remove a child’s survival strategy, no matter how negative, without giving them a new strategy. Demanding a child stop stealing food without providing for the very real fear that they will not have food is not going to be successful. Demanding that a child use their words and not fists when they have had to fight to protect themselves or a family member will not change the behavior, without first providing another strategy.

A few questions to consider:

Who is the child or youth in your world that makes you feel like you are spinning your wheels?

How can you change how YOU see their behavior? Can you see their needs not just their actions?

What tools can you provide to the youth in your life in order to increase their success?

 

**The survival vs. willful disobedience concept was introduce to our team while attending a training on Trust Based Relational Intervention (TBRI.) More information on TBRI can be found here.

 

Beth Nichols is Teen Life’s Program Manager. With her background in social work and experience as a mom of 4, her perspective is invaluable.
It’s Time to Change the Filter

It’s Time to Change the Filter

by | Mar 1, 2018 | Mental Health, Parenting, Personal Development

Middle school and high school years are hard. They are full of uncertainty – about where to sit at lunch, why their bodies are changing, who likes them, and how to navigate these awkward teen years. And what about parenting?! It is full of questioning your own parenting tactics and their success on top of wondering if you can trust anything that is coming from that child’s mouth. Take all of these insecurities, add a jaded filter, and you have a complete and utter mess.

What do I mean by a jaded filter? Everyone comes into a situation with a set perspective (or filter). We refer to rose colored glasses. We ask if people see the glass as half empty or half full. We bring our backgrounds, ideas, past experiences, optimism, pessimism, trust issues, and more into every single conversation.

And that can change everything.

Recently, our staff went to a full-day training where the speaker showed this YouTube video. Hopefully you have seen The Sound of Music and won’t get the wrong idea after watching this video, but take a look at the power of perspective and background:

If you have seen The Sound of Music, you know that it is the opposite of a horror movie. But when you change the background music and take scenes out of context, it can take a completely different tone.

The same is true of our conversations. If we have in our mind that a conversation is going to be negative, we will see it through that light. If we pull every bad interaction out of context, we will only see that relationship through that lens. But our filters also have the power to improve situations – like if we assumed the best before starting a discussion. Or remembering all the good things that our teenagers have done instead of focusing on the bad.

This is a small shift, but it is crucial to our relationships, especially if we want to be good listeners. Here are a few tips on how to change our conversation filters:

 

Discover your current filter. First, you have to be honest and confront your own perspective. Before we can change our filter, we have to face the current one. Take a few minutes to think about past conversations. Identify what has affected your conversations, interactions and relationships. These questions are a good place to start:

  • Are you putting unfair expectations on a conversation? Where do these expectations come from?
  • Is there an unrelated, bad experience from earlier in the day that could affect a confrontation with your teen?

 

Address your teen’s filter. Just like you are coming into the conversation with a filter, so is your teenager. Maybe something happened last week that has made them angry at you. Maybe something happened at school to put them on the defensive. Maybe a different adult relationship has made them distrustful. In order to have a neutral discussion, you also have to address their filter. Ask them similar questions as the ones above. Clear the air and be ready to listen in order to find out about their perspective.

 

Reset both filters. Now that you are aware that you both have filters, the trick is to reset and change your filter to be less biased and more productive. We have to consciously set aside our filters to be open to the conversation in front of us. We also have to help teenagers set aside their filters as well. Try some of these tactics before your next conversation:

  • Be open and address that there could be something that is affecting the conversation.
  • Apologize if there is something that happened earlier to impact their filter.
  • Ask how your teen’s day has been before you jump into a conversation.
  • Ask, “What would it take to go into a conversation without any preconceived notions, ideas or judgements?”
  • Remember the things you love about each other before starting the discussion – focus on the good memories!

 

Let’s change our filters and have positive conversations with teens – no more horror filters, disrespect filters, anger filters, or disappointment filters. Each interaction can be a fresh start and a learning experience. How have you seen filters impact your own conversations? What others tactics can we use to change our filters? Share your ideas!!

 

Karlie Duke was in one of Teen Life’s original support groups and now is our Communications Director. She is passionate about encouraging students to live better stories.
Choosing Kind

Choosing Kind

by | Feb 22, 2018 | Mental Health, Parenting, Personal Development

“When given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind.” – Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

Before the holidays began this year, a new movie called Wonder premiered based on a book of the same title written by R.J. Palacio. This is a story about a middle-school boy named Auggie who has a facial deformity and struggles to learn to trust new friends as he begins his journey in a public school setting. He is bullied, shamed, and loses a bit of his child-like trust on this journey. More importantly though, Wonder reveals through several narrators how one act of kindness by one person can make ripples throughout an entire student population. This story really left me wondering about the way I treated my peers growing up and even now. I have asked myself, “Have I chosen kind over being right?” The answer is not always.

R.J. Palacio wrote this story after her own child had an encounter with a girl with a facial deformity, and her response was to remove her crying toddler and leave. Since that moment, she has felt guilt and anger about her actions. Why? Because she missed out on an opportunity to show her child how to react in kindness. She missed out on a moment to teach her child that just because someone looks different from us, our first response should never be to run away, even though that is often easier. We should choose kindness, even in uncomfortable moments.

The interesting part about how she tells the story of Wonder is that it is based on the children’s perspectives. The adults are shown through the eyes of their children which helps us understand a little more about what is being modeled in their homes. The bully in this story is shown with his parents one time, and that one moment is enough insight for us to see that he has only been told that he is never good enough. We see how a friend’s home life is nothing but a mother who drinks and is never there to support her. This friend ends up lying all the time and distancing herself from what she sees as a ‘perfect family’. These are teaching moments for how quick we are to judge others, to be right, and to justify our actions, but we are often slow to choose kindness.

Wonder does an excellent job of setting up on how our negative reactions can bring another person down. As Auggie struggles to cope with overtly negative interactions, he becomes distant, sad, and disinterested in things he enjoys. The thing that changes him slowly is when one person makes a choice to sit with him at lunch. That’s it. One person showed up and started a ripple effect. I know it may seem like a fantastical set up, that only one person can have an impact, but according to relationship experts, multiple positive interactions with one person can actually make up for negative interactions.

The magical ratio for positive to negative interactions is 5:1 and was originally developed by John Gottman. This ratio means that for every 1 negative interaction, it takes 5 positive interactions to overcome that 1 negative moment. How powerful is it that to overcome one negative comment we need five positive comments to feel better? Our human nature calls for us to need positive interactions on an emotional, physical, and spiritual level in order to thrive. Otherwise we simply struggle to cope as Auggie does in Wonder. I have no doubt that we can all remember a person who has hurt us and never made up for it in some way, those memories are more prominent because we need positivity to continue on. One moment of kindness changes everything within us.

Teenagers are primed to be shown how to be kind, what steps it takes to stand up to for themselves or for others, and the majority want to do what is kind but may be intimidated. Wonder talks about ‘precepts’ and how these are words to live by, they’re kind of like life quotes that reflect a person’s values. I think the easiest step to take in making a decision to be kind is to choose our own precept and then encourage teens to find theirs. R.J. Palacio even wrote a companion book to Wonder all about precepts because she believes it is important enough for everyone to understand how our thoughts speak into our words, and our words are turned into actions.

NPR did a quick interview with R.J. Palacio on her inspiration which I touched on briefly.

This link gives more insight into how the 5:1 ratio can be applied in a classroom like setting.

Shelbie Fowler is currently a volunteer for Teen Life and has her Masters in Family Studies. She is passionate about being an advocate for family life education in order to grow families stronger.

Combating Fear in the Face of School Shootings

Combating Fear in the Face of School Shootings

by | Feb 17, 2018 | Mental Health, Parenting, Resources, Support Groups

Teenagers are pushed to face their fears and overcome them all the time. They fear failure, rejection, stress, the unknown, and so many other things. As adults, our job is to help them give voice to their fear and then figure out how they can find courage in the face of difficult times. But what happens when fear is deadly, random, and unpredictable? How do we respond to the understandable fear after a school shooting?

Fear cannot be ignored.

We see fear of bullies, failing a test, heights, being left, parent’s divorcing, humiliation, missing the shot, letting people down, getting sick. And now teenagers have to add the fear of getting attacked at school? We have to add the fear of our children not coming home at the end of the day?

It isn’t fair. It doesn’t make sense. But it is real and it is something that needs to be addressed.

While we do not have any answers for the tragedies that are taking place all over our country, here are a few ways that we can help combat fear.

 

Be ready for the crisis.

It is easy to react after a tragedy occurs. Once something horrible happens, we look for answers and start having conversations. But what  if we had already started these conversations? What if the ground work was already laid so that when something horrible happened, we were prepared?

It is important to talk to teenagers and kids about what is going on – in their school, city and country. They know something is wrong. They can read adults, and most have access to social media or the internet where they are probably getting more details than you would see on the evening news. We can’t avoid fear and difficult situations that happen across the country. So we need to start having conversations today. Develop a relationship with your student where you can have difficult conversations all the time. That will make these hard topics more manageable.

Here are a few tips to being ready for conversations:

  • Be shock proof: Remain calm when talking to your teens. Be genuine, but don’t let your own fear color the conversation.
  • Ask good questions: Resist the urge to lecture, but instead ask questions about what they have heard and how they are feeling.
  • Keep it appropriate: Conversations are important, but only if they are helpful. Don’t scare or over-share if your kids aren’t ready for it.
  • Be part of the solution: Get involved. Use the resources of schools and organizations, but don’t put all the responsibility on others.

 

Know your resources.

Speaking of being ready for a crisis…this is crucial! When something happens, you don’t have to walk through it by yourself – utilize the resources in your community, school and church. Maybe a resource is as simple as having another trusted adult on call if your teen would rather talk to someone outside of your house. Or be prepared if your child wants to talk to a counselor (whether it be their school counselor or another professional). Ask your church and school what resources are available – is there a series coming up that will address things like school shootings? Are support groups available on their campus? Is there an article or podcast that gives a different perspective?

There are so many resources available, and it will be incredibly helpful if you already know where to look first. Here are a few places we recommend:

  • Youth Specialties Blog: While these blogs are aimed at youth workers, they are a great resources to parents as well!
  • Teen Life: I may be a little biased, but Teen Life offers lots of great resources from our blog and podcast to Support Groups on school campuses.
  • Google: Earlier this week, someone asked us for an online resource after the Parkland shooting and by searching “how to have conversation with child about school shooting,” I found several great options!
  • Preventative Resources: Use resources like Michele Borba’s book or blog to talk about healthy things kids need to focus on. Start with this blog post!
  • Local Resources: Know what organizations are in your area! The Warm Place and Real Help For Real Life are two in Fort Worth but do some research around you.

 

Believe your kids.

It is so important to believe your kids, especially in times of fear and trial. I think sometimes we dismiss students as being dramatic or exaggerating. While teens can be dramatic, and they can exaggerate some details, is it worth not believing them if they are being completely truthful?

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, several students said that they weren’t surprised by the identity of the shooter. They had always joked that he would shoot the school. How terrible is that? Not only that they perceived the danger, but that they either didn’t share their concerns with adults or those adults didn’t take them seriously.

We have to give our teens the benefit of the doubt. If they express worry about a classmate or friend (whether that worry is about violence or suicide or depression), we need to listen. Validate what they are seeing, teach them how to get help and how to find resources for their peers.

 

 

Fear is all around us, and it is not something that is going away, especially with the digital world we live in today. Your teenagers are more aware of what is going on around the world than we ever were. They probably knew about the Florida school shooting before you did. Instead of hiding from fear, let’s learn how to cope, have positive conversations, and find helpful resources.

 

What are some resources you have found in times of tragedy? How have you helped teens combat fear?

Karlie Duke was in one of Teen Life’s original support groups and now is our Communications Director. She is passionate about encouraging students to live better stories.