1-2-3 Magic Teen: Communicate, Connect, and Guide Your Teen to Adulthood

By Thomas Phelan

Help your teens grow into the very best versions of themselves!

From rule-breaking and risk-taking to defensive communication and disrespect, parenting a teenager can feel like modern warfare--but it doesn't have to be that way. In 1-2-3 Magic Teen, Thomas W. Phelan, an internationally renowned expert in child discipline and mental health, explains how to better understand your teenager, which problems are not worth fighting over, and why your child's behavior likely matches the definition of a normal adolescent! With helpful, straightforward advice backed up by research and parent-tested strategies, 1-2-3 Magic Teen will help you establish a calmer, more respectful home and family life and show you how to guide your teenager into healthy, functional young adulthood.

This book offers practical strategies to address common issues such as attitude, independence, technology use, academic pressures, and social life. Dr. Phelan provides guidance on fostering open communication, cultivating emotional maturity, and supporting your teen's growth into a responsible, resilient adult.

You'll also find tools and advice tailored for the challenges of a teen lifestyle, including:

• Forgetting to do chores
• Absence in family outings
• Drop in grades
• Missed curfews
• Parties and drinking
• Work responsibilities

Whether you're trying to navigate daily communication challenges or the larger issues of adolescence, 1-2-3 Magic Teen provides the tools you need to maintain a positive relationship with your teenager and help them navigate their path to adulthood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781492637905

Thomas Phelan

Dr. Thomas W. Phelan is an internationally renowned expert, author, and lecturer on child discipline and Attention Deficit Disorder. A registered Ph.D. clinical psychologist, he appears frequently on radio and TV. Dr. Phelan practices and works in the western suburbs of Chicago.

Book preview

Author

PREFACE

YES, IT’S FINALLY HAPPENED. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, your cute little preschoolers have turned into teenagers! Parenting is suddenly a whole new ball game. But—you’re wondering—what kind of ball game is it?

Now, looking back, raising your two- to twelve-year olds seems no more difficult than going out in the car for ice cream. The prospect of raising teenagers, on the other hand, feels like getting on the creaky Mayflower for a voyage across the Atlantic.

When your kids were little, you had three fairly straightforward tasks: managing obnoxious behavior, encouraging good behavior, and bonding or building relationships. So what’s your job description now? Your adolescents seem less accepting of you intruding into their affairs. They also seem less interested in you! You feel you’re being replaced by their friends, their tech devices, and their own mysterious internal ruminations.

Believe it or not, you don’t have to worry. As we’ll explain in 1-2-3 Magic Teen, this is the way it’s supposed to be. Your kids are pulling away from you, as they should be, and a new part of your job description is mastering the new art of letting go. After all, ten or fifteen years from now, you don’t want your child still living at home—nor would they want to be there.

With 1-2-3 Magic and the younger kids, you actively managed difficult behavior, positive behavior, and relationship building. With 1-2-3 Magic Teen, you’ll still need house rules, a knowledge of your possible intervention roles, and (like 1-2-3 Magic) an awareness of when it’s time to stop talking. But today, as the parent of a teen, your biggest jobs are going to be understanding contemporary adolescence, managing your reaction to your teen pulling away from you, and staying in touch as best you can. Teens do not always detach gracefully, and it is absolutely essential that you do not take personally their sometimes awkward maneuvers to gain independence and establish their identities.

So, welcome to your new world. We hope that 1-2-3 Magic Teen, like 1-2-3 Magic, will help you navigate the temporarily choppy waters and arrive safely in port.

INTRODUCTION

The Snub

IF YOU HAVE A teenager, you’ve probably had an encounter like the one in the cartoon above at one time or other. After a long workday for you—and long school day for your sixteen-year-old son—it’s dinnertime, and you’re trying to start a pleasant conversation.

Dead end—so far. But you’re not about to give up that easily.

That’s it—you can’t seem to get anything else out of your teen. This same situation repeats itself every night. Meet the Snub—a grumpy, uncommunicative reaction from your child, which tends to appear around or before your son or daughter turns thirteen.

When you ask your nine-year-old daughter about her day, on the other hand, you get the Complete Evening News. Extended and enthusiastic self-revelation is no problem for her.

Your sixteen-year-old son is different. He’s quiet, even sullen-looking sometimes. What am I doing wrong? you wonder. All I’m trying to do is have a little talk. Is that too much to ask? What’s wrong with this kid?

Parenting: Then and Now

Some of you have come to 1-2-3 Magic Teen by way of the book 1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2–12. From the time your kids were toddlers through their tween years (nine to twelve), you used the relatively simple and straightforward strategies to maintain reasonable control over the children’s behavior, strengthen your relationships with them, and be better able to enjoy their company.

Now that you have a teenager or two, however, you notice things are changing. Parenting during the 1-2-3 Magic years (then), when your children were two to twelve, had a number of important differences from parenting during the teen years (now), when the kids are thirteen to nineteen (or even way beyond). Let’s look at these differences:

The Kids

THEN: The kids were cute and engaging.

NOW: The children are strange-looking and often seem sullen or irritated.

Young kids enjoy and seek out the company of adults, and they seem to think that their parents know everything. They are quite impressed by their parents’ abilities, and they like to emulate and imitate these strengths.

Teens, on the other hand, avoid parent contact and think it’s absolutely uncool to be seen with Mom or Dad in public. Adolescents are frequently critical of their parents’ behavior, feeling that their parents are out of touch with reality.

Control

THEN: Your small children were helpless; you were the biggest influence in their lives.

NOW: Teens control most of their own behavior; peers, technology, and media have more influence than you do.

During the 1-2-3 Magic years, your kids were quite helpless, especially as infants, and you were the largest influence in their lives. If you didn’t like what they were doing, you could pick them up and put them somewhere else or use clever distraction or redirection tactics.

If you don’t like what your adolescents are doing, you can’t physically move them, and you can’t distract them. If you criticize your kids’ activities or even make well-intended suggestions for improvement, you are met with arguments or rolling eyes.

Parent Energy Level

THEN: You were fresh, young, and motivated; your parenting job was just beginning.

NOW: You are older, more tired, and have other things to worry about; your parenting job is 70 percent or more over.

Sure, younger kids can be exhausting (frequently!), but your physical and mental condition usually allowed you to be up to the challenge. Parenting was new, and its challenges were often—though not always—rewarding. You enjoyed talking to friends about your children as well as theirs.

The years you’re parenting teenagers find you with a distinct change in energy level. Though you keep going at a good pace, you don’t have the extra energy you used to have. You also have a number of other things to worry about, such as your own physical and mental health, the health of your parents, your job, marital issues, and perhaps financial concerns.

Your Job Description

THEN: Your parenting job was straightforward.

NOW: What is your job at this point anyway?

Your tasks used to be to control obnoxious behavior, encourage good behavior, and strengthen your relationship with your kids.

In just a few years, however, your teenagers will be leaving home. You look forward to that huge event and fear it at the same time. What are you supposed to do with them in the meantime?

Where to Start

Adolescents present their parents with a number of puzzling and difficult situations—just like the Snub described at the beginning of this chapter. That’s the bad news. The good news is this: if you can understand and accept the causes of the Snub itself, you’re halfway home when it comes to living with and managing a teenager.

I don’t know what to do with this kid anymore, many moms and dads grumble regarding their teens. That’s what this book is about: exactly what should you do with your adolescents. And—equally important—what should you not do with them.

Before you try anything, it is essential that you understand several things, so the next part of this book is called Straight Thinking. To engage in straight thinking, it is critical that you appreciate (and remember!) what adolescence is like, what falls under the category of normal teen behavior, and why and how teens take risks. Then you need to recognize how your teenage son or daughter’s behavior makes you think and feel. Trying to accomplish anything without this knowledge is like trying to drive at night without your headlights.

Then comes the bottom line: your new job description as the parent of an adolescent. In chapter 5, I’ll offer you a basic template for the profession. The job proposal has five pieces. Each of the next five parts of 1-2-3 Magic Teen will deal with one of these pieces.

1-2-3 Magic Teen is not just about theory; it’s about actually changing things at your house. Accomplishing this change will be much easier—like, a whole lot!—if you can recall your life as a teenager. What serious issues did you think about, how did you behave, how did you feel about your parents, and what kinds of things did you do that your parents knew nothing about?

In appreciating your teens, it may also be of great assistance if you know something about the lyrics to the music they like.

So what’s your kid thinking about? Let’s find out!

PART I

Straight Thinking

CHAPTER 1

Appreciating Adolescence

CHAPTER 2

What’s Normal?

CHAPTER 3

Risky Business

CHAPTER 4

Diagnosing Your Own Reactions

CHAPTER 5

Your New Job Description

1

APPRECIATING ADOLESCENCE

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN FOURTH GRADE and high school, it gradually dawns on your kids that life is presenting them with a big job to do. Or rather, big jobs to do. These Herculean tasks are the essence of growing up, and they’re the same ones that you had to deal with when you were young.

Often listed under the banner of establishing one’s identity or proving oneself, these daunting assignments include the following:

1.Making sense out of life: the world, other people, and yourself

2.Finding and keeping friends

3.Finding and keeping a sexual partner/soul mate

4.Establishing a job/career

5.Physically leaving home and establishing economic independence

6.Discovering how to enjoy life on a daily basis

As time goes on, your children come to realize that these tasks have to be done largely alone. No one, no matter how well-meaning, not even parents, can do these things for anyone else. But teens also realize that all their friends are in the same boat. This fact provides reassurance as well as sometimes a disturbing sense of competition.

Teenagers have mixed feelings about life’s assignments for two reasons. First, they’re not sure they can live up to all these challenges and wind up being reasonably happy. TV, movies, religion, parents, and politics all present drastically different views of the world and of human beings. In addition, you can’t control the behavior of would-be friends, and it’s hard to even understand—much less control—the behavior of the opposite sex! The idea of leaving home may become more and more attractive as the kids get older, but adolescents often have little idea as to how that job can or will be accomplished.

Second, teenagers aren’t sure they want to accept all these tasks, especially finding a job and establishing economic independence. Pink Floyd once sang in a famous song about the machine. Isn’t the machine the lair of the Man and the Establishment? Isn’t the Man the head of the Establishment, which was put into place to exploit people and bring them down? And isn’t the Man probably a male Caucasian who has acquired quite a bit of wealth through questionable activities and who is not about to share it? So who in their right mind would want to join all the phonies in the Establishment in the first place?

But then again, if you don’t join, where does that leave you? Unfortunately, kids in our society have a lot of time—from the ages of eleven to about twenty-two or so—to mull over this dilemma.

Sexual Partners and Soul Mates

While the friend and career issues are very important, the sexual partner/soul mate finding–problem can be obsessive during the adolescent years. The problem is infinitely compounded, it seems, by new feelings regarding sex and romance (for the boys) and romance and sex (for the girls). Strangely, many parents of teens are not only unsympathetic but often critical of their sons’ or daughters’ goofy romantic behavior.

Adolescents know there are two parts to the sexual partner/soul mate problem. The first is finding your companion. Unfortunately, finding someone to love and falling in love are only the first (and probably