At about the age of 12, plus or minus, a child’s body and brain are flooded with growth hormones to begin the physical development needed to become an adult. The growth period lasts about ten years. We call it adolescence.
During this gradual transformation, the child becomes a different person. They may not even be aware that the changes are happening to them. But as a parent you will experience difficulties, disappointments, disagreements, and conflicts that could not happen with the younger version of your child.
How will you react? What skills and wisdom will you engage to turn a negative situation into a positive, helpful one? Unfortunately, it’s quite rare for a parent to own the interpersonal skills to pull this off. All too often, it’s like pouring gasoline on a fire. All too often, the child loses trust in the parent and begins to pull away.
This is why I wrote the book, Connect with Your Kid: Mastering the Top 10 Parent-Child Communication Skills. I wrote it to be a how-to guide for parents of teens.
In the best case however, a parent will begin sharpening these skills years before their child reaches adolescence. Skills are behavior patterns. Brain cells need to grow together and connect into circuits that enable the skils. Establishing them takes lots of practice. Getting the reps takes time. Ideally, a parent will already have these skills by the time a child becomes a teenager.
So it’s an important book for any parent — for parents of teens, and for parents preparing for those difficult years.
The good news: the 10 skills you need to communicate effectively with your child are the same skills you need for all relationships.
Like all good books, it’s available on Amazon.
