by Dennis Coates | Nov 16, 2015 | Adolescence, Education, Encouragement, Parenting, Parenting Books, Teen Success
What will the next step be? College? A job? Technical training? A gap year? Missionary work? Military service? Marriage and a family? Every parent who has raised a teenager to this threshold is concerned that the child will be able to handle the challenges and...
by Dennis Coates | Oct 26, 2015 | Adolescence, Parent-child Communication, Parenting Books
To be the best listener you can be, I believe you need two, closely related skills: active listening and empathy. I learned active listening in 1976, and I’ve been practicing it and writing about it ever since. The core skill in active listening is to check what...
by Dennis Coates | Oct 12, 2015 | Adolescence, Adolescent Brain, Critical Thinking, Education, Parent-child Communication, Parenting, Parenting Books, Teen Success
These days, parents hear a lot about the “teen brain” in the popular media. The message is that the “prefrontal cortex” (PFC), the area of the brain in charge of controlling impulses, is still under construction – that this a big reason...
by Dennis Coates | Sep 21, 2015 | Education, Parenting, Parenting Books
Did you read my review of Reset Your Child’s Brain (2015), by Victoria Dunckley? Dunckley is a psychiatrist who has treated hundreds of young people who suffered from behavior disorders caused by excessive screen time (video games, cell phones, tablets, TV,...
by Dennis Coates | Sep 21, 2015 | Mentoring, Parenting, Parenting Books, Strong for Parenting
If you’ve never gone to war or if you’ve never had to stay behind when your spouse is deployed, you can never fully appreciate the worry, loneliness and hardship of trying to raise a family not knowing if or when the family will be together again. Or how...
