Adolescence -

What Parents Can Do

Principle and Rationale, with Examples for Adults Who Care for Young Adolescents

Reinforce and support desirable behavior

a. Give many chances to learn and practice positive behaviors and skills. Youth learn new behaviors or skills contextually – not through lectures. Opportunities to practice provide a context for learning to do better with feedback and coaching. Because of young adolescents’ brain and social development, they are more likely to make errors in new or distracting environments, where perceived embarrassment is high.

• Involve the youth in a variety of activities, projects, games, etc. in your home and in the community.
• If the youth makes a mistake, give another chance to try again.

b. Praise and reward positive behaviors. Early adolescents’ puberty and brain changes mean they need lots of support, encouragement, and praise to try, learn, and master new skills. If adults are not reinforcing, teens will seek rewards elsewhere—from computer games, risk-taking peers, or substance use. Lack of reward and reinforcement also worsen problems like ADHD and depression.

• Provide praise for a job well done and for acts of kindness. For example, leave written notes praising a positive act once or twice per week in youth’s purse, wallet, or backpack, or on their pillow.
• Provide rewards for a job well done. For example, allow a special privilege for consistently doing a good job on homework everyday in a week. Or use “prize bowls” with small random rewards weekly for positive actions.
• Create a “Pride Wall” at home where youth can put up weekly self-selected positive work or mementos.
• Consider using the “paying rent” concept rather than “takeaway” for problematic behaviors. That is, keeping family rules (e.g., homework, behavior, or chores) provides the “rent” for desired activities.

c. Express warmth and caring to teens to dilute the natural tendency to view the world negatively. Increases in sex hormones during puberty bring about brain changes that lead early teens to view the world more negatively–especially when adults are absent, cold, or threatening. These brain changes often increase anger, irritation, sadness, and perceptions that others have hostile intent. Increasing warmth and caring at home, at school, and in the community tends to dilute this developmental trend and produce positive outcomes.

• Spend time everyday in positive, loving interactions, especially over food or fun activities.
• Use kind words, tone, and gestures when giving instructions.
• Notice at least one specific loving or kind act that your child did each day.
• Schedule walks with your youth twice per week, both for exercise and for positive conversation.
• Have “weekend news” reports, where your youth reports the highs and lows of the past week, and what they might want to repeat or change the next week.

Monitor and be involved

a. Stay involved in teens’ lives; observe and participate in their activities. Teens need positive, caring adults to be involved in their lives. Staying involved gets more difficult as pre-teens become teens, but it remains just as, if not more, important. Too often, adults let go just as youth are needing the strong guidance and support of adults. By actively observing and participating in teens’ performances, games, events, projects, and activities, we show teens that we care, we understand their interests better, we get an opportunity to have fun together, and we gain a window for monitoring their activities.

• Learn about and take an interest in the things your teen is interested in.
• Ask your youth to talk about their goals and make a “goal map” of why, who, what, and how he or she might achieve those goals.
• Schedule your youth’s events in your personal calendar.
• Help out with and attend their events, games, and performances.
• Participate together in activities that your teen enjoys.

b. Monitor adolescents’ daily activities. Until very recently in human history, young adolescents were largely in the company of many family or community adults, and rarely in the company of large numbers of same-age peers. When same-age peers are together with little or no supervision from wise adults, the peers tend to reinforce risky behaviors in each other. This can be very dangerous, given the fact that early teens’ brains are not yet well skilled at assessing risk.

• Keep track of where youth are, whom they are with, and what they are doing when they are not with you, especially after school.
• Praise and reward your youth for coming home on time.
• Get landline phone numbers of where your youth reports to be going, and call those numbers every now and then to check on how things are going.
• Check in with the parents of your child’s friends to make sure that all gatherings are well supervised.
• Minimize the time your youth spends at home alone. If your youth must be home alone, give special tasks to complete and follow up on later on whether or not they were completed. Having tasks to complete decreases the likelihood of engaging in problematic behaviors.
• Ensure that all co-ed activities and all parties are well supervised.
• Ensure that visits from friends of the opposite sex occur only in public, common areas of the home.

c. Listen to youths’ ideas and concerns. Studies of adolescents consistently show that teens who feel “unheard” are more likely to be rebellious and difficult. By providing structure and paths for early teens to voice their concerns, worries, goals, and ideas, we help teach patience for change and model the powerful skill of participation in problem solving and improving social settings.

• Ask your youth about how they would solve a problem at home or at school.
• Ask your youth what they would do about local issues or what they think about different topics and ideas.
• Do surveys from newspapers and magazines together to initiate talk about your similarities and differences.

Structure and guide

a. Make clear rules, and gently and consistently enforce them. Early teens’ brains are still developing the ability to control impulses and think through the negative consequences of their actions. Clear, consistent rules and practices provide a developmentally appropriate bridge for young adolescents to succeed and be safer. Overly harsh or inconsistent consequences can backfire and lead to aggression, destructive acts, and sneaky behavior. Because young adolescents’ brain changes cause increased hostility, inattentiveness, and risk taking, it is developmentally helpful to remain consistent, calm, and non-harsh to motivate youth to follow the rules and minimize rebellion.

• Clearly state a few key rules.
• Give praise for following the rules.
• State clearly that you will not permit use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs by the youth.
• Have a rule that your youth do homework before leisure activities on school nights.
• Use the When/Then Rule (e.g., when homework done, then may do video/computer after dinner).
• Set non-harsh consequences for rule infractions and enforce them consistently (e.g., no time with friends for 1 week for experimenting with tobacco or alcohol).
• Consider using a lottery for penalties or fines for minor problems, which helps a youth realize that that negative consequences can be a little bit unpredictable.
• For noncompliance or minor rule breaking, begin by asking the youth to perform the appropriate behavior. If they correct themselves, praise them. If they do not comply a second time, give a warning and choice to comply, or face a mild, negative consequence. If s/he does not comply after the warning, deliver the consequence matter-of-factly.

b. Provide many opportunities to engage in positive activities; provide support for schoolwork and positive peer choices. Engaging in healthy and positive behaviors helps youth learn positive skills and make new friends, and helps to rule out engagement in problematic behaviors. In addition, more opportunities for positive behaviors mean more opportunities to praise and reward youth for positive acts.

• Give your teen meaningful jobs or roles at home that result in positive recognition and responsibility.
• Engage youth in supervised, healthy, enjoyable activities.
• Provide the necessary support for your youth to succeed in school.
• Communicate with your child’s teachers about how your child is doing in class, and work together to solve any problems.
• Limit the youth’s access to places where at-risk youth hang out unsupervised.

c. Structure positive sibling and peer interactions; guide youth away from troublesome peers. Positive sibling and peer interactions can buffer a child from many ills, and multiple negative interactions pose substantial risk for poor physical or mental health. In addition, troublesome peers greatly increase a teen’s risk for experimenting with problematic behaviors, such as substance use, antisocial behavior, and sexual activity.

• Set up a weekend or weekly family reward for when siblings cooperate and do not fight.
• Regularly play board games or do projects that teach turn taking, patience, cooperation, or teamwork, and provide positive fun or socializing.
• Limit contact with problematic peers to well-supervised settings only.

d. Set limits on “screen time” and media content. Electronic media can disrupt youth’s social skills, contribute to inactivity, disturb their sleep, and expose them to violent or other inappropriate content and to temptations to engage in risky behavior.

• Keep TV, video games, and internet out of your teen’s bedroom.
• Limit total screen time to 2-3 hours per day.
• Make R-rated or equivalent media off-limits without your prior scrutiny.
• Watch media together with your youth, and talk about how the values presented fit with your family’s values.
• Set a rule that phone calls and text messages go “off” at 10pm.

Model and teach

a. Provide many culturally relevant role models of positive, healthy behavior. The media saturate young adolescents with negative models. Limiting their exposure to negative models and assuring their exposure to positive, culturally relevant, local role models of skilled and healthy behavior increases their connection to positive acts.

• Connect youth to wise adults they can relate to and learn from.
• Point out and discuss local “heroes” doing positive things in the community.
• Limit youths’ exposure to negative, unhealthy role models in the media, and teach them to question how often that sort of behavior really happens in the real world.

b. Provide effective instruction in academic, social, problem solving, and health skills. The media rarely provide such instruction, and it must happen formally for a youth to develop the skills that lead to success as an adolescent and adult. Changes in the brain during early adolescence also make it important to revisit skills first taught in elementary years.

• Open up discussion with your youth about values, emotions, health, friendships, sexuality, and substance use. Your youth needs and wants your guidance and wisdom in these matters.
• Be an “askable” parent—convey that you are accepting and open to any questions about these or any other difficult topics.
• Notice and praise your child for handling anger, frustration, or disappointment well.
• Ask your youth how certain actions or people could help or hurt them achieve a heartfelt goal.
• Brainstorm together solutions to problems at home or school.
• Ask your youth to prepare one meal per week that is healthy for the whole family.

Reference: www.earlyadolescents.com, Principle and Rationale, with Examples for Adults Who Care for Young Adolescents, date accesse 19 March 2016