It can be frustrating and bewildering when your grown child still lives at home with you. You’re not quite sure how to help them become independent enough to leave the nest. Here are six tips to help you! Continue reading
Blog
How to Handle Your Child’s Challenging Behavior
Sometimes our teens and emerging adults are just straight-up challenging. They do things that get under our skin and frustrate us to no end. Your relationship strains and worsens over time, and soon you’re not sure what to do to make things better. Here are eight things you can do to handle your child’s challenging behavior while maintaining a positive relationship. Continue reading
How to Talk So Your Teen Actually Hears You
We adults are very wise. We have the benefit of hard-earned life lessons and perspective. So how come every time we try to impart some wisdom, our teens and emerging adults shut us down? In my experience from working with parents, usually there are a few things that can be in play. Here are 5 mistakes parents tend to make and how to fix them so your teen or emerging adult actually hears what you’re saying. Continue reading
24 Ways to Ground Yourself When You’re Feeling Overwhelmed
When overwhelmed with emotional pain, you need a way to untangle from it so you can better manage your feelings. If you stay completely absorbed by your negative emotions, then it’s more likely to snowball into stronger and more heightened negativity. Grounding is a set of strategies to help “ground” you back to the world around you. Instead of getting lost and overwhelmed in your head thinking about the past or future, it brings you back to present reality. Grounding has been shown to help people better regulate their emotions. Continue reading
How Do I Know if My Child Needs Therapy?
The typical mood swings and hardships of adolescence or emerging adulthood can sometimes make it difficult to know if this is typical of the developmental period or if something is wrong and needs to be addressed by a professional. This video gives you two things to consider before deciding to have your child see a therapist.
3 Ways to Address Fear of Failure
Fear of failure can hold back even the most capable of our teens and emerging adults. Though fear of failure is rooted in deeper issues that should be addressed in therapy, there are three things you can do in the meantime to address it. Continue reading
How to Create an Effective Living Agreement: A 15 Minute Mini-Training
I’ve heard mixed thoughts from parents about using living agreements with their emerging adult child living at home. Some say that living agreements feel too business-like and cold. Others report that the living agreement didn’t work. There are many that swear by using one. Most parents are willing to give it a try, but they aren’t sure how to go about forming one.
I’ve done parent workshops on this topic numerous times. I thought it’d be helpful to take my 1.5 hour-long workshop and distill it into a mini 15 minute webinar style training. I’ll explain why a living agreement is important, what areas you should consider setting boundaries around, and the five essential principles of creating a living agreement. Continue reading
Handle Office Politics Without Being a Jerk
It can be easy to get sucked into office politics. You want to get ahead at work, but you don’t want to constantly stab your colleagues in the back. Thankfully, there is a way to handle office politics without being a complete jerk! Continue reading
What the Research Says about Teens and Electronics Use
One of the parents in my Grown and Not (Yet) Flown group, an online support group for parents of teens and emerging adults, asked me to speak to the effects of electronics use on our teens and emerging adults, and I thought I’d share my findings it with my blog readers, too.
Instead of just talking anecdotally, I actually went to the research. I read a bunch of articles and shared some findings in my video and added some more findings in the body of this article.
My Teen or Emerging Adult Has No Motivation- Help!
It’s one of the most common complaints I hear from parents: My teen or emerging adult has no motivation to do anything! That’s almost never the case. Usually what’s happening, is your teen or emerging adult has motivation to do things that are not aligned with what you want them to do.
So what do you do? Watch and find out!