The coaching approach works great when parents coach teens. For the parent, it provides tools where they can still have influence while helping a son or daughter assume more and more responsibility for their lives. For the teen, it gets mom and dad out of the telling role and gives them space to share their heart and feel heard. These resources will help you use coaching tools to connect with your teen.
Stop Parenting and Start Coaching can help you make the change from a telling parent to a coach -- a change that often allows both parents and teens to start enjoying your relationship again. The practical, easy-to-read story format introduces you to some of the tools and techniques of coaching teens. Stop Parenting and Start Coaching can help you:
See yourself through your teen’s eyes
Understand what teenagers are going through
Improve communication with coaching techniques like listening and asking
Champion your teen’s gifts, dreams and goals while increasing his or her motivation to succeed
Stop Parenting and Start Coaching unlocks the process of coaching teens.
Here's one way to look at it. When your kids are very young, you do things for them: feed them, put them to bed, change them, burb them. As they get a little bigger, you use a directive style: instead of carrying them to bed, you take them to bed, or tell them, "No!" when they play too close to the street.
A few more years and you've taught them to go to bed on their own, and you just come in to say goodnight. They have boundaries that they understand and can interpret in different situations. You show them how to do something and expect them to do it on their own. By this point, you've moved from doing for through directingall the way to mentoring. Each step of the way you as a parent have given the child more autonomy and responsibility.
Then your kids enter the teen years. The next natural step is to move gradually from mentoring to a coaching style. However, many parents lack the tools to coach teens to think their own way through decisions or reflection on consequences of there actions. Parents who continue to use a directing or even a mentoring (imparting wisdom) style often meet resistance or rebellion. Learn to listen, ask and draw out a person's heart using coaching skills is a great tool for any parent.
