About Connection Centered Parenting
Parental Support
is Crucial
for Teen Success
The best successes in helping teens come when parents are equipped with the necessary skills to focus on and connect with their teenagers.
Teens Feel Misunderstood and Overwhelmed
Teens often feel overwhelmed by their changing lives and responsibilities, feeling isolated because their parents are either too busy, frequently angry, or simply do not understand their challenges.
Maintaining Connection
is Key
A consistent theme in therapy shows that maintaining a connection between teens and their parents is crucial for navigating the difficult years of adolescence effectively.
After spending 23 years as a social worker focused on supporting kids and teens
 I Noticed SomethingÂ
the best successes come when parents are supported in the skills that are needed to focus on and connect with their teen.Â
In the therapy room working with teens on their own, time and again, I hear the same stories.
Teens are often left feeling
BOTH EXCITED AND OVERWHELMED
with their changing lives and level of responsibility.
They frequently feel like they are expected to figure it out because their parents are busy, or get mad all the time, or simply just don’t get it.
While completing family sessions, I frequently worked with the family to do a “wax museum” activity in which the teen gets to “sculpt” their family members in the forms that feel most accurate to family life. Over and over again, I see a museum filled with angry and discontented family members who are turned away from each other in trying to “deal” with each other.Â
I've found that maintaining this connection is the key to a teenager being successful in life. It became evident to me that a key part of the challenge in raising teens successfully is to develop the skills needed to maintain connection through the most difficult years teens and their parents face. It became my mission to find as many families as I could to help support the development of these skills.
