Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen
The Essential Conversations You Need to Have with Your Kids Before They Start High School
-
-
4.7 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
The fourteen essential conversations to have with your tween and early teenager to prepare them for the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead, including scripts and advice to keep the communication going and stay connected during this critical developmental window.
“This book is a gift to parents and teenagers alike.”—Lisa Damour, PhD, author of Untangled and Under Pressure
Trying to convince a middle schooler to listen to you can be exasperating. Indeed, it can feel like the best option is not to talk! But keeping kids safe—and prepared for all the times when you can't be the angel on their shoulder—is about having the right conversations at the right time. From a brain growth and emotional readiness perspective, there is no better time for this than their tween years, right up to when they enter high school.
Distilling Michelle Icard's decades of experience working with families, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen focuses on big, thorny topics such as friendship, sexuality, impulsivity, and technology, as well as unexpected conversations about creativity, hygiene, money, privilege, and contributing to the family. Icard outlines a simple, memorable, and family-tested formula for the best approach to these essential talks, the BRIEF Model: Begin peacefully, Relate to your child, Interview to collect information, Echo what you're hearing, and give Feedback. With wit and compassion, she also helps you get over the most common hurdles in talking to tweens, including:
• What phrases invite connection and which irritate kids or scare them off
• The best places, times, and situations in which to initiate talks
• How to keep kids interested, open, and engaged in conversation
• How to exit these chats in a way that keeps kids wanting more
Like a Rosetta Stone for your tween's confounding language, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen is an essential communication guide to helping your child through the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead and, ultimately, toward teenage success.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this encouraging guide, Icard (Middle School Makeover), a contributor to the Washington Post's "On Parenting" column, helps parents navigate the strange waters of having middle school–aged children. She shares "what works best in keeping parents and kids connected," introduces the "BRIEF" model for conversations (begin, relate, interview, echo, and provide feedback), and walks readers through conversations on 14 topics, among them criticism, reputation, and sexuality. In the chapter dedicated to technology, Icard recommends parents hold a family meeting to "create a philosophy about what role we want technology to play in the family." The chapter on money suggests parents explain that "when an advertiser can make you feel bad enough about some part of yourself that you'll buy their product to fix it, they make more money." Icard convincingly builds the case for beginning to talk about crucial issues before a child turns 14: "You've got to start practicing ways to have balanced, thoughtful, rational conversations early and often so that skill gets cemented in your child's brain." Parents at a loss about how to start and maintain important conversations with their growing kids will find much of value in these strategies.
