The learning is in the journey. Resolving conflict between teens and their families.

Valerie Canino works with parents and their teens to help them focus on resolving conflict and set goals to help create a success path.

Valerie doesn't consider teens a troublesome category to work with. She finds them very enlightening, feels they have a lot of wisdom and that they are misunderstood a lot.  The teen years are challenging. It’s a growth period and a stage in their life where they are learning much of what they’ll take into adult life - exploring and experiencing friendships and relationships as well as having academic pressures.

Much of Valerie’s work revolves around creating a strong connection between parents and their teens. This is a period of life when teens really need their parents. She feels that some teens struggle especially when making decisions and solving problems. She often finds when coaching teens that they want to do well and be resilient but they don't know how to do well. They get stuck and her coaching helps them get unstuck and find the answers.

Often they get stuck because of outside influences such as social media, which make them feel they are on the outside. Their own parents have expectations and want them to be successful but this looks different for every family. Teachers and other adults in their world can also add to the pressure by making them feel powerless and that they don’t have a voice – why say anything, why do anything if you’re not going to be listened to?

Nowadays teens aren’t really trained to think critically. Critical thinking programmes don't feature in the education process any more as schools especially are set up to get students through subjects. Critical thinking is essential though in helping teens work through a problem, realise what is going to move them forward and help them get the result they want. Schools can’t be responsible for everything so its up to parents to be responsible for the provision of a parent model. This can have a huge influence on kids. A parent helping guide their child through making a decision is extremely powerful but a lot of the times Valerie finds that although great strides have been made on parenting there is still some thinking in society that adults know best. It’s up to the parent to create a connection and allow their child to make mistakes and decisions and to figure out their own path

Being a guide is about creating a connection and allowing the teen to have their voice and express themselves. Letting them be who they want to be, focusing on the good and positive, having an open dialogue and parenting from within. Instead of telling them what to do, parents should be helping them figure out what to do. Parents may not like the decision but once the choice has been made the decision is owned. This experience of owning that choice allows them to learn and teaches responsibility and consequence all of which is very empowering.

There are several different styles of parenting which work for different ages but Valerie helps parents develop their parenting instincts so they don’t come from their head, ego anger and fears, but from their own instinct for what they think is best for their teen. They are listening within rather than taking on outside influences. Part of being a parent is setting rules and structures but there is also a need to allow teens to have an opinion and for this to be discussed freely. They need to be able to balance their expectations by setting their goal and having a plan to achieve it but also being open to other options in case it doesn't work out. The focus may be on the end result but a lot of the learning is in the journey. It's the plan, the need to execute the plan, to get things wrong but then having the resilience to move forwards.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

You can find out more about Valerie and her work at https://valeriecanino.com/ She is also the author of the upcoming guide Surviving to Thriving and the owner of the non-profit Mission A-Teenable, Inc., which seeks to offer coaching to teens at a low cost.