Reviews for Your Defiant Teen: 10 Steps to Resolve Conflict and Rebuild Your Relationship

The average rating for Your Defiant Teen: 10 Steps to Resolve Conflict and Rebuild Your Relationship based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-29 00:00:00 Rob Gardiner Extremely helpful at bringing both a parent and a defiant teen up to where they can communicate and work on the underlying issues that have grown up in their parent-child relationship. I especially appreciated the humbling realization that I was doing it all wrong.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-24 00:00:00 David Harmon This is basically the rewards-and-consequences plan for teenagers already outlined in Taking Charge of ADHD: The Complete, Authoritative Guide for Parents, with more detail. That's exactly what I thought it would be, so I was surprised to feel disappointed. The author is not quite as sympathetic to parents as he was in Taking Charge, and having a teenager means I already get talked down to plenty, thanks tho. Some ideas I particularly disliked were: *Teen should be paid for everything they do. We're in a position to pay kids for chores now, but I hated reading advice like this when we were a poor college-student family. So poor parents are just SOL? The author repeatedly asks, "Would you go to work if no one paid you?" Maybe because I am raising boys, I have strong opinions about this topic. A house is full of unpaid labor waiting to be done, and statistically men have trouble doing it. Because no one pays them. There has to be some sense of personal and social responsibility instilled. On principle I refuse to pay kids to clean their own rooms or their own messes. Paid chores in our house involve doing things for others or the whole family. *Gifts from parents and things kids bought with "their own money" are irrevocably theirs. Legally this is true, but as their legal guardian in a society that has a stake in my sons turning out to be decent humans, I can claim eminent domain whenever I see fit. I can't possibly foresee all manner of ways he can abuse a gift before giving it to him, and even if I could, forbidding it in a written contract is practically giving him a to-do list. The whole, "It's your Xbox but I pay for the electricity" thing is unenforceable -- unless you actually shut off the electricity -- and is just a roundabout, legalistic, and toothless substitute for confiscation that teens are not dumb enough to think is any fairer. *The Q and As were largely like this: Question: Your advice is not working. Answer: You must be doing it wrong. I probably would be more open to the author's suggestions if I were still as desperate as when I started the book. I was just getting into it when my son had a mysterious come-to-Jesus. I have no idea what happened. One day we were in the vice principal's office talking to the police about whether he'd be charged for his misdemeanor, and like a month later he'd distanced himself from his trash friends, stopped hating his brother with the fire of a thousand suns, and started getting along with the family better in general. An angelic visitation seems more likely, but IF anything we did had an effect on his road to Damascus, it was due to some principles I got from Taking Charge that are also in this book: *Looking for and reinforcing the positive. I'm really bad at this. I've always kind of operated under the assumption that if he's behaving, it's out of self-interest, and therefore doesn't deserve any sort of praise. Like, if he does his chores and practices piano without asking, it's only because he wants Xbox time, and he gets his Xbox time, verily he has his reward, right? But even if I'm right, it's counter-productive to withhold verbal reinforcement. I've had to retrain myself to ignore his motives, or at least question my motherly omniscience. I've been really stingy with praise in the past, and I can imagine that hasn't helped. Certainly it doesn't hurt anything to tell him I'm happy I didn't have to remind him to do his chores. *Spending time together. This is obvious, but it took me a long time to be okay with the amount of TV time togetherness requires. When we began to see there are worse ways for him to pass the time, I got more lax about family screen time. (He might grow up to be a lazy adult who watches Netflix all day in our basement, but that's better than being a highly motivated criminal, right?) It gives us something to talk and laugh and have feel-feels together about. Our relationship really needed that positive infusion. *Don't get emotionally reactive. This is a hard one, but someone has to be the adult in the relationship, and by all accounts that's supposed to be me. Ode to Celexa for helping with this. This book is great at breaking down the negative spiral that angry reactions send relationships into. *"Act, don't yack." He has ADHD; he's not listening anyway. In conjunction with the previous point, I've tried to focus on trading in my angry rants for consequences, ignoring all his claims of not caring what the punishment is. I may revisit this book when parenting a teenager inevitably humbles me again enough to be more receptive to its ideas.