teens
This post contains referral links. Thank you for using them! Jean Twenge, iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood* (*and What That Means for the Rest of Us) (New York: Atria Books, 2017) Review by Hal Young Cultural changes tend to be gradual, incremental things,…
We recently passed a huge cultural milestone – ten years ago, Apple introduced the iPhone, and our whole culture changed. The Pew Research Center reports that almost four out of five American adults own a smart phone and nearly three-fourths of teenagers have one of their own. Is this a good thing, or not? We’ve decided…
We've all seen them: the viral videos of parents smashing their kids' computers or sharing their stupid mistakes. Some of them are pretty funny and most of us have been tempted to do something outrageous some time or another, but is this really a good idea? Public shame has been a form of punishment throughout…
Let me be upfront. I love Star Wars. The original Star Wars was released when I was a young teen and I think I saw it 5 or 6 times the first month. It was a grand story of nobility and sacrifice, knights and princesses, tyranny and resistance, epic battles and spaceships. Spaceships! It was…
A dear sweet friend of mine nearly lost her son the other night. Just a few seconds, maybe a minute more and she'd be planning a funeral right now. Here's her story: Sam, our fourteen-year-old, came stumbling into my bedroom on Saturday night at ten, crying pretty hard and saying, "Mom, I don't know what happened,…
A mom asks, "My 16yo is driving me crazy! He won't do his schoolwork. He argues with everything we say. He blames someone else for everything that happens. He's not obeying and he's disrespectful. If we say he can't use the internet, he does anyway and says we don't trust him. He just won't grow…
A reader asks, " I have a seventeen year old boy . He has always been brilliant at school - loved school, loved life. Two years ago he began a downward spiral, he has bashed myself and his sister a number of times. He refuses to go to school. He wants to stay up all…
This morning a friend asked, "Do you think I should watch Fifty Shades of Grey with my teen and talk about it?" We're not as strict on media as some are. We think there's some value in watching things you don't agree with and analyzing and discussing them with your teens. Sometimes, though, there's more…
Q. A mom came up to us at a conference where we'd been speaking about entrepreneurship, "My teenage son is constantly coming up with business ideas, but I'm afraid to let him try. What if he fails?" We are not doing our boys a service to protect them from ever failing. When we do that,…
A few weeks ago, our son Matt came in and said, "Mom, you know it makes a guy feel good to take responsibility - to meet a need, to do something that matters. I had no idea how much fun it could be to be the one to take care of something." I think there…