For our kids, navigating successfully through the scary and confusing growing-up years in our fast-moving, complicated, and hazardous society is a great challenge. How can parents intervene to help assure a safe and positive journey for their kids? Parents must find a way to ensure that their child is listening with interest; then they must ensure that the message sent and received is the right one.
How can we reach kids, get them to listen, fire up their enthusiasm about setting and achieving positive goals, and spur them to action?
Let's look at two of the reasons that kids don't always listen to advice from home and school. As a result of working with young people for more than a decade, I have come to realize that part of the problem is what is being said and part of the problem is who is doing the talking.
What is wrong with what is being said? Typically, kids are told to
- Study harder
- Try harder
- Practice harder
- Make better choices
- Be more outgoing
- Get better grades
- Use their heads
These messages are meaningless if youngsters are not taught and shown exactly how to do these things. In other words, kids often are not given enough information to set and achieve positive goals. They feel powerless to affect their own dreams or please their parents and teachers, so they stop listening to defeating adult messages and tune in to undemanding voices. Kids align themselves with a peer group that accepts them as they are. They idolize and emulate sports heroes and rock stars and actors who seem to "have it all together" because they have control over their worlds and the approval of millions.
This lack of effective communication between parents and children is destroying the strength of our families and the dreams of our youngsters. Research has shown the correlation between poor communication within our family structure and the social problems that threaten our kids: drugs, alcohol, crime, teen pregnancy, and school dropout rates. Yet we can work on the quality of the content of our messages by making sure we are delivering effective examples and "how-to" strategies and not just sermonizing or admonishing.
That brings us to another reason our kids "tune out" the ideas of their parents. To young people, parents seem "to have all the answers" and to be very capable. Everything kids aren't. A tough act to compete with when you are an inexperienced, insecure kid who messes up regularly! And not a favorite source for more "lectures."
Whether we like it or not, young people between nine and 18 usually listen to advice from a "respected" third party with far more interest than they will listen to their parents, even though the parents are the ones who love them and consistently put their well-being first.
I know this to be true from personal observation and experience, but also from the tremendous response I get from kids who have used "Making a Difference," the motivational youth program I have developed over the last the years.
The feedback I have received from parents also supports the strength of third-party advice. Whether it's because the kids know I played in the NBA or because they know I expect their best and tell them step-by-step how to get it, they do, in fact, listen and take positive action.
Perhaps it is because the program is theirs -- it belongs solely to them. It is an arrangement between them and me, completely independent of school and home. The program arrives in the mail and is addressed only to them and is intended for their use only. Follow-up contact is directed to them personally. I have witnessed incredible growth in these kids, academically and athletically, socially and artistically, so I know they are listening! And after all, I am not their parent -- a definite advantage. Consider using a third party as a motivational resource for your youngster.
--Jim Brogan
Jim Brogan has a varied background as NBA basketball player, professional speaker, instructor, author, and financial analyst.
