As a parent or someone in a parenting role, your influence is essential in your teen’s success. There are intentional ways to grow a healthy parent-teen relationship while instilling confidence in your teen to persist toward their goals and succeed in all areas of life. Everyone faces challenges, yet mistakes and failures are necessary for your thirteen-year-old’s learning and development. With your guidance and support, mistakes become a tool for learning and growing confidence.

The key to any parenting issue is finding ways to communicate to meet your and your child’s/teen’s needs. The steps below include specific, practical strategies and effective conversation starters to prepare you as you address any issue with your child/teen.

As you address any issues, you build the foundation for your child’s/teen’s development.

Your focus on cultivating a safe, trusting relationship and promoting life skills can create:

● greater opportunities for connection, cooperation, and enjoyment

● trust in each other

● a sense of well-being and motivation

Engaging in these five steps is an investment that builds your skills as an effective parent or someone in a parenting role to use on any issues and builds essential skills that will last a lifetime for your child/teen. Throughout this tool, there are opportunities for children/teens to:

● become more self-aware and deepen their social awareness

● exercise their self-management skills

● build their relationship skills

● demonstrate and practice responsible decision-making and problem-solving

This five-step process helps you and your child/teen with any issue. It builds critical life skills in your child/teen. The same process can be used to address other specific parenting issues (learn more about the process[1] ).

Whether it’s your eleven-year-old confiding in you that they don’t feel ready for fifth grade, your twelve-year-old crying that they have no real friends, or your fourteen-year-old hiding homework to avoid facing it, these steps and associated questions can help you support your child.

Tip: These steps are best done when you and your child/teen are not tired or in a rush.

Tip: Intentional communication[2] and healthy parenting relationships[3] will support these steps.

Based on your child’s/teen’s development milestones, you will want to focus on the following as you move through the five steps:

● Your youth’s sense of belonging or desire to “fit in.”

● How your youth experiences “self-talk” and how to reframe negative self-talk.

● Normalizing experiences: youth at this age tend to believe they are the “only ones” experiencing specific challenges.

● Your youth’s transition to the middle school environment, new academic practices, and relationships with friends, peers, and teachers.

Getting your child’s/teen’s input will help you better understand their thoughts, feelings[4] , and challenges related to their feelings when confronting challenges. When your child/teen provides