Troubled Teens Resources

What do troubled teenagers need? The threats to a healthy and fulfilling adolescence range from drug abuse, to steroid abuse, to online computer obsessions to adult predators to self-mutilation to teenage pregnancies and the list goes on and on.

Teenage drug abuse wouldn’t exist if a teenager fully understood their worth as a human being and were taught the skills to create a life worth living. There has to be a foundation, an instillation of core values that stand an at-risk teen good stead when confronting the temptations and threats that they must daily contend with. They need to learn to frame the world in a way that allows them to see the many options and choices that they have to create a productive and satisfying life.

Writer Charles Watson offers 7 core skills to inculcate in the at-risk teen.
Expressiveness

Young people need to have the ability to talk about what really matters — feelings, friends, dreams, wishes and frustrations. Having authentic conversations rather than all the glib chatting that seems so easy to come by is an important outlet for developing healthy relationships and attitudes. Parents should mold their communications to a child’s particular preferences, including communicative style, most accessible time of day and degree of directness that can be tolerated.

Respect

Young people need to feel respect for their parents. While this might, on the surface, seem to be more about parents than about kids, young people who are able to look up to their elders tend to feel more secure and less angry in their daily lives and are then better able to resist being drawn into risky behavior by their peers. Parents need to be clear about expectations and know how to follow through with reasonable consequences when they are not met. And it also means parents who act in ways that are worthy of respect, including how we make and amend for our mistakes, handle people and ideas with which we disagree and generally treat others.

Mood mastery

Young people need to be able to moderate their own internal emotional states and to know how to calm themselves down when they are angry or upset. Without this ability, children will turn to external sources for structure and soothing — like drugs or peer groups or push adult rules until forcibly controlled. You can model specific ways to soothe intense emotional states — anger, anxiety, fear — that fit a child’s particular temperament.
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