How do you “get through” to your teen in tough conversations? You know “listening” is important, but they may not engage with you to have something to listen to? You are concerned. You may even be afraid…
There are so many dangers for teens today?
- You’ve read the headlines of kids ordering drugs online and having them delivered at home.
- You think your teen is safe online. But cyberbullying abounds and just last week, a co-workers teen attempted suicide.
Those are just 2 examples. There are more in the Facebook Group, Brave Parents Raising Teens. One thing, I can offer now is that the perfect script about scary topics won’t help you make the impact you and your teen need. Say what? So, what will? What’s the secret?
Co-creation…
Co-creation in conscious parenting is the highest form of respect.
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Co-creation goes beyond the non-coercive parenting approach. Let’s face it, there’s no “convincing today’s teen of anything,
In co-creative conscious parenting, power and control are no longer the basis of relating. They don’t work anyway! And power sharing can’t be the basis of relationship because parents will always have more social experience and legal status than children. The power differential will always influence the relationship.
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But co-creation in relationship defines the relating by responsibility, not power. In co-creating relationships with our teens, we share the responsibility for the relationship. Co-creating trusts that our teens have their own wisdom and establishes the emotional and spiritual safe space to call it out, supporting and nurturing their wisdom.
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How is this achieved? By communicating from the heart in every interaction.
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When we do our own inner work, we can be as emotionally and spiritually present as possible in as many interactions as we can. To the best of our ability, we free ourselves of projections. We learn conscious communication skills that represent our own truth in real time, in real conversations which carry an underlying invitation to our teens to share their truth.
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Not only is co-creation a constant invitation to connect on a heart-level by the way we communicate our heart messages, it has the added benefit of modeling respectful communication for our teens’ futures. The conscious communication skills that voice our truth is the very way teens can respectfully stand for themselves with us and every other relationship as they grow.
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Co-creating (sharing responsibility in relationships) is the path for parents to take with teens to demonstrate how to be a “successful” adult. And isn’t that our parenting purpose to raise teens to be responsible, contributing adults?
