• Boys, Boys, Boys!

    Tuesday 17 November, 2009 - A Dose of Grose - 0 comments



    by Michael Grose ©

    Australia's No 1 parenting educator!

    It’s stating the obvious that boys and girls are different. One of the biggest differences is based around time and timing.

    Get your head around this and you start to unravel the secret to successfully raising boys………and reduce some of the frustration you feel at times when you compare your son with your daughters, or other people’s daughters.

    Here are three examples of how time and timing differs with boys, and how you can use this knowledge to your advantage:

    1. Their maturity levels

    Boys take longer to mature than girls. This is a source of great consternation in many families where the eldest is a boy preceded by a girl. If a boy’s sister is only a couple of years younger then there’s a good chance they are on a par academically and socially.

    First borns boys like to have a competency gap between themselves and those that follow. A younger sister (or brother) who matures earlier can be a source of consternation leading many eldest boys to give up, or else they give their sister merry hell!  

    Factor in their differing maturity rates when looking at boys’ school readiness, their transition to secondary school, and their move into adulthood.

    2. What motivates them

    Boys are more likely to live in the now than girls. A generalisation I know, but it’s true.
    Teenage boys, in particular, live for the moment.

    The trick is to use this knowledge to your advantage. For instance, avoid lecturing your teenager about how his current behaviour is going to impact on his adulthood. A 15 year-old can’t see life beyond next week let alone when he’s 25. So get into his timeframe when trying to motivate, dissuade or persuade him.

     For instance, you’re more likely to instil good sleep habits into boys if you point out that a good night’s sleep will help them play football/ guitar/surf/ pick up girls better than appealing to long-term health benefits.

    3. Their ability to focus

    Ever noticed how some boys will work at diminished capacity on things that are not important to them. This happens around schooling a lot. Give them a project that’s due in a week and they’ll amble along for six days and then focus like a laser beam the night before it’s due (often after a great deal of panic or a brief mental meltdown!)

    One way to get boys to focus is shorten their deadlines. Give them two days, not two weeks to do something.  Even better shorten the deadline and give them a practical purpose (or a tangible reward if you can’t think of a good purpose) for doing something –  “hand this work in tomorrow and you’ll get five minutes of free play!”

    Alternatively, if they drift along waiting until the last minute and then go into a mad panic, don’t sweat it. They may just be saving themselves for that big effort!

    The best gifts to give a boy revolves around time.

    Not just your time, although that is important, particularly for dads whose time boys crave. In fact, most boys crave some one-on-one time with their dads, as long as it’s done a way that’s relevant to their age.

    But there’s two other time aspects to consider. First, make sure you give them the time they need to mature and develop.  Don’t expect them to be what you want them to be on your timing. Most boys take their time growing up.  It takes patience and time to grow a boy ....... sometimes decade or so.

    The other aspect refers to communicating with boys.  Adults who do best with boys have a way of getting into their timeframe. They can talk with them about what interests them now, what’s important to them now, what’s grabbing their attention now. That’s relatively easy when your sons are under ten, but challenging when they are teenagers.

    You have to be a little cunning to get into a teenage boy’s timeframe.  A parent who picks up a teenage boy from a party at midnight, just may have a better chance of getting into this timeframe and getting a window into what’s important than one who parents from a distance.
    So time and timing are the keys!

    Give boys time to mature, give them your time and get into their timeframe if you want to get on their wavelength.

     

     

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    Michael Grose is a leading parening educator, renowned author of seven parenting books and runs parenting seminars around Australia.  He is also the 'Body & Soul' Parenting columnist of the Herald Sun, reaching 6 million readers every Sunday!  For more information about Michael Grose plus great parenting advice and resources visit www.parentingideas.com.au . 

     



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  • What's with teens today?

    Wednesday 4 November, 2009 - Educational Issues, A Dose of Grose - 0 comments


    by Michael Grose ©

    Australia's No 1 parenting educator!

    What's with teens today?

    Last week I took a phone call from a journalist from the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, who wanted my opinion on the current state of play with teenagers in Australia. I’ve given him background information before so I was happy to help.

    I gave him some essential tips about successfully raising teens, but more about that later.

    He told me that there’s been an increase in the number of school suspensions of teenagers due to anti-social behaviour including: drug-taking, videoing of fighting and bullying behaviours, racism, and sexual activity at school.

    He wanted to know if Australian schools were experiencing similar problems.

    My initial response was that these types of behaviours, while relatively new to Hong Kong, are not so unusual here.

    Schools for some time in Australia have had to develop strategies to deal with a range of behaviours that would quite frankly, shock the pants off people of past generations.

    Parents and teachers in Hong Kong are now facing a similar set of circumstances that parents and teacher are experiencing in many western countries.

    That is, teenagers today courtesy of modern media, the internet and other circumstances see things, know things and do things earlier than teens in the past.

    And they are now growing up at the speed of light. Generational bracket-creep is a fact of life.

    Everyone knows that forty is the new thirty for older generations.  Now eighteen is the new twenty-one, sixteen is the new eighteen and thirteen is the new fifteen for young people.

    The journo was a little shocked. I could sense that he felt more than a little powerless . After all, he was a parent himself so his interest in the topic was both personal and professional.

    So what do we do about young people? How should parents raise young people today?

    Well, we don’t put our heads in the sand, cross our fingers and hope for the best when kids move into adolescence.  There is plenty of evidence that effective parenting makes a massive difference to young people’s outcomes, as does keeping young people connected and engaged at school.

    Here’s a quick rundown of the main tips I gave this journalist for parenting 21st teenagers:

    1.      Build relationships with young people. It’s a fact of life that having a decent relationship with your teenager will give you some leverage. That means you need to work hard to develop relationships with teenagers. Ideally these relationships have been developed in childhood, but if they haven’t it’s not too late. There are a number of things you can do. Check out Bringing out the Best in Teenagers for more information.

    2.     Be their parent, not their friend. This may seem like a cliché but being their parent has real meaning. Be willing to set some boundaries rather than lower them, particularly around areas such as going out, parties and  the use of alcohol. In fact, it means saying no to alcohol, before the age of eighteen. More on this topic in my Blog.

    3.     If you can’t stand the heat..........There’s a great deal of heat, not to mention hormones, involved in raising teens so you need to be willing to engage them in robust conversations, challenge their views and support them as they grow up. You need to enjoy the thrust and parry involved in raising a young person.

    4.     Talk with other parents. Talking with parents of your young person’s friends is vital. Young people are highly connected through social media, and other communication technology, yet parents are frequently disconnected from each other and raise their kids in isolation. Teens tend to gang up on parents, saying things such as ‘everyone else is drinking at the party.’  ‘Is that right? I’ll just check that one out for myself’ needs to be your attitude. Check with other parents. Better still. Draw strength from other parents so you can set some limits on their behaviours.

    5.     Attend to their mental health. Young people live with a type of pressure not experienced by  any other generation of teenagers. Increasingly, schools are attending to the emotional and social wellbeing of young people and their efforts need to supported by parents.  Get some ideas in my Unwinding ebook.

    The challenge for parents is not merely to survive their young person’s adolescence (although that’s a worthy goal), or even to get their young person through high school unscathed.  These are no longer the end games for parenting teens. 

    The real task is to prepare teenagers for the years between 18 and 25, because negotiating the next steps after school are becoming the trickiest years of all for teens. That’s why it’s doubly important that you stay in the parenting game with your teens so you can effectively guide them through the abundance of freedoms they face and myriad lifestyle choices that they are required to make. 

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    Michael Grose is a leading parening educator, renowned author of seven parenting books and runs parenting seminars around Australia.  He is also the 'Body & Soul' Parenting columnist of the Herald Sun, reaching 6 million readers every Sunday!  For more information about Michael Grose plus great parenting advice and resources visit www.parentingideas.com.au . 

     



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