Talks for Parents

Resilience in Action: Raising Children and Adolescents Who are Prepared to Thrive! (90-120 minutes)

This talk is an overview of the Seven C’s Model of Resilience.  It focuses on communication strategies that position parents to be unwavering positive forces in their children’s lives.  Parents will leave the session better prepared to:

• Build confidence in their children
• Notice and reinforce their children’s competence
• Foster the vital connection between parents and children
• Develop character and a sense of contribution in their children
• Develop those critical coping strategies that will help their children thrive even through difficult times
• Help their children and teens gain control by learning that the privileges they earn are linked to the responsibility they demonstrate.

This presentation provides an overview of resilience with attention to strategies parents can use to help their children help themselves.  Certain topics are covered in greater detail in the talks noted below  (“Authentic Success” and “Keeping Adolescents Safe”).

Authentic Success: Raising Children and Adolescents who are Prepared to Thrive in a Challenging World  (90 minutes)

This talk discusses how to foster high achievement in children while instilling a love of learning, rather than a fear of failure. We must never forget that our goal in raising children is to prepare them to be happy and productive adults.  This means that academic performance, while important, is only one measure of success.  Children need the emotional and social intelligence to thrive in the home and workplace.  They need to maintain and develop their creativity and innovative potential as well as their internal resilience.  Children who are pushed too hard do not discover their gift and are driven to perfectionism.  Perfectionists do not find themselves acceptable and don’t experience the joy associated with high performance, and in fact stifle their own creativity.  The college admissions process will be discussed and the importance of guiding each child to find the right educational match will be emphasized. This seminar is about raising successful children who will make their unique and substantial contributions to the world.

Keeping Adolescents Safe  (90 minutes)

We can’t wrap our children in bubble wrap, although sometimes we wish we could. Instead, the best thing we can do is to teach them to protect and to take good care of themselves.  This talk will focus on preparing parents to have influence in four key areas:

1. Working with schools and communities to display positive images of adolescents so that teens will see that it is “normal” to do the right thing.
2. Helping teens develop skills to navigate peer culture as issues or conflicts come up in their daily lives.
3. Monitoring teens in appropriate ways using strategies that are proven to substantially reduce risk in many areas.
4. Reinforcing teens’ positive decision-making and coping strategies.  Most behaviors we fear in adolescents are their quick easy fixes to stress. Telling teens what not to do backfires.  Teens who possess healthy coping strategies will be less likely to reach for those dangerous behaviors.

Parents of tweens and preteens begin receiving foreboding messages about adolescence early on.  They mourn the loss of the innocence of childhood and dread their children pulling away.  Adolescence is a wonderful time and teens are inspirational people.  There may be a few bumps as children struggle for independence, but if parents honor their child’s growth while protecting them from risk, they can look forward to a lifelong healthy relationship that has the interdependence that helps families thrive far into the future.  This talk prepares parents to take a stepwise approach to parenting that offers increasing privileges and opportunities for growth as their children gain increasing competencies.