Tips to make sure your kids hear your advice

Giving advice to kids is never easy, and when they're between the ages of 9 and 17, it's downright treacherous. But this is exactly when kids face new challenges and need their parents' guidance.

So how do you break through resistance and give them advice they'll actually hear and try? The experts at Good Housekeeping have some advice.

Ask any parent of an adolescent and she'll tell you it's not easy doling out advice her child will listen to.

“I'll just work it into the conversation, where I'll say, 'By the way, maybe you should do this with this,'“ said parent Audrey O'Gorman. “I don't really say, ‘Come here. I want to sit down and have a serious talk with you.”’

But tweens and teens are more in need of guidance than any other age group because they're constantly facing new challenges.

“They're very interested in showing how independent they can be, whether that means organizing their time after work, when they do their homework, when they don't do their homework,” said Good Housekeeping Executive Director Janet Siroto.

To get your kids to listen to your advice and actually try it, Good Housekeeping recommends keeping your comments clear, concise and positive.

“Take a positive approach so that your child feels that you're helping her rather than criticizing her,” said Laurence Steinberg, Ph.D., author of The Ten Basic Principles of Good Parenting.

If your child is unsure of a situation, give him some leeway by asking questions that will get him to think for himself.

“If you ask your child questions, you let your child feel some ownership of the conclusions she comes to and the solutions that she develops,” Siroto said. “You're kind of building a little scaffold for your child to climb up. And so you want to help your child up this scaffold a little bit, but you want to make your child feel as if he's the one doing the climbing, not you.”

Good Housekeeping suggests waiting 48 hours before bringing up a red-hot topic. That'll give both of you time to cool off.

And one last question: what percent of parents say they aren't sure their teens are listening when they talk to them?

The answer is 74 percent.

(Source: komonews.com)

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