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Lecturing, punishing, informing, and warning teens about dangers are ineffective methods of protecting them.

Parents can tune into their teenager's positive values and biases when trying to impact their behavior.

Parenting teenagers requires a dance of both holding on and letting go.

Raising teenagers can easily trigger parents to feel anxious, powerless, and rejected. How can we keep our teenagers safe and maintain equanimity?

Without effective tools and preparation, many parents understandably default to instinct and use common ineffective tactics, such as warning, advising, informing, or trying to control their teens.

The adolescent brain has been compared to a car with a powerful gas pedal and weak brakes when in the presence of other teens or when expecting to be seen by them (Bulow, 2022; Steinberg, 2008). Further, they are drawn to peers, and then instinctively rev each other up into risky experimentation and sensation-seeking.

But teenagers also use peers to learn social and negotiating skills, as well as begin consolidating an identity in the world separate from their parents. Further, research shows that teens who are too sheltered have as many difficulties later as those who are high risk-takers.

Despite the risks, adolescents must test themselves in the world to potentiate brain growth during this critical window of development (Costandi & Blakemore, 2014).

Parents can have a positive impact on their teens’ decisions with research-backed strategies that appeal to the teenage mind. By leveraging adolescents’ inherent biases and strengths, parents can have a positive impact.

Parental monitoring involves establishing a norm of open dialogue about what their children are doing and who their friends are, including online. In a 2021 CDC survey of over 17,000 teens, teens who felt that their parents knew where they were and who they were with were at lower risk in all areas of potential risk, including mental health (Dittus, 2023).

Being tuned in, respectful, and emotionally present is the most........

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