As a parent or someone in a parenting role, your influence is vital in your teen’s success. There are intentional ways to grow a healthy parent-teen relationship while instilling confidence in your teen to persist toward their goals and succeed in all areas of life. Everyone faces challenges, yet mistakes and failures are necessary for your eighteen-year-old’s learning and development. With your guidance and support, mistakes become a tool for learning and growing confidence.

The key to any parenting issue is finding ways to communicate to meet your and your teen’s needs. The steps below include specific, practical strategies and effective conversation starters to prepare you as you address any issue with your teen.

As you address any issues, you build the foundation for your teen’s development.

Your focus on cultivating a safe, trusting relationship and promoting life skills can create:

● greater opportunities for connection, cooperation, and enjoyment

● trust in each other

● a sense of well-being and motivation

Engaging in these five steps is an investment that builds your skills as an effective parent or someone in a parenting role to use on any issues and builds essential skills that will last a lifetime for your teen. Throughout this tool, there are opportunities for teens to:

● become more self-aware and deepen their social awareness

● exercise their self-management skills

● build their relationship skills

● demonstrate and practice responsible decision-making and problem-solving

This five-step process helps you and your teen with any issue. It builds critical life skills in your teen. The same process can be used to address other specific parenting issues (learn more about the process[1] ).

Whether it’s your fifteen-year-old confiding in you that they are scared of learning to drive, your seventeen-year-old in high school crying that they have no close friends or your nineteen-year-old avoiding the pile of college applications, these steps and associated questions can help you support your teen.

Tip: These steps are best done when you and your teen are not tired or in a rush.

Tip: Intentional communication[2] and healthy parenting relationships[3] will support these steps.

Based on your teen’s development milestones, you will want to focus on the following as you move through the five steps:

● Support your teen’s desire and capacity to evolve into adulthood and the changes that come with it. Focus on identifying and setting healthy boundaries as they grow.

● Continue to build confidence and healthy practices around “self-talk” and how to reframe negative self-talk.

● Support your teen’s preparation for their goals beyond high school and encourage them to consider their choices, the resulting consequences, and responsible decision-making.

● Give your teen space to determine how much or how little they need your support and input. If they need it, give them a chance to figure out things independently, try and fail at things, and support the exploration of lessons learned. Remind them you are there if and when they need...