Parenting Tweens: Handling Adolescence Problems
Got a tween? Then grab your coffee and settle in to watch the complete video of our recent event, Tweens and the New Rules of Parenting. Our experts (see below) will help you keep calm and carry on in the tween years. They’ll address everything from puberty to peers and technology to typical tween behavior (and how you can best handle it).
Experts are: Deborah Paris, LISW, a therapist who works with adolescents; Dr. Ellen Rome, a pediatrician at the Cleveland Clinic; and Sara Stephenson of University School. Moderated by Fox8’s Todd Meany.
Excerpt:
Todd Meany: Sara Stevenson in the middle is a lifetime educator, someone who has spent the largest part of her career working with teens and tweens. She loves everything about those teen and tween years. Rich and meaningful time, rather than fearing she encourages parents to hang on, relax, and enjoy the ride. She’s also been a head of two middle schools, including Hathaway Brown right here in Shaker Heights. She has also run a preschool-through-eighth-grade school. Over twenty-one years of education, nineteen of them working with teens and tweens, please welcome Sara Stevenson.
Debbie Paris is a child psychotherapist who works with parents and children, consults to schools, and conducts parenting groups. Best qualification: she raised two kids and survived, and so did they. Please welcome Debbie Paris.
And online, on the big screen, is our Great and Power Oz, you’ll see a little bit later on. His name is Stephen Balkam, he’s the founder and CEO of the Family Online Safety Institution. We’ll hear from him about ways that your children can be safe online, because we know we don’t know as much as they do. So that’s going to be great to hear from Stephen as well.
So to begin this discussion, let’s start with Sara, and let’s kind of talk about from an education standpoint. What are we seeing, as children are kind of going from that early elementary off to these tween years, what are we seeing from an educational standpoint?
Sara Stevenson: I think the one thing I would share with all parents is that the one thing you can predict is the unpredictable. And as we head into the tween years from the children, the child that’s in your house becomes the tween that’s in your house, you don’t know the day that’s going to happen.
(For the rest of this interview, please view our video)
