Communicating with Teens: The Information Drop

Every parent has some book or article that contains information that you would love your teenager to sit down and read. Usually it has something to do with hormones, puberty, and sexual behavior. The big question is how to share these resources with your teenager in a way that captures his curiosity, or that at least doesn't nauseate him. In general, what worked so well when he was younger usually falls short during adolescence. That is, years ago, if you made something important he accepted your evaluation and treated it as important, too. Now it's the opposite. If you want him to evaluate something as important, you need to undervalue it.

After raising four teenagers, I've come to realize that there are only two ways to get them to read something that I think is important. The second best option is to leave the newspaper or magazine open to the article and leave it lying around on the coffee table or in the dining room. But far and away the best option is to leave it in the bathroom. That's a surefire read—just be judicious and save it for the really important stuff.

If ever there was sage advice from the front lines, that is it. At the same time, there are other ways, too. Besides leaving it in the bathroom (which I agree is the best), it's also effective to leave the materials lying around in her room, preferably on her bed or desk. And after you leave said book, do whatever it takes to not ask her if she saw it. Just trust that she found the book and will use it in a way that makes sense for her, which you probably won't find out about for at least a few months.

I was at the bookstore and found this great book on all the changes teenagers' bodies go through during and after puberty. I bought it and tossed it on my son's bed, but he never acknowledged seeing it. Given the state of his room, I couldn't even be sure that he had found it. Then one day out of the blue, he says, That book you left in my room talked a bunch about how the hormone changes affect my skin, so I'm not too freaked out by this acne, since pretty much everyone gets it. I was shocked. Then he just went on to talk about the movie he was going to that evening, as if I had known all along that he had found the book and read it. Of course, when I stopped to consider that if he had read the parts about acne he had surely read the parts about sex and sexuality, I gave a huge sigh of relief.

The reality of these books is that they become references for your kids, something they turn to as various issues arise in their lives. Here's how one high school teenager described how she read and used an earlier book that I wrote for kids, Surviving High School.

My mom bought it for me, or at least I think she did because I just found it lying on my bed one day after school. At first I just tossed it aside, figuring that if my mom bought it for me it was just some adult lecture dressed up to look cool. But a couple days later, I spent a couple of hours thumbing through it and reading around. Nothing major. But the strange thing is that I sought it out at different times during high school, when I came face-to-face with some of the things you talked about: stress, girlfriends, alcohol, cars. It was kind of cool that way, and don't take any offense, but I liked what the kids had to say way more than what you said in the commentary.

For me, this was the best review I could ever hope for from a teenager. She had glanced at the book and kept it around, which means a general thumbs up. Then she used the book as a reference when various issues came up in her life. And, most important, she told me what she liked and disliked, which is something all parents need to prepare themselves for when providing any kind of reading or listening materials for their teenagers. The nature of adolescence is never to accept in entirety anything an adult has to offer in this realm. The only way they can take in this kind of information is to wrestle with it, which means deciding what is useful, what is relevant, what isn't worth their time, and what is irrelevant. Listen when they talk to you this way, because, they are catching you up on what they know and what they don't know on whatever topic they are discussing. It's a great time to play a student and ask them to explain further, which, once they shift into the teacher's role, they are more than happy to do.

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