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Hi, Daniel Harkavy here. Welcome to this week’s Leadership Moment. Talking to teenagers. Now
I am not an expert but what I am is a dad who has been married to my wife for 23 years
and we have four kids: 21, 19, 17 and 8. And those kids bring a lot of other kids into
our home. We’ve spent many, many years investing in teenage kids as teachers of junior high,
Sunday school and just had a lot of them in our home.
A few years ago, we led a session at the Building Champions Experience. It was an optional session
on parenting. In that session, a question was asked that gets asked of us all the time,
and that is “How do you talk to teenagers?”
I want to encourage you, parents of teenagers. I want to give you the answer. Here’s how
you do it: you just talk to them, like young adults. Don’t talk down to them, don’t
try to coerce or manipulate, don’t back away because they act like they may not want
to talk to you.
Pursue them without any expectations. Pursue them. Pursue them. Pursue them. And talk to
them like the adults that they are. What you’re doing is training them up on how to best communicate
as adults when they leave. Too many folks get their feelings hurt, and too many folks
make it much more challenging than it is.
So in the week ahead, for you – parents of teenagers, I want to challenge you. Stay
up later, talk to them when they come home, take them out on a lunch date or a dinner
date, spend time with them, do something that interests them, get on their playing field
and talk to them. It’s one of the most important things we can do today as parents of these
young teenagers to build them up to become the adults that we’ll enjoy spending time
with, and that we ourselves will be those folks they enjoy spending time with years
ahead.