The fourteen essential conversations to have with your tween and early teenager to prepare them for the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead, including scripts and advice to keep the communication going and stay connected during this critical developmental window. “This book is a gift to parents and teenagers alike.”—Lisa Damour, PhD, author of Untangled and Under Pressure Trying to convince a middle schooler to listen to you can be exasperating. Indeed, it can feel like the best option is not to talk! But keeping kids safe—and prepared for all the times when you can't be the angel on their shoulder—is about having the right conversations at the right time. From a brain growth and emotional readiness perspective, there is no better time for this than their tween years, right up to when they enter high school. Distilling Michelle Icard's decades of experience working with families, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen focuses on big, thorny topics such as friendship, sexuality, impulsivity, and technology, as well as unexpected conversations about creativity, hygiene, money, privilege, and contributing to the family. Icard outlines a simple, memorable, and family-tested formula for the best approach to these essential talks, the BRIEF Model: Begin peacefully, Relate to your child, Interview to collect information, Echo what you're hearing, and give Feedback. With wit and compassion, she also helps you get over the most common hurdles in talking to tweens, including: • What phrases invite connection and which irritate kids or scare them off • The best places, times, and situations in which to initiate talks • How to keep kids interested, open, and engaged in conversation • How to exit these chats in a way that keeps kids wanting more Like a Rosetta Stone for your tween's confounding language, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen is an essential communication guide to helping your child through the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead and, ultimately, toward teenage success.
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Michelle Icard launched Athena’s Path, a curriculum that helps girls navigate the tricky middle school social scene in 2004. Shortly after, she added Hero’s Pursuit for boys, and in 2011 launched her website about how to parent middle school children. Athena’s Path and Hero’s Pursuit have been implemented in thirty schools, in five states, and have impacted over ten thousand students. Michelle is often a guest speaker at schools and parenting events, and she hosts Right in the Middle, a conference for girls headed to middle school and their moms. Michelle also runs Moms Meet Up, a parent conversation and support group for parents of middle school children, and provides private coaching for parents and teens. Michelle has written curriculum for other national programs for adolescents, including Girlology and Girls Rock the House. In addition to her own blog, Michelle writes for Your Teen Magazine, The Karina Chronicles, and Charlotte Smarty Pants. She is the mother of a thirteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old son.