Life Skills Mentoring
  • Home
  • About
  • Services
    • Teen Breakthrough™ Consultation for Parents
    • Life Skills Mentoring
    • Learning Disabilities
  • Contact
  • Breakthrough Blog
  • Home
  • About
  • Services
    • Teen Breakthrough™ Consultation for Parents
    • Life Skills Mentoring
    • Learning Disabilities
  • Contact
  • Breakthrough Blog

Blog

How to Open Your Teen’s Mind

5/4/2018

0 Comments

 
How to Open Your Teen’s Mind
One of our most sacred roles as parents is to prepare our children for a successful future. What success means to each of us may differ, but we can all agree that resilience, flexibility, and adaptability play a large role. How, then, do we weave these qualities in our kids?
​
Fortunately, just one quality in naturally leads to the others: open mindedness. With a truly open mind, your kids will remain strong in the face of challenges, remain calm and collected when things don’t go their way, and remain ready to choose a different path when the first leads to a dead end.

How, then, do we teach open mindedness?

1. Encourage Critical Thinking

A study outlined in Toward an Open Mind found that one of the surest ways to develop the trait is through critical thinking. Teens who closely analyzed situations (and then related those situations with their particular beliefs, values, or emotions) were able to view them with a progressively more open mind. As a parent, encourage this approach to problems and situations with your teen. Examine issues of the day with your kids and, together, come to new realizations and unique conclusions.

2. Encourage New Experiences

Another powerful technique is to introduce novel experiences. The more your teen encounters the unknown, the more willing they’ll be to accept the new and different. They’ll become more and more comfortable in unfamiliar situations and surroundings, and become more and more welcoming of the people within them.

3. Broaden Their Perspective

Narrow mindedness is often a result of limited options. If your kids only know their small world, they won’t know to consider a greatest perspective. It’s up to you to introduce it. Teach them about different cultures and customs, different places and people. Travel. Learn. Engage with a wider circle. When your kids realize there are people on the other side of the planet who live vastly different—but equally worthwhile—lives, their stretched perspective will never shrink back to its previous size.

4. Be a Role Model

To say that our kids learn from our example is to say nothing new. We are the water and they are the sponges. Nowhere is this clearer than with our willingness to be open or closed. Parents who live by narrow perspectives will inevitably raise narrow-minded kids. Don’t do this. Force yourself to be open and show it, speak it, be it.

5. Let Go

One of the hardest things for parents to do is let go of their vision of their child’s future. We so want the best for our kids—and think we know best for our kids—that we inevitably lead them down the paths we’d choose. Is there a better definition of narrow? If we are to raise kids with open minds we have to give them the freedom to choose different paths. We have to be open to the reality that our kids are of us, but they aren’t us. They have to have the freedom to be themselves.
​
These lessons, and others like them, will engender an open mindedness in your children that will bend but never break, will find a way forward when everyone else quits, and, most important of all, will welcome the world with open arms whether or not it looks and acts just like them.
Download Traits In Thriving Teens

SIGN UP TO LEARN ABOUT


 TRAITS IN THRIVING TEENS


Download a FREE Parenting Guide from Todd Kestin, LCSW.
    0 Comments



    Leave a Reply.

      Author

      Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

      Archives

      October 2021
      September 2021
      June 2021
      April 2021
      January 2021
      May 2020
      January 2020
      July 2018
      May 2018
      December 2017
      January 2017
      July 2016
      May 2016
      April 2016
      December 2015
      November 2015
      January 2015
      August 2014
      July 2014

      Categories

      All
      Adults
      Calm
      Camp
      Change
      Chaos
      Character
      Chicago Teen Mentor
      Child
      College Fund
      Communication
      Confidence
      Connection
      Consequences
      Counselor
      COVID
      COVID-19
      Dad
      Danger
      Depression
      Dreams
      Drive
      Engagement
      Experience
      Friend
      Friends
      Frienship
      Goals
      Growing Up
      Growth
      Health
      High School
      Hope
      Investments
      Kids
      Learning Disabilities
      Learning Disability
      Learning Disablity
      Making Change
      Making Friends
      Meaning
      Mental Health
      Mentor
      Mentoring
      Modeling
      Motivate
      Motivation
      Networking
      Open Mindedness
      Parent
      Parenting
      Parents
      Passion
      Prepare
      Punishment
      Purpose
      Quarantine
      Relationships
      Responsibility
      Role Model
      Sadness
      School
      Self-esteem
      Skills
      Socializing
      Stability
      Stress
      Success
      Take Away Technology
      Teen
      Teenagers
      Teen Mentor
      Teen Mentor For Learning Disabilities
      Teens
      Teen Transition
      Therapist
      Therapy For Teens
      Volunteer
      Weed
      What It's Like To Have A Learning Disability
      World
      Yes

      RSS Feed

    About
    Contact
    ​Blog
    Teen Breakthrough™ Consultation for Parents
    ​Life Skills Mentoring for Teens & Young Adults
    Learning Differently Relationship Mentoring
    Mailing Address:
    ​899 Skokie Blvd., Suite 220, Northbrook, IL 60062

    Copyright © 2018-2021 Todd Kestin. All rights reserved. Privacy | Terms