Learned Optimism
Helping Your Teens When Things Just Don't Seem To
Go Right
with
Michael Y. Simon, MFT
As adults, we know life is filled
with setbacks and “failures.” For teens, their self-esteem
and even their risk for depression depends on how
they deal with these setbacks and the anxiety of things
not going well. In today's culture of perfection,
teens can get caught up in the mistaken belief that
if something isn’t working out as planned, it’s a
failure that will haunt their entire lives. So what
can parents do?
• How can we raise teens who are resilient?
• How can we help them understand that sometimes failing
can be an absolutely crucial, necessary and tremendously
helpful experience?
• How do we back away from our natural inclination
to “fix” it for them?
Michael Simon provides real-life solutions
to help us support, understand and assist our teens
with one of the most common and painful experiences
of adolescence – the experience of failing, getting
it wrong, or just not getting it right.
Michael Simon is the founder of Practical Help for
Parents. In addition, he works with adolescents at
a local high school, maintains a private psychotherapy
practice, and has designed and implemented a full-service
family resource program for youth and families. For
more information, please see Michael’s web site at:
http://www.practicalhelpforparents.com/index.html
Sharon Strand Ellison: POWERFUL NON-DEFENSIVE
COMMUNICATION -
Building Strong Relationships with Teens
Parents often struggle to achieve balance between
the boundaries children need to be secure and the
freedom they need to grow as individuals, and this
struggle hits a high point with teenagers. Join Sharon
for an evening and learn practical tools for setting
firm yet nurturing boundaries that can prompt your
child to become increasingly competent and respectful.
You'll also learn how to avoid lectures and create
meaningful conversations that maintain strong parent-teen
bonds and help your teenagers develop values that
will sustain them in life.
Sharon Strand Ellison is author of Taking the War
Out of Our Words and the award winning audio book,
"Taking Power Struggle Out Of Parenting, "
the creator of the Powerful Non-Defensive Communication™
process, and an award-winning speaker. Sharon was
a Scholar in Residence at St. John’s University and
is a pioneer in developing methods for eliminating
defensiveness. Find out more about Sharon on her
web site: http://www.pndc.com/about-us/trainers-ellison.php
We hear about "hooking up" and "chastity
promises," but what do teens really think about
sex and, more importantly, what are they doing about
it? Dr. Ponton will help us separate myth and media
hype from reality, and will offer helpful tips to
enable us to understand the sexual lives of our teens
and to parent more effectively around this challenging
issue.
Dr. Ponton is a professor
of psychiatry at UCSF, a practicing psychiatrist
and psychoanalyst, as well as the author of *The Romance
of Risk: Why
Teenagers Do the Things They Do* and *The Sex Lives
of Teenagers: Revealing the Secret World of Adolescent
Boys and Girls*. She has published and spoken widely
on risk behaviors such as sexual experimentation.
For more information about Dr. Ponton, please visit
her website at
http://www.lynnponton.com
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Marsha Rosenbaum is director
emerita of the Safety First Project and director emerita
of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance.
She received her doctorate in medical sociology from
UCSF 1979. Dr. Rosenbaum is the author of Heroin,
and co-author of Pursuit of Ecstacy:
The MDMA Experience and Pregnant Women on Drugs: Combating
Stereotypes and Stigma and numerous drug education
pamphlets. She regularly speaks to parent groups,
schools, drug treatment and prevention professionals
and the media about teenagers and drugs, and drug
policy issues. For more information visit Saftey1st.org
Dr. Kastner provides practical, realistic, and ultimately
reassuring guidance to help us navigate one of the
most challenging aspects of parenting today:
staying calm and clear-headed
during hot-button situations that arise during teen
years, such as:
- When your teen is rude and sarcastic
- When your smart teen does something really dumb
- When teen problems drive a wedge between you and
your spouse
- When your teen acts like a spoiled brat
- When you’re worried that you’re losing your teen
- When teens are mean
Dr. Laura Kastner Is psychologist specializing in
adolescent behavior, professor of psychiatry and behavioral
sciences at the University of Washington, and author
of The Seven Year Stretch: How Families Work Together
to Grow Through Adolecence; Launching Years: Strategies
for Parenting from Senior Year to College Life; and
the recently published Getting to Calm: 14 Cool-Headed
Strategies for Parenting Tweens and Teens
DAVID
SHEFF
David
Sheff, Bay Area journalist and New York Times
best selling author of
Beautiful Boy: A father's journey through his
son's meth addiction shares his and his family's
story of pain, hope, and healing. Although extraordinary,
Mr. Sheff's compelling journey will resonate with
all of us who have struggled with the tough issues
we face as parents – guilt, second guessing parenting
ability, anger,denial, recovery, steadfastness, reconciliation,
and letting go of what we as parents cannot fix in
our children’s lives. His discussion will raise questions
that reflect the fears of every parent: How, and when,
should a parent know whether his or her child is substance-abusing?
What is the extent of one’s responsibility to a loved
one? Don’t miss this opportunity for an evening of
enlightening discussion,.
David
Sheff ’s work has appeared in the New York Times,
Outside, Rolling Stone,
Wired, Fortune, and elsewhere. His piece for
the New York Times Magazine,
“My Addicted Son,” generated hundreds of letters from
readers and won an award
as “Outstanding Contribution to Advancing the Understanding
of Addiction” from
the American Psychological Association. He has been
interviewed extensively and
has spoken nationally on the subject of addiction.
DENISE
POPE, Ph.D.
Challenge Success: Developing
A Broader Vision of Success To Prepare Students For
The Needs Of The 21st Century
What is success? Our teens live in a high-stakes,
high-pressure world where success is often measured
by easily-observed symbols: trophies, grades, test
scores, and acceptance into prestigious schools. Teens
are, however, experiencing unacceptably high levels
of anxiety disorders, depression, substance abuse,
suicide, poor physical health, and disengagement from
learning. Educators, mental health professionals,
and business leaders agree that the pursuit of this
narrow vision of success often leaves young people
lacking the skills most needed to thrive in a rapidly
changing world--adaptability, interpersonal and collaborative
skills, and the ingenuity and creativity to solve
complex problems.
As parents we need to accept a broader vision of success
for our teens. Dr. Pope proposes a definition of success
that encompasses character, health, independence,
connection, creativity, enthusiasm and achievement,
and outlines steps we can take to help reduce pressure
in our teens’ lives.
Denise Pope, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer at the Stanford
University School of Education. In 2003, she founded
SOS: Stressed-Out Students project, a research and
intervention effort to help K-12 schools counter the
causes of academic stress. In 2007 she co-founded
Challenge Success. She authored "Doing School":
How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out,
Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. Please visit
challengesuccess.org for more information.
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LINDA BURCH
SPEAKING ABOUT:
RAISING TEENS WITH COMMON SENSE IN A 24/7 DIGITAL
WORLD
iTunes. Twitter. Gossip Girl. YouTube. Facebook. The
media and technology that runs through the middle
of our teen’s lives is evolving at a dizzying pace.
As parents, many of us struggle with how to guide
our kids through the positives and negatives of this
24/7 media world. How do we engage our teens to discuss
media images and messages? How do we encourage them
to have a healthy skepticism of the media influences
that they are bombarded with on a daily basis? How
do we teach them to self-reflect before they self-reveal
in a cut and paste culture where words and photos
can travel the Internet at the speed of light? Linda
will explore these issues and answer our questions
as to how we can help our teens to be savvy media
users and interpreters – we can’t cover their eyes
but we can teach them to see.
Linda is the Chief Education and Strategy officer
and a co-founder of Common Sense Media, a non-profit
dedicated to improving the media and entertainment
lives of families. For more information, visit www.commonsensemedia.org.
Elizabeth
Scott
POSITIVE
BODY IMAGE
From eating
disorders and steroid use to the influence of the
media, Elizabeth Scott, LCSW, will speak about the
issues teenage boys and girls face regarding body
image. This talk will provide insight as to what we
can do to help create an environment free of body
perfection obsession in a society full of unhealthy
media influence, and promote a mentally and physically
healthy lifestyle for our teens.
Elizabeth is a practicing psychotherapist in San Rafael,
California, treating women and girls with eating disorders.
She co-founded The Body Positive and co-authored the
BodyAloud! guidebook to encourage girls to resist
eating disorders and to focus on what they want to
express in their lives. Elizabeth trains mental health
professionals, community leaders and school personnel
nationwide to implement the BodyAloud! program model.
For more information, visit TheBodyPositive.org.
A
$5.00 donation is requested at the door for each event.
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"THE
ADOLESCENT BRAIN: REACHING FOR AUTONOMY." Robert
Sylwester
Speaker and author of over 20 books, Robert Sylwester,
will discuss his latest book "THE ADOLESCENT
BRAIN: REACHING FOR AUTONOMY." Recent developments
in the cognitive neurosciences are providing important
new information regarding the brains continued development
through adolescence into young adulthood. This talk
will explore brain development in our teenagers, just
at the time that are getting the literal and figurative
“keys to the car” -- and how it affects moral and
ethical growth. For more information, view Dr. Sylwester’s
monthly column for the Internet journal "Brain
Connection" at
