Excerpt from Chapter 4: Ten Steps to Help Your Child Get Back on Track

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The steps

1. DO remind your child that you are both on the same side

Despite differences you and your child have in the present, ultimately you both want to help your child become a confident and capable adult. Most children with troubling behavior or disturbed emotional states feel very alone. Your child may feel she is not understood or she cannot figure out how to make things better. This is even more the case if she senses that you are angry and disappointed. Your child may also feel alienated and alone if she feels guilty. Children, and often adolescents, tend to see the world in simple black-and-white terms. Children often interpret difficulties that involve them as entirely their "fault." Your child may try to convince herself and others that the problem "is not my fault," while deep within feel that she is totally to blame. If a child feels entirely at "fault," she may also believe that her parent is enormously disappointed and angry and that her parent's feelings might "never" change. This guilt and sense of alienation for "causing" the parent's emotional pain usually increases a child's anxiety, fear, and shame. When strong, these emotions prevent good resolutions to emotional and behavioral problems and often increase such problems. Therefore, I encourage you to remind your child, and yourself, that you are both on the same side. Even if you feel disappointed, scared or angry about the situation, remind your child that in spite of such feelings, you want to work together to make things better.

Fourteen-year-old Elizabeth and her parents frequently argued about many of her new interests: talking on the telephone to friends, sending "instant messages" instead of doing homework, and wanting to go to parties at the homes of people her parents did not know. Over the past year Elizabeth had become increasingly oppositional and defiant. Although Elizabeth resisted when her parents held to limits, she did seem more responsive when they spent some time talking about how they were all trying to adjust to her getting older and desiring more freedom. In response to her parents' openness about their own struggles with her getting older, Elizabeth acknowledged more openly that she had been feeling torn between her wish to do things that were "fun" and feeling guilty about the distress her behavior caused her parents.

Being on the same side helps you and your child find respectful solutions to your differences and makes your relationship stronger.

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