Relationships PART I - Helping or not?

I haven’t posted anything here in a while. I feel like I’ve been neglectful of something I was so excited about. Isn’t that always the way of it? Well, I decided, to help me over the hump, I would just post the talk I gave at a local gathering. There are MANY things/ thoughts imbedded here, and I will likely come back to this as a jumping off point for future posts… I'm splitting it into two... why? I don't even know! ("I dont even known" is becoming my favorite saying, as my teen girls all mimic each other and the culture of adolescence spans time and space.)

 

Thank you to Jackie Dozier over at AIDS Care for inviting me out to such a great event focused on women and girls of color and their health.

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A social gathering talk PART I

 

So, as I was thinking about what I would talk about today, and 15 minutes isn’t a long time to talk about something you spend all day, 6 days a week talking about, I tried to think of the most common things I see working with girls and their families

1.       either the relationships are directly related to the problem (like a mom who is unpredictable or a dad who is abusive)

 

2.     the relationships are not supporting them in a healthy way so that they can get through an unrelated problem quickly, (like a teen who is really struggling to deal with a school problem and the parents don’t really know what’s going on)

 

3.     the relationship is maintaining a problem (a parent who lets their anxious child avoid safe situations, making the anxiety worse. [I see more for suburb kids]

 

4.     the relationship doesn’t change as the child changes (the child is getting older, the level of collaboration, support stay the same)

 

5.       The relationship doesn’t fit the kid - The child as a disability (mental health, physical, learning problems) or the personality and temperaments don’t match.

 

6.       And last, the most common thing I see, there is a disruptive child and the parents want me to make the child more compliant. And you talk to the child and they have already decided that the relationship with their parent isn’t worth it. Maybe because there are other things that are more important (like being cool in front of their friends) or maybe because they started off in one of those other situations I mentioned before… many times kids get to the point of “I can’t do anything right anyway.”