How To Really Love Your Teenager by Ross Campbell

I finished the last page of How To Really Love Your Child and then headed straight into the first page of How to Really Love Your Teenager.  This too is a very helpful book and one that I will be reading again. Up front, there were a couple of things that I didn't like so much about this one - a few too many anecdotes in this particular volume and occasional comment or idea that I didn't really agree with - but these are perhaps personal dislikes.

 

However there is lots to like.

 

Especially that Ross Campbell offers hope.  He seems to work with people of all ages but of all the possible age groups to choose from, I think he loves teenagers the best.  He adores them.  And he desperately, achingly wants teenagers and their parents to thrive together through these years.  This book is full of hope - and I think it is a realistic, attainable hope.

 

Early up in the book Campbell makes the comment that we ought not to regard teenagers as adults.  They are still in essence children, albeit children that are getting quite big and independent.  Which is not to say that they are not capable of great maturity.  In the face of their growing independence and capabilities it can be easy to regard teenagers as fully fledged, independent adults when in fact they still require their parents' love. This is a helpful principle to keep handy.  It's a bit like the warning I read when I was immersed in baby books...that when you stop breastfeeding a baby the amount of physical contact they receive - because the close contact of feeding has stopped and because they quickly become toddlers on the go - often decreases by more than 50%.  And more so with boys.  Yet they still thrive on lots of physical contact.  I was glad to be wised up to this advice ahead of time.  And I am glad to have been made aware of this not dissimilar trap with teenagers ahead of time.

 

How then to love your teenager?  In much the same way you love a child, according to Campbell.  Keeping their emotional tanks full with lots of positive eye contact, lots of appropriate physical contact and lots of focussed attention.  And focussed attention is the particularly big ticket item - the one where parents of teenagers get to put in the hard yards.  He is very clear that once our children are teenagers we don't get to lie back on the sofa with our cups of tea and read our books (or whatever your equivalent idea of blissful relaxation might be), with all that hard, physical toil of raising children behind us.  No...there are more hours to be genuinely and lovingly spent with our offspring, and in the teenage years they will likely be at times inconvenient to us - and how we respond when they need some time from us is important.

 

Beyond the principles common to both books, Campbell spends lots of time discussing teenager moodiness, anxiety, anger and general rollercoaster-ness.  He seems to get teenagers and I have found reading his insights useful.  There is a chapter on teenage depression - and with a good amount of time given to detailing the difference between normal teenage behaviour and behaviour that needs help from health professionals.  There is another chapter on how to move from parent control to self control.  And a chapter for parents about parental self-control. 

 

What I love about the Teenager book, as I have said, is that Campbell clearly adores teenagers and desperately wants parents to do well with them.  And he gives parents every hope that they can indeed navigate these years with great joy and success.  I think this book is realistic and I think it gives a good pattern for positive relationship.  He doesn’t ever suggest that it will be a walk in the park or suggest he is offering a foolproof programme. This is no "Supernanny for Teenagers." He offers guidelines, insight and hope.  Campbell also makes it clear that you can’t think things are ever too far gone for this to be of help as we all respond well to genuine, sincere, consistent love - sometimes quickly and sometimes with time.

 

I am no teenager expert.  As soon as a child walks out that final year primary school classroom door for the last time I have zero expertise.  Having read How To Really Love Your Teenager I feel forewarned and forearmed with a positive approach to the second decade of a child's life.  No doubt there are sqillions of other books around on this topic and squillions of other approaches too.  For now, to my untrained eyes, this one looks ok and like it might be a good launch pad. 

In a bit over a decade's time I will let you know how it all went.  Feel free to offer your view and your best advice along the way.

 

How To Really Love Your Child by Ross Campbell

 

We received a copy of How To Really Love Your Child by Ross Campbell as a gift when our first baby was born.  I read it at the time and liked it, but moved on pretty quickly to the books that gave me the specific advice needed for the minutiae of the moment - sleeping, feeding, teeth, tantrums, temperatures and the like.  The principles of How to Really Love Your Child apply to infants and toddlers but it is a period that calls for specific survival techniques rather than broad brush strokes.  However as those young children emerge from their toddlerdom into that golden era called childhood, this book really comes into its own.

 

Campbell, a Christian developmental psychologist, works on the principle that we need to love our children unconditionally and that we can achieve this through...

 

Lots of eye contact - and not just when we are staring them down because we are cross, but lots and lots of warm, happy eye contact.

Lots of physical touch - and he gives a lot of time to the subject of appropriateness in this department and how appropriateness changes as a child gets older.

Lots of focussed attention - not the "I'm half listening to you and half writing my blog post" sort of attention...ahem...

Discipline comes into it too and there is a lovely chapter on this issue - that is, training a child in what is right, rather than punishing a child over what is wrong.

And then he finally gets to the "what to do when they are naughty" bit.  More than three quarters of the way through the book.  And this is the genuis of the book.  When I used to have student teachers at school and on the handful of occasions I've run a training session for Sunday School teachers, the question, "What do we do when they're naughty?" always comes up.  That's normal and expected.  And I always irritatingly answer that question by saying that most classroom discipline problems can be dealt with by good lesson preparation.  For the most part, classroom disruptions can be avoided by running good lessons. 

Now before you all head to the comment box, I know, OH HOW I KNOW that this isn't always the case.  Sometimes we have some truly challenging children in our midst who haven't had breakfast or who live on sugar, whose home life is terrible or whose routine is non-existent, who are sick or who have experienced some sort of trauma.  Or you have the children whose home life is steady but last night they had an awake-over  sleepover and today it is windy and tonight it will be a full moon and... Stuff happens.  I know.  You should have been in my first Scripture lessons last week!  There was a lot of stuff happening there...not a lot of Scripture lesson though.  But generally speaking, most classroom problems can be avoided by good planning. 

And Ross Campbell contends that most discipline issues at home can also be avoided if a child feels well loved.  They won't do all that attention seeking stuff if they know they have your attention.  He gave plenty of examples of when his kids did muck up and he was able to pin it down to the fact that, as he phrases it, their "emotional tanks" were not full.  At times he had the clarity to realise this and deal with it properly instead of heading into a session of unwarranted chastisement.  At other times he mucked up.

Campbell's approach is not permissive.  He is all for firm boundary setting, good training and high expectations.  He is all about making sure that children don't develop scarily dependent relationships with their parents (and vice versa) but grow and develop into mature, independent, capable adults. He is also up front that the he is speaking in broad terms.  Things don't run to script - he is not suggesting a formula that will work perfectly in every instance every time.  And furthermore he is not suggesting that parents don't have a right to get on with the things they need to be doing.  But he is suggesting that when kids feel loved things go better.

I was spurred on to read this book for a couple of reasons.  Firstly by a comment Cathy made about slowing down to look at her children in the eyes when they are talking to her.  It reminded me of this book with its emphasis on eye contact.  Reading it has been a good reminder to seize the moment, because these moments won't always be around. And secondly, we have been catching the odd glimpse that our firstborn might sometime in the next year or few turn into a teenager.  Which brings me to Ross Campbell's next book - How To Really Love Your Teenager.  Stay tuned.