A Guide to Strengths-Based Parenting

These questions are by no means an exhaustive list of life skills your teen might need, but a starting point. The goal here is to ensure that your teen will be able to manage life’s difficulties, and also make a good cohabitant – not just for their future, but also for you, right now. These questions are designed to give your teenager some autonomy in the responsibilities they want to develop and design.

Together with any other adults you share the parenting responsibilities with, spend some time thinking about what your teen can do. Not in relation to sports and maths, but in relation to being an adult and a good housemate.

So, firstly start with a list of all the stuff that has to be done at home. These are things like laundry and dinner, but also the other stuff, like school sports admin, managing assignment due dates and all that fun stuff. Write it down.

Next, cross out what your teen is already doing. Then consider the things that aren’t crossed out. What can be added easily and slowly to the crossed-out list? Don’t start with taxes; start small! If they’re taking out the rubbish, are they sorting recyclables? If they’re doing laundry, are they ironing too?

As a single mother, I carry an enormous mental load. A very wonderful and wise friend said about single parenthood, ‘There is a strength and vulnerability to it. It is all on you, which is scary, but it is all on you, and you just have to do it, and you can.’ And I can.

As your kids become teenagers, they should start to share that mental load. Make sure you are giving your teen tasks that include the whole nine yards – the conception and planning as well as the execution. Or give them the conception and planning while you handle the execution.

A strengths-based approach to parenting will make for a better parenting experience in general, and greater communication with your teen. Professor Lea Waters, author of The Strength Switch, argues that the strengths your teen may have in one arena (for example, organising their social life) can be channelled into an arena where their strengths may be hiding (such as organising their time to study). Discussing and understanding what your teen’s strengths are puts you in a far better position to help them develop skills than reminding them of what they can’t do.

It is totally okay to roll one’s eyes at doing chores.

I roll my eyes at doing my taxes. But make them do it. Bin night, setting the table, cleaning up. Everyone in the family contributes, including the teens. The goal is to become a fully functioning adult.

What’s for dinner?
The ability to cook is a pretty basic requirement of being an adult. A love of food is nice to foster, too. Teenagers should learn to cook out of necessity, but also because it develops an understanding of being a part of a family, a household and, eventually, their own future family.

There are heaps of ways to get your teen into cooking. You could prepare a meal they like together so they can learn how to make it.

How are you going to keep the wolf from the door?
Getting a job as a teenager is not mandatory, nor is it necessarily expected. For the most part, working as a teenager is about earning some spending money. It takes the onus off the parents to provide that money, as well as being good for the teenager’s self-esteem – because the best way to improve self- esteem is to know you can do something. Kids with more responsibilities become more responsible, and work, even in the most mundane of jobs, encourages autonomy and develops life experience.

Talk to your teen about jobs you got when you were their age, and jobs you didn’t get. Help them with their applications and run practice interviews. Ask them typical interview questions, like ‘What is a difficult situation you’ve experienced and how did you overcome it?’ or ‘When have you shown leadership?’

Talk to them about the minimum wage, about what their rights are at work. Also, talk to them about managing their expectations of work. Their boss might suck, and that’s okay – they are learning how to deal with difficult people.

What do you do to rest?
In our increasingly busy lives, rest is not prioritised. Busyness has become a marker of status and success, and while ‘self-care’ is a new buzzword, getting your nails done isn’t going to cut it. We should all be resting every day (and this includes you).

Mental breaks are really important for teenagers, especially when they are studying. Encourage them to break up study routines by going for a walk, staring at the wall (which will rest their eyes as well as their brain), playing a game or listening to music. Your brain needs 5–10 minutes to repair at least every two hours.

Talk to your teen about it. Tell them how you rest, and ask them how they get the different types of rest they need.

Finally, if your teen is living a life that leads to burnout, they should consider what exactly is burning them out, and how they can restructure their time and their lives. We need to have rest built into our lives. And sometimes that rest can come in the form of boredom, or soft fascination in something. To need rest does not mean your life is too busy or frantic. Rest should be built-in.

What do you know about money?
Just because your teen is able to read and do maths, don’t assume that means they understand how money works. Teenagers need to be taught financial literacy. This is true regardless of their family’s financial circumstances.

So, here are some questions to ask your teen about money:
There are numerous conversations to have about money and financial literacy with your teen. The first is about cost: mention the cost of things like food, utilities and holidays – not to guilt-trip them, but so they develop a sense of how much things actually cost relative to income.

• What money do you have saved?
• What do you know about tax?
• What do you understand about retirement savings?
• What banking fees are you paying?
• What are your financial goals?

Explain that work is for a person’s purpose as well as to pay the bills. Life costs money. Some parents avoid talking to their kids about money, either because it’s a stress in their own lives or because they worry their kids will gloat or be indiscreet. For better or worse, money is a huge part of our lives. Why shield kids from it, when we can instead foster a healthy relationship with it that emphasises the value of hard work?

Talk to your kids about budgets and savings, credit cards and debt, to help them understand what goes into providing all the things in their life that they might otherwise assume just ‘exist’ or grow on trees.

How big do you want your world to be?
Your world gets smaller as you get older, but the starting point is already smaller than it once was. In one way, teenagers today have infinitely sized worlds, with social media and YouTube channels and group chats. But they are not real. Teenagers need a physical world, too.

Their physical world is built from curiosity and adventure, as well as friendships. But these days opportunities for socialising in person – the bus stop, the train station, the park – have been replaced by the internet. We need to promote the idea of teenagers getting out of the house and doing things that build their worlds.

Encourage your teen to join a sporting team or a music group, or to take up lifesaving, or just let them come home from school slowly, rather than rushing home to tutoring or chores.

If your teen is someone who already experiences their whole world in their rooms and on their screens, try to expand it – go for walks, or reintroduce the kind of family day trips you may have taken when they were young. There is huge psychological benefit in being able to experience awe. This doesn’t have to involve huge family hikes – it could be something as simple as a sunset, a sunrise or a storm.

Travel is a part of this too, especially for teenagers, as it connects you to the world beyond yourself. It makes you realise that there are other places with other people who have lives that are completely different from yours.

I try to build my world out because I know that one day it will be small again. That ability to go to the next suburb or to another country, or to walk

the whole day because I am enjoying an audiobook, will go, and I want that downsizing to take time, and to start from a big place. Help your teenager make their world as big as it can be, to share with you and to have on their own as well.

Daisy is a mother of two, a teacher of teenagers, a counsellor and director of wellbeing.

READ 50 Questions to Ask Your Teens by Daisy Turnbull (Hardie Grant)

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