Yuri Frolov read for us a book by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish “How to talk so that teenagers will listen and how to listen so teenagers will talk”
“At the heart of this very useful and practical book is a training for parents of teenagers organized by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. The scheme of classes in the group is simple: confused adults share their experiences and receive comic diagrams from trainers on how to act in recognizable situations. Parents put the recommendations into practice – some are successful, some are not very good – and talk about this experience in the next lesson, analyze it together with other parents.
Later, children join the classes, and the training becomes a family one. The value of the book is primarily in the discussion of teenage problems that are faced in every family – here are relationships with the opposite sex, and smoking, and uncleaned rooms, and friends who behave unacceptably. The problems seem to be known to everyone, but their solution hangs up because there is no communication: adults scream and crush, teenagers are closed and aloof … We need meetings on “neutral” territory.
By “conducting” the group, the coach creates the conditions for the parties to listen in a new way to already familiar problems, be surprised by them – and find a solution. Adults begin to talk with children, and teenagers begin to sort out their feelings little by little. Adolescence is a time of searching for your identity and sexuality, working on your body image and establishing harmonious relationships with it (hence so many conflicts with parents about piercings, tattoos and diets).
In a group, in the presence of peers and adults, a teenager learns to make decisions consciously, to be responsible for what he does and how he lives. However, not only teenagers grow up at the training. The transitional age of children often coincides with parental midlife crisis. Adults project their personal problems onto teenagers.
Trying to establish communication with children in the best possible way, they also adjust their relationship. When children grow up, partners – if they were united only by raising a child – sometimes become strangers to each other or realize that they have nothing else to do in this life. The training described in the book by Mazlish and Faber helps adults solve their own problems, take care of themselves.
About the authors of the book
Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish – students of the brilliant American psychologist Haim Ginott, mothers of many children and authors of several effective guides on family relationships. Their main principle is a non-directive approach to communication. “How to talk so teens will listen and how to listen so teens will talk» Adele Faber and Elaine MazlishEksmo, 240 p.