ONLINE PARENTING COACH

We are facing some challenging times ahead and I would like some advice on how to handle this with our 16 year old son. We moved to the town we are in now in the U.S. about 2.5 years ago from Canada. At the time our son had just started Grade 9. We had some rough times with him refusing to do school work, not caring about school and just being very angry. Things had just turned around with him recently when his Dad's company decided to close down without much warning. His Dad won't have any trouble finding a new job but we likely will need to move again. As you can imagine, this prospect is not going over well with our son. He is saying he wants to stay here to finish high school. Unfortunately with his past academic efforts or lack of them, he isn't doing great at school. He is in his Junior year but he is a few credits shy of graduating on schedule as he has failed a couple of semesters in 2 courses. Also, he does not have a job and he isn't driving. How d...

In the content below, the parent's comments and questions are italicized ... My comments [Mark Hutten, M.A.] are bold... __________ Hello Mark. To begin, my name is Sara and I just wanted to say that I joined your online program a few days ago and it has already been so helpful. There seems to be an ample supply of resources in my community for parenting young children, but haven't come across much for parenting the pre-teen and teen ages. I've been studying the materials and started implementing the strategies therein. Which has now brought about a couple of questions I could use some support on. First, a few days ago I removed my daughter's computer privilege for the 3 day time frame. I didn't engage in the power struggle, simply explained the consequence, and stated I wasn't going to argue. The first day went surprisingly well. She did say my rules were dumb and asked for clarification about how long and when she would get computer tim...