Using the Love and Logic Approach

Dealing with teenage behavior problems can be a challenge, but I think it is important to not only address the poor behavior, but also teach and promote the positive behaviors.  One of the things I often teach in my counseling practice is the Love and Logic approach to parenting. 

This involves, expecting your kids to make mistakes or bad decisions, and letting them deal with reasonable consequences of their bad decisions.  This can be tough because sometimes parents have to invent negative consequences.  For example, if the poor choice is that they are doing things that make their parents worry or stress out, then the parent may have to name their own stress as the problem and let the teenager know they will have to do something about it. 

For example, “Suzie, you neglecting to study for tests and then failing them is a problem for me because it makes me worry about your future.  I think it’s probably your phone that is keeping you from studying adequately.  If you can fix the problem of me worrying about your grades that would be great, but if not, I’ll have to solve my problem.”  Then, if Suzie starts studying, problem solved.  But if she continues to fail to study, you can take her phone away.  The next part would be to say to her,  “I’ll be glad to let you use your phone again as soon as I don’t have to stress out about your grades”.

Using Positive Behavioral Approaches

While this approach works quite well, it’s also only half the equation.  It still involves negative consequences or punishments.  However, research shows that we change out behaviors best when we feel good about the behaviors we are doing.  This means rewarding positive behavior is going to get better results than punishing bad behavior.

When trying to address teenage behavior problems, then; try to teach your teenager what behaviors you are looking for, be specific, and reward them for doing them.  You can do this in several ways.

First, you can simply compliment them when you notice them doing something positive on their own.  Try to do this as close to the behavior occurring as possible for maximum effect.

Second, you can give them a task to do and them compliment them for doing it, compliment them for being cooperative if they did it without a fuss, and/or compliment them the results of what they did (i.e. “Look how nice the living room looks after you vacuumed?)

Using Compliments

Other things you can do to avoid teenager behavior problems is to let you teenager overhear you bragging about their positive behaviors to other people.  This can let them know you must really mean it if your talking about it to others when they are not around.

Don’t be deterred if you compliment your teenager and you get a reaction such as eye rolling from them.  Just pretend you didn’t notice it because it still does the intended job.  Just make sure your compliments are genuine.  For example, you wouldn’t compliment a teenager on being able to tie their shoes or dress themselves (although for some you might want to compliment them for choosing an appropriate outfit).

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, teenagers, and adults.  He can help with anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, relationship problems, and more.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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Children and teenagers with social anxiety is a common occurrence.  It often shows up in early adolescence where kids have difficulty making friends, making connections and developing a satisfactory social life.  We generally describe these kids as shy but the problem can become more pervasive and problematic for many kids. Few things are more painful for parents than seeing their children be left out and struggling to make friends.

Kids and teenagers with social anxiety often feel quite lonely, isolated, and  sometimes ostracized.  This can in turn lead to depression and hopelessness because these kids often feel alone. This can make them feel like social “losers”.  Your teenager may want to make friends but suffer in silence as they struggle to find ways to do this.

What to Do:

Kids with social anxiety have a lot to offer but have trouble developing confidence and tools to engage with others.  These kids and teenagers often have great personalities with kindness, humor, and generosity as parts of their personalities.  We often describe these kids as kind, intelligent, loyal, and caring. However, their introverted personalities make it difficult to “put the mselves out there”.  They often have intense internal conflicts as they struggle to think of things to say to initiate interactions.  Then, they judge themselves harshly for not being able to think of anything. They may worry that peers are judging them harshly for their apparent social deficits.

Fortunately, counseling works wonders in helping kids learn to work within their strengths to develop self esteem and self confidence. It can help them learn to initiate basic interactions that make them more approachable to peers.

Solution Focused Counseling Can Help

Solution Focused counseling is a good fit for teenagers with social anxiety because it helps you find small ways to start interactions. And it keeps them within their comfort zones as they “stretch” themselves enough to begin the process.  

If you’d like to learn more about how solution focused counseling can help your child, contact me for a free consult.  

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, counseling for teenagers, and adults.  He provides counseling for anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, and relationship problems.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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How do you know if your child has anxiety?  There are a few signs that are common to teenage anxiety that I have seen in my counseling practice.  This can vary by age.  Older teens can show anxiety,  or hide it better, than younger teens and children.  Some of the signs I see are avoiding speaking up in groups,  avoiding social situations such as sleep overs, avoiding interacting with authority figures such as coaches, teachers, or aunts and uncles they are less familiar with.  Body language can also be a clue.  Anxious teenagers tend to hold themselves in such a way as to make themselves smaller.  They literally make themselves shorter by scrunching down their posture and tend to cover themselves almost as in a defensive posture. Think arms crossed over their chests and avoiding eye contact.  They don’t stand in ways that look assertive.  This may mean they don’t stand or walk with a confident air.

Anxious Behaviors

Anxious teens often decline invitations to do things with new groups of kids or go to places they are unfamiliar with.  They may say they are not interested in going to summer camps, joining activity based school clubs, or field trips because they get uncomfortable in situations where they don’t know what to expect or who they might have to interact with.  Anxious teens often don’t like to be called on in school or singled out even in good ways.  

Anxiety can be overcome with counseling.  The general strategy is to help the teen visualize what they will be doing differently when they are no longer anxious.  A counselor for an anxious teenager will help them develop a very detailed picture of themselves when they are more confident so they can see it themselves clearly in various real scenarios.

Next Steps

The next step is to help them identify very small, but do-able, things they can start doing differently.  This could be, for example, choosing to walk more confidently into the school building one day, even if they don’t do anything else differently the rest of the day.  Then the counselor would build on this one thing and add another positive behavior to it.  Pretty soon, the anxious teenager is noticing other times when they were more confident. They start seeing themselves gaining confidence and trying new things.  

If your have a child with teenage anxiety, counseling is a good idea.  It can help them overcome it more quickly and feel confident to try new things and gain new friends and experiences.  

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, counseling for teenagers, and adults.  He provides counseling for anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, and relationship problems.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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This realization sometimes leads to a discussion of how to build self-worth that’s independent of relationships. In other words, how do you value yourself based on your own merits, rather than letting other people decide what your worth is? This can get a little tricky because we are social creatures so some of our worth will be based on our value to others. And, there is another problem.

Being Realistic

Young children sometimes get the message they are somehow “special” without actually acquiring any speciality. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen those motivational posters in schools and other places that say things like “When you enter here, you are amazing”. Unfortunately, you’re not amazing merely for breathing in and out. People send this message to kids with good intentions, but it doesn’t help much. To our families, we’re special and loved no matter what. Outside the family, it’s not that easy. To be seen as amazing by anyone outside your family, you need to do amazing things. To be loved, do the work to be a lovable person. And to have friends, you need to be friendly. You get the point.

How to Build Self Esteem

One way to improve your self-esteem is to learn to do something you’ve always wanted to learn. Or learn about something and know it well. Some people learn to be great cooks or bakers, or mechanics or artists. Some people decide to learn something useful like computer coding, or something perhaps less useful, but interesting, like the history of World War II. This becomes their thing and it’s something they can take pride in. It’s something other people find useful or interesting.

When people tell me about having low self-worth, I ask them what tells them they should not have high self-worth. Sometimes they have legitimate things they feel shame. Other times they tend to minimize things they should legitimately take pride in. In these cases, my role is to help them see these things more clearly and amplify the skills they have.

In other cases, the person truly has very little in the way of accomplishments, skills, traits, or knowledge to feel high self-esteem. For example, a young man who passes high school with moderate grades, plays no sports and no extracurricular activities, and spends his time playing video games, may have low self-esteem. In this case, it’s a matter of helping him figure out things that he can start doing that will bring a sense of self-worth. However, this doesn’t come easy either. Learning to do something worthwhile takes time and hard work.

Be Willing to Do the Work

Quite often, we want the benefits without doing the actual work. We want the great beach body, but don’t want to put time in at the gym. We want to be a straight A student, but don’t want to sacrifice the time to study. Or we have to remember that high self-esteem that is dependent on our own merits requires work, but it is worth the effort.

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, counseling for teenagers, and adults.  He provides counseling for anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, and relationship problems.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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Symptoms of ADHD

While many children are diagnosed with ADHD in childhood, quite often Aspergers Syndrome is mistaken for ADHD at first. The APA in their latest revision of the DSM 5, did away with Asperger’s syndrome as a separate diagnostic category and included it with Autism. So, basically it is now considered high functioning Autism.

ADHD usually presents with symptoms of inattention, distractedness, forgetfulness, disorganization, and sometimes hyperactive or impulsive. In ADHD, symptoms are due to an inability to stay focused, and with feelings of restlessness, and boredom.

Symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome

The traits of Asperger’s syndrome often look like ADHD as these children also seem distracted, disorganized, and off topic. However, the causes of the behaviors are different for ADHD and Aspergers Syndrome. Children with Asperger’s syndrome have trouble reading social situations so they are often unsure what the important things to pay attention to and focus on are within the classroom. They are often unaware of social rules so may not be aware, for example, that they shouldn’t get up and do something else while the teacher is teaching.

Students with Aspergers Syndrome also have difficulty with social reciprocity and something called Theory of Mind. This means they have difficulty considering a situation from another persons viewpoint, and as a result, may talk too much about their own interests, cut people off, and interrupt without being aware this is rude. It appears impulsive or as if they are not paying attention so looks like an ADHD trait, but it’s different.

Understanding Social Rules

Children with Asperger’s Syndrome are often not aware of “unwritten rules” the rest of us learn intuitively. Consequently, they say and do socially awkward things. Again, they appear impulsive or as if they are not paying attention to their surroundings.

It’s important when having a professional do an ADHD evaluation for a child, to have them rule out the possibility of Asperger’s Syndrome during the process. Quite often, the forms we have teachers fill out for ADHD will show significance for ADHD traits even in someone who has Asperger’s Syndrome, which means you can get what is called a false positive for ADHD. In my counseling practice, I often have children, teenagers, and adults come in for counseling who have previously been diagnosed with ADHD and treated with ADHD medication such as Ritalin or Adderall, to find out their symptoms are more consistent with Asperger’s syndrome. This usually explains why the medications were not making much difference.

Some of the things to look for in Asperger’s syndrome are whether the child has rigid thinking or behavior, such as needing to follow the same routine and getting overly upset when the routine is changed. Another thing to look for is whether the child seems to have trouble “reading” social situations wherein they may unknowingly say or do something offensive or awkward. This can result in them having trouble getting along with kids their own age. Sometimes they prefer the company of adults or of younger children.

Sensory Issues

A child whose emotions are hard to read because they don’t seem to show much expression on their face when happy, sad, or upset (unless they are really happy or really upset) can be another tell tale sign. While children with ADHD often have some sensory issues, they are most often things such as not liking the feeling of tags in their shirts or complaining of clothing being too restrictive.

Children with Aspergers Syndrome generally have more severe sensory issues than kids with ADHD. They will complain about noises being too loud, smells being too strong, places being too loud and crowded. They may experience a great deal of pain for a minor injury or hardly complain at all over serious injuries. Generally speaking, children with Asperger’s syndrome often have a distinct way of speaking. They often have a very good vocabulary for their age and speak with very precise speech. These children often choose not to use slang or more abstract terms. They often talk like “little professors” or they just talk in a more mature way than children their age.

More Symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome

Children with Asperger’s syndrome often have trouble understanding sarcasm or language that contains too much abstract language. If your child has trouble understanding when you’re joking, it could be a sign of Asperger’s syndrome. Most children understand when an adult is kidding with them and will smile at their jokes just to be polite. When joking around with Asperger’s children, I often get no response, leaving me feeling I’m not very funny. Then I realize this may be an Asperger trait. These children sometimes don’t react with the reciprocity of smiling at jokes the way other people will.

Determing whether your child has Asperger’s syndrome requires an evaluation by a psychologist or the special education team at school. However, it can be useful to get a screening by a counselor first to get support for doing an evaluation.

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, counseling for teenagers, and adults.  He provides counseling for anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, and relationship problems.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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This is a Love and Logic strategy I incorporate in counseling for teenagers and helping parents use discipline for teenagers. If you’re not familiar with Love and Logic, do a google search and you’ll find tons of books and videos available. Teenagers have a tendency to screw up and do things they shouldn’t or fail to do things they should be doing. One thing parents tend to do to fix this is give the teenager a 20 minute lecture on how the world works and how they are going to ruin their lives if they keep going down this path.

Unfortunately, these lectures don’t usually work. The good news is that your kids already know almost exactly what you’re going to say. This means you’ve already gotten through to them; your voice is already in their head.

A Better Way to Approach Discipline for Teenagers

So how do you get teens to do the right thing if lecturing doesn’t work. The Love and Logic approach is to stop talking and let natural or logical consequences do the teaching. For example, lecturing them about homework may just cause them to shut down (usually combined with eye rolling and heavy sighing). So try this instead. Let them know their ability to earn privileges depends on whether they earn those privileges by working to earn them. This is different from telling them they don’t get something because they did something wrong. So they might earn the use of their iPhone on a daily basis by making sure they have no missing assignments.

Love and Logic Strategies

Love and Logic suggests we have to let our kids own their own problems and learn from experiencing reasonable consequences. And if they create a problem that affects us, we get to solve the problem in a way that works well for us, but not necessarily well for them. So for example, if you have to worry about their missing assignments and lose sleep due to worrying about whether they will graduate, that’s a problem you get to solve. When your teen asks you to drive them somewhere, you might respond with, “I’d really love to drive you, but I’m so exhausted from worrying about your grades I just don’t have the energy to drive you anywhere right now. But as soon as I’m not so tired from all this worry I’m sure I”ll have the energy to start driving you around again”.

Providing discipline for teenagers this way helps them develop better decision making skills.

So, try to stop nagging and lecturing and take the Love and Logic approach. Don’t try to solve all your teen’s problems for them. Let them suffer with their bad decisions as long as the consequences are reasonable. They’ll learn to make better decisions for themselves and gain more confidence and maturity in the process.

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, counseling for teenagers, and adults.  He provides counseling for anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, and relationship problems.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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As a counselor for teenagers and college students, I often see clients who struggle with personal identity. They need counseling for self-esteem and to develop a personal sense of identify. High school students, college students, and young adults often have trouble figuring out who they are and exactly how they should navigate their world. This involves dating relationships, friendships, developing a sense of personal right and wrong, etc. They often look to me for input on what the “right way” to handle a situation is. However, I can usually only talk about what is right for me, or what has been “right” for other people. That doesn’t mean my ideas will be right for them.

So I find ways to ask questions that will encourage them to think about what is important to them, what they want, or how they want to “see” themselves or have other people see them. Quite often, rather than tell a client what they should do, I will tell them what I’m thinking about as they describe what’s going on for them. I do this so they can compare my ideas with what they are already thinking and gain some clarity about what they want to do.

Sometimes when I’m counseling someone for self-esteem issues they realize they should be doing something different. The idea seems good but they have trouble picturing themselves doing something different because it feels awkward. When one client mentioned this during a counseling session, it reminded me of something I saw on a TV show.

I watched a tv show not long ago and someone asked the main character why he wore a cowboy hat. His response was, “I tried it on and it fit”. The implication was that sometimes you try something new and if it fits, you keep doing it.

This is one of the objectives of therapy. You try a new behavior and it if works then keep doing it until it’s a part of you.

You might feel if you adopt a new attitude or behavior then others will think you’re pretending to be somebody you’re not. But if you try it on and it fits, why not just keep wearing it? After a while, you will be so comfortable with it you won’t feel like you’re playing dress-up anymore.

Gary Watson is a solution focused counselor in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He works with people who want counseling for self-esteem, depression, anxiety, self-confidence, relationships, and more. For more information about Solution Focused Therapy and how it works, visit the Solution Focused Brief Therapy Association website.

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As a therapist who works with lots of teenagers, I often talking about successful parenting skills. I often caution parents about not letting their kids spend too much time playing video games or playing on iPhones. However, over the past couple of years, it seems just as important to remind parents about their own screen addictions.

I often go to the coffee shop to take a break and do some work on the computer. More and more often these days, I see a parent come in alone with a toddler or infant and sit for a long time, ignoring their child as they focus on their smart phones. I always want to tell them to interact with their child.

Nothing is more important than interacting with your child as this age. Does it take effort? Of course. Is it worth it? Absolutely. We don’t know what the effects on kids will be whose parents are there physically, but not emotionally. However, you can bet it won’t be good. While it’s tempting to think you’ll just be on your phone for a minute while your child is occupied with something else, it usually tends to be more than just a minute.

Successful parenting–raising mentally healthy kids who are responsible, socially adept, and who will become successful adults–takes time and effort. Kids whose parents have put in the effort to interact with them are later rewarded with older children who are intelligent, interesting, socially successful, and positive. They often have better relationships with their children as they grow up.

In my counseling practice, I’ve provided counseling for teenagers who feel their parents lack interest in their lives. These teenagers feel their parents left them to figure things out for themselves and they resent their parents. This tends to be the time when grades slip, or the teenagers get into trouble at school or their neighborhood.

To save yourself the misery of having this situation happen to your family, invest in your children while they are young. Put the phone away and play with your kids.

Gary Watson is a counselor in Grand Rapids, Michigan who specializes in working with teenagers, college students, and young adults. He also provides marriage counseling. Gary uses a solution focused approach to counseling with all clients. To learn more about Solution Focused Counseling, go to the Solution Focused Brief Counseling Association website. To learn more about Gary Watson, please visit his website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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