Strategies for Parenting Your Testing Teen
$15.00
Description
(February 2021) Strategies for Parenting Your Testing Teen
Adolescence is a time of push-pull, in demanding independence then resuming rituals of childhood, in exploring identity apart from family and also rigidly seeking to conform. Adopted adolescents face all this with the complication of rethinking the impact of their adopted status on self while still being a member of your family. This workshop is PRACTICAL as we name the woes and offer strategies for mindfully moving through these vital years. Specifically:
-How to set boundaries with a teen whose early attachment ruptures spark a persistent need to be in control and a need to cling.
-How to balance teen’s need for Strong Nurture with Strong Structure.
-How to be a “Secure Base” in attachment terms, for your teen to explore out and come back, at times without regard to their own safety or yours.
-How to come alongside teen’s need to navigate their belonging culturally, sexually, or in gender identity, especially in our tough pandemic reality.
-How to track and know yourself – blind spots and all, through your teen’s steps to independence.
Participants will reflect on their evolving job description as a parent of an adopted adolescent in order to approach this time of life with humor, compassion, and grace. This workshop will be geared towards parents, but is open to professionals as well.
Krista Nelson, LICSW, LMFT has thirty years of post-master’s experience working with children and parents who are coping with attachment loss, trauma and family changes, especially with youth who entered a family through adoption. She is co-founder of Family Circle Counseling in St. Paul, MN and led the Wilder Foundation’s Attachment and Trauma Training program in St. Paul from 2001 to 2017. She co-created Surviving and Thriving Beyond the RAD Diagnosis in 2008 and continues to facilitate adoptive parents in experiential workshops across Minnesota. Krista is an attachment focused family therapist with advanced training in EMDR, Theraplay, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Emotion Focused Couples Therapy who loves the balance of doing therapy with playful children, teens, adult adoptees, parents and couples in their quest for healing. She specializes in work with adult adoptees and adoptive parents with their own trauma histories now raising children of their own.
Watch time: 121 minutes
Eligible Certificate of Completion time: 120 minutes