Tether Yourself: The Enlightening Talk Parents Aren’t Having Can Keep Teens from a Damaging Drift

Here’s how you take back control:

Awareness … you see, awareness changes everything. Awareness is your weapon against the hidden influences and damaging behaviors. While you are online, your mind, your thoughts, your core values are drifting to wherever tech companies want you to go. The remedy is to limit the time you spend drifting in the online world and tether yourself to real life.

Book Recommendations for Parents

Below is a list of parenting books. Some we have read and found to be interesting and helpful; others come highly recommended. Enjoy!

• The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine

A must-read for any parent. A great primer on how to raise healthy, happy children. Particular guidance for those parenting teenagers/tweens.

• How to Talk So Kids will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Elaine Mazlish

Great book with important communication strategies that will help enhance the dialogue between parents and their children.

• Queen Bees & Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman

Good reading for parents and daughters. It offers the tools you need to help your daughter feel empowered and make smarter choices.

• “Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall?”: A Parent’s Guide to the New Teenager by Anthony E. Wolf

• The Optimistic Child: Proven Program to Safeguard Children from Depression & Build Lifelong Resilience, by Martin E. Seligman

A guide to help your child view the world in a more positive way to help him/her lead a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

• Freeing Your Child from Anxiety: Powerful, Practical Solutions to Overcome Your Child's Fears, Worries, and Phobias, by Tamar Chansky

• The Whipped Parent: Hope for Parents Raising an Out-of-Control Teen by Kimberly Abraham, Marney Studaker-Cordner, with Kathryn O’Dea

A practical, realistic resource for dealing with serious behaviors. Helps parents learn to stop blaming themselves, handle disappointment from unmet expectations, and work with courts and schools.

• Reality Gap: Alcohol, Drugs, and Sex – What Parents Don’t Know and Teens Aren’t Telling by Stephen Wallace

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey

An engaging step-by-step guide to help teens improve self-image, build friendships, resist peer pressure, achieve their goals, get along with their parents, and much more.