My Work

I didn’t deal with my teen son’s rejection very well at first, but here are five tips to help you cope.

Inside this post: In today’s tech-centric world, students are feeling overwhelming anxiety when they need to speak face-to-face to adults and other authority figures. Teaching our teens how to self-advocate is an important life skill.

Teach Your Teen to Self Advocate

For years, I’ve been teaching my sons to advocate for themselves. First, we’d strategize together to find ways to make their woes better (if and when we decided the issue/drama was worth the trouble.)

We also spent a lot of time

I see your slumped shoulders and head down when you leave school.

I see you reciting your presentation from memory, even though the words are right in front of you.

I see you at the library, paging through Where’s Waldo, and trying to hide it from your peers with their chapter books.

I see you cracking jokes, stalling, making excuses and sometimes getting in trouble to avoid embarrassment related to your learning differences.

I see you collapse into bed, exhausted, at the end of every school

Ten years ago, I was stressed and venting about my little kids during a coffee morning with a group of international moms. I’m not sure if it was schoolyard drama or academic struggles that had me in a tizzy. Didn’t matter. An older mum and dear friend stopped me right there to warn me about how much harder the teen years would be, how I should enjoy the minor problems of my little kids while they lasted.

I bristled inside. Even when she talked candidly about her son’s drug use, alcohol abuse,

• Only the American parents stayed to watch their kids during swimming lessons.
• At age 4, my son was expected to ride his bike everywhere, as Dutch kids usually do.
• Returning to the US has been a culture shock for my kids, who are used to a more direct way of life.

I'm an American who lived in Holland for three years with my husband and two young sons. Parenting abroad, we experienced jarring differences in everyday life, from transportation to education to healthcare.

When we moved to th

I read a lot of parenting blogs. And books and magazines. Plus, I follow a ton of writer-moms on social media who have teen and preteen children, just like me.

So I’m feeling a little betrayed by all of you. Why didn’t anyone warn me?

Yesterday, my goofy, curly-headed baby boy slid over to me while I was doing dishes. And my little buddy looked me straight in the eye. OK, now friends, I stand a full 5 foot, 8 inches. My youngest child is barely 12. And he stood there, gazing at me, nose to nos