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If you have teens or pre-teens, those kids may act like they don't care what you have to say or what you think, but don't be fooled, they're paying attention and they long for your approval.

I'm John Fuller with Danny Werta who leads our parenting and youth department here at

Focus on the family and Danny I think some of us as parents tend to give our kids more criticism than affirmation.

It's easy to point out the things that they're not doing right.

Give us some ideas here at the beginning of this episode.

How can we be more intentional about affirming our kids?

It is about intentionality, John, and pausing and noticing those specific things that are

true to your teen. It takes knowing them. It's

easy to see things that are not doing well and to gauge where they're doing well

and pointed out it's it's an accurate assessment of their true

abilities. Teens love genuine feedback and so if you're just giving empty, they're going to ignore the empty praise.

Oh, you're good at that, good smile.

It's truly giving them feedback as to who they are, as teens,

what's truly good about them and pointing it out and not always

about their performance they do want true affirmation of their sense of belonging their sense of belonging, their sense of worth, and their sense of competence.

Those are three important buckets to a teen.

And so what are they truly good at?

Maybe they're not as good at something that's okay that there's nothing bad

with and we've talked about that in our house it's okay to be bad at something and

...