You are listening to Feeding the Mouth That Bites You with Ashley Parrish and Jessica Pfeiffer.

A weekly podcast guide on parenting teens and launching them into the world.

As always, we are joined by psychologist and author, Dr. Ken Wilgus.

Hey, everyone and welcome back.

Today's episode is part three of the communicating with teen series we're going to start

right where we left off so my kids think that their ideas are best and if i come from the

perspective of trying to help them to come up with this idea on their own how to you know to solve

their own problems how do we do that it's hard to lead them in a way that helps them

to think that it's their idea. But I know that that usually the most effective way with my own

kids. Yeah, I would think, you know, I think that last thing you said about to make it think

it's their own idea. You know, that's kind of what I think is a good goal, but you can't get there

by thinking that that's your goal. I would think of it more back to really communicating the freedom that your teenagers have,

which is you are thinking for yourself.

So this thing that we're dealing with,

what are you going to do about that teacher that just doesn't seem to be giving you a fair shake

or whatever the problem is?

What you want to do is encourage them or show them the respect that this is your

problem, not mine. And I really am curious, what are you going to do about it? What do you think you should do?

So that gets to your point, which is the things they may say they're going to do, you may know full well,

that's a really bad idea. So what do you do with that? Well, you're right. If you say, no, no, no, no, that's not going to work. If you get four other kids together and bring signs to class that say you're a terrible teacher, that's not a good idea. So what do you do when you're hearing something that you think is not a good idea? I think that in that respect, you go back to advice giving.

I think you listen to it. Make sure you're hearing what they're saying. And then I think you can

only give advice as long as you recognize that you probably should try to let your kid make

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