Raising Confident Teenagers

This book is about relationships, about building rapport and understanding between parents and teenagers at a stage when it’s easy for relationships to crumble or sour. It’s also about behaviour: tricky adolescent behaviour but also our own (perhaps sometimes tricky), adult behaviour. It’s packed with skills and strategies proven to help parents communicate effectively with their children and develop their confidence. It’s a book for all parents (or carers) but it’s a particularly valuable resource for those whose adolescents are exhibiting behaviour that’s challenging, or whose mental state is causing concern. Many young people are suffering since Covid/lockdown, and support services often lack funding. When children suffer, parents suffer – they too need support.

It’s based on the principles of the evidence-based Take 3 parenting course, written by the author when she was employed as a parenting worker for the Youth Offending Service (see www.take3parenting.co.uk), which is used around the UK and overseas. It can be used as a self-help parenting course, designed so that parents can work through it alone, or with others. There’s also a ready market for it amongst workers already using Take 3 to support parents, and it’s an invaluable handbook for professionals caring for young people or working with families (in schools, CAMHS, YOS, etc.).

A core concept of Take 3 is that no one can change other people but they can change themselves. Parents at their wits’ end trying to alter their adolescent’s behaviour develop in confidence and transform their parenting when given a chance to discuss anxieties and feel supported to try out new strategies. As they make changes, their children’s behaviour changes, families become happier. When families are in crisis, parents typically become confused, helpless, angry, and/or depressed, and love gets lost, but when they’re supported and equipped with new skills, love and connection can flow again.

This book contains a wealth of information about adolescence, reasons for misbehaviour, trauma, sibling rivalry, teenage brains, adult relationships, ‘teens & screens’ etc., and offers tried-and-tested strategies for parents to try out. Coming from a deeply supportive and encouraging place and acknowledging that all parents are always doing their best, the Take 3 approach invites parents to reflect on their own behaviour and what they’re modelling to their children. The number one parenting skill is self-care, and the book introduces Take 3 breathing to help parents stay calm when family life is turbulent and stressful.

Rosie Hill, BSc, has worked with parents for over thirty years. Her interest in the world of parenting first developed when she was struggling with feelings of loneliness and isolation while raising two children on her own. Her life changed dramatically after attending a parenting course. Since then she has dedicated her working life to supporting and initiating projects to help parents, enabling them to access the ideas and strategies she found so helpful with her own family. In 2000, in her role as Parenting Officer for the Youth Offending Team, she set up the Oxfordshire Parent-Talk programme for parents/carers of troubled, out-of-control, at-risk or vulnerable teenagers. While in post she wrote the Take 3 parenting course to meet the needs of that project (http://www.take3parenting.co.uk). This evidence-based course, Take 3: Skills and Strategies for Supporting Parents to Deal with Challenging Teenagers, is now used around the UK and overseas and has become very popular with both parents and facilitators.

She has trained and supervised many parenting practitioners over the last thirty years and has supported hundreds of parents, working one to one or in groups, in person or online. Now a grandmother of teenagers, she draws on all her knowledge and experience of having been a reflexologist, a training officer for the Citizens Advice Bureau, a china restorer, her life on a smallholding, and her degree in anthropology. In the last decade she has been immersed in training to facilitate systemic family constellations. In 1998, she co-edited the book Cross-Cultural Marriage: Identity and Choice (Routledge).