Hope For Parents With Struggling Teens

Send us Fan Mail Brandon delves into the critical role of honesty in parenting. He explores how being truthful about decisions, motivations, and family dynamics can profoundly impact children's development. Examining past choices and their consequences highlights the importance of daily self-reflection and transparency about temperament and limitations. He also discusses the challenges of man...

Send us Fan Mail Brandon explores why many parents fixate on setting boundaries, emphasizing the need to first understand what they can and cannot control. Instead of relying solely on boundaries, parents should focus on connecting with their children through patience and open-mindedness. Using the 90/10 Rule—spending 90% of the time connecting and only 10% correcting—parents can engage more effec...

Send us Fan Mail Brandon tackles the growing issue of "failure to launch," where young adults struggle with independence, creating stress and resentment in families. Learn how setting healthy boundaries and focusing on your well-being can support your child's growth and family harmony. He also emphasizes that parenting is a journey best navigated with community support—it's not...

Send us Fan Mail Brandon explores the challenges of parenting a defiant child and emphasizes the importance of setting boundaries. He explores how parents can team up effectively even amidst meltdowns and defiant behaviors, and why disengagement and silent consistency can bring calm to chaotic situations. Discover actionable strategies for protecting your peace without sacrificing your well-being,...

Send us Fan Mail Brandon dives into the complex world of parent-child relationships, focusing on strategies for repairing and nurturing a connection with a child who seems distant or wants to cut ties. He touches on overcoming parental fears by understanding the purpose of boundaries for long-term contentment without resentment. This episode highlights the value of persistence, consistency, and he...

Send us Fan Mail Brandon explores food addiction, boundaries, and grief in parenting. He explains that addiction behaviors can persist without substance use and stresses the importance of setting firm boundaries to avoid enabling. Parents should focus on healthy behaviors, consistent boundaries, and not basing their actions on their child’s reactions. Grief can affect behavior but shouldn't c...

Send us Fan Mail Zack Collie is an Associate Marriage Family Therapist who has been working at Inspired Resolutions for a year. He has an Instagram @theparalyzedtherapist. He was in a diving accident at 15 years old that left him wheelchair-bound. This event led him down the path of becoming a therapist to help others. Zack is also newly married and has taken on the role of stepdad.  What’s the di...

Send us Fan Mail Our guest is a mother whose child has been on a different path from most. She has been attending our parenting group for many years. She gives a history of her journey with her son and their progress in rebuilding and maintaining their relationship. We talked about how she could stop doing the things that didn’t work without her child making the changes she wanted him to make. She...

Send us Fan Mail What if we as parents challenged ourselves to stop yelling.  Well Pat has become a social media sensation doing just that and putting it out there for everyone to see.  In this episode we explore some parenting dynamics that can be frustrating and often lead to yelling.  If it worked we would all see that in our children.  Yelling has its place in parenting, but is often an unheal...

Send us Fan Mail Today my guest is pastor Kyle Zimmerman from Orange Friends Church, who recently gave a Sunday message that I feel applies to parenting struggling teens. Whether you believe there’s a God or follow Christianity or not, you’re going to get some good wisdom out of his insight about boundaries, parenting, and the definition of real love. Pastor Kyle used an illustration from the stor...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Hope for Parents with Struggling Teens.  Today we’re joined once again by Brittany Johns, LMFT to talk about some recent trends in the mental health world and a few of the dynamics we’ve been seeing recently in many families of struggling teens. We address some new diagnostic terms that are growing in popularity, as well as a couple of phrases that aren’t actually...

Send us Fan Mail On today’s episode, I got to talk with Asha Bhattacharya, who was crowned Miss Anaheim when she was 18 and has been using her platform to spread awareness about mental health ever since. I used to think all pageants were focused on beauty, and all pretty much the same, and I know I’m not the only one who will benefit from hearing how Miss America and other pageants actually work,...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to the Hope for Parents with Struggling Teens podcast! My guest today is an incredibly inspiring woman named Annette Craig. Annette founded my favorite non-profit in the world: The With Hope Foundation  Annette lost her daughter Amber to suicide extremely unexpectedly in 2005, when Amber was just 14. Now, With Hope, The Amber Craig Memorial Foundation is actively educ...

Send us Fan Mail Today’s episode is all about gaslighting.  This term has become very popular in our culture over the last decade, and I’ve noticed that not everyone is using it in the same way.   “Gaslighting” was Merriam-Webster’s most searched word of 2022, and has taken a prominent role online as people attempt to describe things like deceit, feeling discredited, being misrepresented, and more...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I want to talk about the three basic rules to the parenting relationship. Number one: stop what doesn’t work. Getting rid of practices that aren’t bearing fruit seems like a no-brainer, but however obvious it may be, it can be hard to do.  Sometimes we can be operating in defaults and habits that have been around for years, and ceasing these activities and approac...

Send us Fan Mail This episode it all about boundary setting. The topic of setting healthy boundaries is a significant part of my practice. When done correctly, it can be a game changer in many challenging parenting dynamics. Many parents have heard of and tried setting boundaries, but it’s common to begin the boundaries journey with some misconceptions about what they do and why they’re important....

Send us Fan Mail First, I address the subject of doing what works. Some of us can continue to do things that aren’t working because we believe it’s the right way to parent, that it SHOULD work, or that maybe it is somehow secretly working.  Common approaches that often don’t work are: nagging, repeating, yelling, criticizing, and sometimes even the punishment and reward approach. Instead, we want...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode of the Hope for Parents with Struggling Teens podcast, we’re going to tackle the heart-wrenching and all too familiar topic of substance use and addiction. Today I’m talking with Brittany Johns AMFT. Brittany carries valuable expertise from her years of experience helping teens through substance abuse and addiction. What can you do to help your teen who is using? S...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to the Hope for Parents with Struggling Teens podcast, a resource for parents who want to learn what really works in relationships with struggling teens. Have you ever set a boundary with someone, and then that person just wouldn’t respect it? Well, guess what - that wasn’t a proper boundary.   There’s a common misunderstanding about boundaries floating around right n...

Send us Fan Mail You are not alone if you don’t know where to go or what to do in order to get your child the help he or she needs.  There is so much information on what to do and how to do it that it can be overwhelming.  In a way, it seems like there are countless options and at times it seems that there is no help for what your family is struggling with.  Get some answers and better navigate ge...

Send us Fan Mail When we first have a kid most of us dreamt about their future, how we were going to protect them, and how we were going to make sure that we start off correctly with not too much but just enough parenting intervention.  Often our desire for them to have a successful and happy future leads us to parenting behaviors that do not put the relationship first.  The lessons and the parent...