What do you do when your adolescent is spending too much time on a screen?
Or staying up too late?
Or behind on homework?
Or getting sucked into social drama with friends?

Especially as our kids get older, how do we influence them while still maintaining our connection?

How do we give our adolescents practice making their own choices–and making mistakes–while still keeping them safe?

As parents–if we are not going to resort punishments or rewards, threats or yelling–our best bet is to influence our children in positive ways, through our connection with them, and through conversations.

But HOW do we talk to our adolescents?

How do we have a conversation about a “hot topic” that doesn’t devolve into us lecturing, and our teen rolling her eyes, rebelling, or sneaking behind our backs?

Is there a technique we can use to help kids change their minds?

Yes! It is Motivational Interviewing.

We first heard about Motivational Interviewing from Dr. Christine Carter. If you missed her talk in the last conference, here is where she talks with us about Motivational Interviewing.

But here’s the thing….

We’ve read a lot of parenting books and interviewed a lot of speakers until we read Christine’s book we’d never heard about this before!

So we wanted to make sure that you knew about Motivational Interviewing and how to do it because we think this technique is seriously genius.

And if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on Christine’s newly released book, you’ll find a whole chapter devoted to Motivational Interviewing with more scripts, details, and examples than we could fit into our interview with her… Extra genius!

So what is Motivational Interviewing?

Check out Christine’s interview. It’s only a few minutes long and it’s enough to get you started.

And if you want a groundbreaking parenting book that will help you and your teen with a lot more than just Motivational Interviewing, please check out her book.

It’s one of our favorites right now!

P.S. We’re not getting paid to tell you about Christine Carter’s book. We just want you to have the most cutting edge information about parenting. Christine’s book has info that we have not found anywhere else… And it’s not just about motivational interviewing.

This book is a slam dunk, in so many ways, including the not-to-be-missed chapter about teens smoking pot and drinking.

If you have an adolescent–or if you will someday–please, get this book. You’ll be glad you did.