Becoming Strength Based

This book is written for parents who are concerned about doing what they need to do to help their teenagers become successful in school. Said more simply, this book is meant for those parents who wonder if what they are doing is “good enough,” at least in terms of helping their teenagers to achieve their full academic potential.

What is “good enough” anyway? Consider for a moment the “three nines” (99.9 percent) of good business practice. Successful companies are supposed to be the ones that can claim 99.9 percent customer satisfaction, for instance, or 99.9 percent accuracy in their manufacturing process.  That sounds great, doesn’t it? But the reliance on a number can be deceiving. Those “three nines” would still result in several unsafe plane landings across our nation’s airports each day, tens of thousands of pieces of mail sent to wrong addresses per hour, and the IRS losing a couple of million tax documents every year.

By any standard, being a “good enough” parent is a common worry. This concern is so widespread, in fact, that dozens if not hundreds of hardback and paperback books available right now promise to help people become “better parents.” Although the titles and topics seem quite different at first, these parenting books usually share at least one thing in common. Typically, the message of each book—sometimes subtle, sometimes more direct—is that you aren’t quite “good enough” as a parent. That is, unless and until you start doing things the way Dr. So and So tells you to do them. And sometimes that message begins to sound a lot like the “three nines.” 

So what’s different about this book? Great question! Most simply put, the basic premise of this book is that you and your family members already know what works and what doesn’t work for your family. Not me. And neither are any of the other “experts” out there. Because of this, you and your family members will be given the position of “the experts” in this book. After all, who knows your family better than you?

This is a rather large difference, and it offers a perspective that will take some getting used to as you read this book. The idea that you and your family members know more about each other than “the experts” do is not a typical message. Don’t worry, though. After a while, with concentration and practice, you will get the hang of it.

Thinking of yourself as the expert really can make a difference. How so? When you are the expert about your own family, you are in a great position to become more strength based in your thinking. As a result, quite often you become less problem focused. And quite frankly, you will be a lot more successful with teenagers and their efforts in school if you focus on strengths, and not on problems.

Of course, it goes without saying that your teenager will have problems and concerns with school-related issues from time to time. Almost all teenagers do at some point in their education. However, throughout this book, you will be asked to place these kinds of issues in your “family parking lot.” Think of this in exactly the same way you think about your family car. You are going to work, or to a meeting, or to a movie. You drive your car to the place you need to be and park your car. No big deal. You have better things to do than worry about your car, right?

You are being asked to “park your teenager’s problems” because all too often people define their lives by the amount of difficulties and concerns that they have. Instead, focus on your strengths, and pay attention to what is already going well for you and your teenager when it comes to his or her schoolwork. The more you are able to do this, the more you and your family members can take advantage of the power that comes with being a “strength-based” family.

This perspective is based both on research evidence and on direct work that has been done with families in both prevention and intervention programs. Within this perspective, the best outcomes usually happen when family members understood that they know more about their family than anyone else. Even further, the more family members pay attention to their strengths, the better equipped they will be to deal with all of the challenges that life is presenting them at any given time.

Does this mean all of the problems and concerns that you “park” will somehow go away, perhaps magically? Of course not! Does your car disappear when you park it? Not very often. The car is usually waiting for you, exactly where you parked it. So too will the issues be waiting for you. However, you will be able to see these problems and concerns with a fresh perspective when you go back to the parking lot.

This book is in no way a substitute for professional help, however. Lots of families need to rely on helping professionals to get through some of life’s really tough times, including when their teenage sons and daughters are struggling in school. However, because this book will help you view your problems and concerns in a different light, you also will learn some skills that will help you work more effectively with these professionals. This includes ways that will help you find your voice when it comes to identifying what is going right in your teenager’s efforts in school, as well as how those strengths can be used to make certain changes that are needed.

This book is divided into two sections: a thinking part and a doing part. The first section is labeled the Science of Families and involves the thinking part of this book. The chapters in this first section are designed to help you understand what we know about families from research literature. In essence, you will be given an overview of the accepted wisdom about parents and teenagers, as well as how this information can be applied to your teenager’s efforts in school. A number of important topics are covered in this section, including the family life cycle and the family systems perspective on families with adolescents. This first section ends with a chapter that discusses five facts about strong families, which provides an important connecting point to the second section of this book.

The second section is labeled Steps to Becoming a Strength-Based Family and concerns the action-oriented portion of this book. The five chapters are connected to each of the five facts about strong families, and each chapter is built around an exercise you can do with your family that focuses on helping your teenager reach his or her full academic potential. While these exercises are geared specifically toward helping your teenager experience greater success in school, you may come to realize that the things you learn from the activities can be transferred to other parts of your lives together. That simply means you are in the bonus round.

You most likely will want to read the book from cover to cover in order to understand where you will be going. You should then go back to the first chapter of the second section, read it again, and then have your family do the first exercise together. What you do from there depends on how much time and effort that first exercise takes. You could proceed to the next family challenge immediately, or set aside a time in the near future if your family needs to take a short break.

It’s now time to get started on the thinking part of this book. You are about to take a journey that will help you better appreciate yourself as the “good enough” parent you are already. No matter how many difficulties you and your family might be facing right now regarding your teenager’s schoolwork, this journey will be marked most significantly by two discoveries. First, there will be a growing realization about just how similar your family is to other families with teenagers. And second, you will begin to appreciate how many things you and your family members are already doing right in your lives together. The road to raising teenagers who are successful in school will never look the same again.