The teenager is trying to prove that he is an individual, his opinion must be taken into account, so he rebels against his parents, school, rules and requirements, trying to change the world around him.
There is an opinion that most often children from disadvantaged families run away from home. This is partly true, but a teenager can run away from the most ordinary family.
If parents use totalitarian methods of education, harshly scold the child for bad grades, damaged or lost things, as a result, the fear of the parents will prevail over the fear of the night street, and then the teenager decides not to come home.
When a child’s hobbies are not accepted by his friends, youthful maximalism is criticized, they forbid falling in love and dating a girl (or guy), but demand that they follow the rules (learn homework, come home on time, wash the dishes), then leaving home becomes the only way for a teenager to get rid of from misunderstanding and oppression from parents.
Misunderstanding in the family is indeed one of the main reasons for running away. Children are acutely aware of injustice towards themselves. And if in a conflict situation (for example, involving a teacher) they do not receive parental support, this may well be the reason for leaving home.
What to do?
Most teenagers are found alive and unharmed after going missing within 48 hours, so you need to act immediately!
Call your child's friends and acquaintances, as well as relatives. Parents should always know the phone numbers of not only their child’s friends, but also their parents! In most cases, teenagers do not inform their father and mother that the need for a classmate to spend the night is due to the fact that the friend ran away from home. Therefore, after you have called your child's friends, start calling their parents. Find out who saw him and communicated with him. Peers often know much more about their friend than their parents.
Find out what things the child took with him. Check out his social media pages. In his accounts, based on the latest entries and photographs, one can often understand whether the teenager was planning to run away, with whom he spent the day, and where he was until recently.
Contact the police: law enforcement agencies are required to accept your statement, even if only an hour has passed since the child went missing. Action must be taken immediately. Don't forget to bring a recent photo of your child with you.
Contact volunteer organizations that search for missing people. Most of them work in conjunction with the police, making this search option the most productive.
If your child's mobile phone is registered to you, ask your mobile operator for a printout of recent calls.
Try not to panic. Of course, in such a situation it can be very difficult to cope with your emotions, but this will not help your child. If you cannot stabilize your emotional state, call the helpline - do not be afraid to contact specialists.
Someone should always stay at home. The teenager can return home at any time, and if he finds the door locked, since all family members rushed to look for him, he will go outside again.
If you find out where your child is, do not immediately rush to forcibly take him away from there. It is important to get in touch with him: let him speak out without reproaching, and if you are guilty, ask for forgiveness.
Don't rush to scold him. Talk to the teenager on a sensory level, talk about your experiences and emotions, ask him how he felt. This will make it easier for you to understand each other. It’s good if a psychologist works with the child for some time after what happened, because if a teenager runs away from home, it means he needs help.
Cases where teenagers run away from home forever are mostly associated with a severe dysfunctional situation in the family: alcoholism of parents, criminal environment, prostitution, drug addiction. The teenager decides that it is better to be a street child than to live in such an environment. But children from such families are also ready to return home if they have confidence that they are loved and understood.
Parents often wonder how to influence a teenager so that he does not run away from home? “Influencing” a teenager is a losing proposition. A teenager must be sincerely loved, respected and accepted. He should feel that anyone at home loves him: the one with a ring in his nose, the one who has committed a bad act, the one in love, the one who got a bad mark, the angry one, the one who is confused. The home should be an environment where a child will be loved not for something, but simply because he exists - so dear and rapidly growing up.
Ekaterina Safonova
Using harsh and sometimes cruel forms of punishment for children and adolescents, we firmly believe that we are doing them good by warning them from some kind of danger. In fact, we instill deep fear in them.
Photo source: static.life.ru
At first they live with this fear of punishment, but then it becomes too much and it causes too much pain and humiliation. And then it may seem that it is easier to leave and run away than to be punished again.
Conflicts with relatives
“Dear ones scold - they just amuse themselves,” you may say. But your child may not agree with you.
For him, the conflict can be much more serious and painful than for some adults. You will then go to work, chat with your girlfriends, cool down, forget everything, and the next day you will be kind and sweet. For a child experiencing internal maturation, everything can be completely different.
And the phrase “I don’t need you!” accidentally thrown out by my mother in the heat of anger! - be the impetus for leaving home.
Hypercontrol and overprotection
We love our children very much. We want the best for them and really want to protect them from the many dangers that our world is fraught with. It’s so natural when parents protect, isn’t it? So…
But moderation is good in everything, and in guardianship and care too. What is natural and normal for a preschooler may be too much for a teenager.
Photo source: life.ru
Allow your child to gradually separate from you. Teach him to behave correctly in life alone, but allow him to make his own mistakes. Because otherwise, your child may at some point begin to suffocate from your irrepressible round-the-clock love, care and guardianship and may try to break out of this state.
To attract attention
Leaving home can be demonstrative. There are children who are very determined to constantly attract attention to themselves, and are ready to achieve this by any means. Psychologists say that these are children in whom there is a clear hysterical accentuation of character.
Parents' conflicts with each other
When mom and dad are in conflict, they rarely think that there are at least three of them, and that the child is involved in their showdown no less than they are. Because he feels tension, because he sees and hears constant swearing.
Photo source: menslife.com
And no matter how much the parents reassure themselves that their relationship does not affect the child and does not concern him, because they love him as before and very much, the child himself may feel completely different. “There’s also me here!”, “You’re sorting things out with each other and forgot about me!” - he shouts with his behavior.
Inappropriate parenting methods chosen by parents
How do we raise our children? When parents, together with their children who have left home or tried to escape from home, come to see a psychologist, he often sees a completely different relationship between mother and teenager than what the parents imagine.
It often happens that those parenting methods that seem healthy and adequate to mom and dad are not. And parents notice this only when their children already leave home (and it’s good if they return and something can still be fixed!) and when they turn to professionals for help.
Do you know stories when children ran away from home? Share in the comments!
You consider yourself the best parents in the world and think that your life experience is priceless, although your child, in fact, manages to learn more in a day than you do in a week. Of course, you love your child, but your love very often turns into a continuous “I-know-how-you-to-live-I-know-how-you-should-be.” And then one day you come home and your child has disappeared, leaving at best a note. Do you think you are not to blame for this? Whatever the case!
In Belarus, every year the internal affairs bodies of the Republic of Belarus receive about 2 thousand applications and appeals from citizens about the unknown disappearance of children. The vast majority of children who leave home or boarding institutions stay for one to three days. However, some of the missing remain untraceable for many years. Thus, as of January 1, 2014, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 62 children were not found, 35 of them were over 5 years old, 5 were from 3 to 5 years old, 10 were from 1 to 3 years old.
Comrade parents, would you like to think about it?
You think that the most important thing in your child’s life is you, and also school. Oh, the ubiquitous teacher-is-always-right parenting conspiracy. You will never, ever prove that a teacher is just a person, and not always good and smart. You don’t even want to imagine that some future teachers enter the pedagogical school because there is less competition there, and then they teach children, hating them with all their hearts.
You don't like your children's friends, for them you reserve the refrain "they are a bad influence on you." And it’s good if caring moms and dads say this to their children, and not to those same friends.
The children's outfits loudly terrify not only you, but also all your numerous relatives, and the innocent piercing in the navel was hidden from dad for three months.
All I hear from you is: “Do your homework, go to bed, turn down the music wherever you hang out, clean up the mess in the room, you won’t amount to anything, the way you talk to your parents, we feed and water you, wash the dishes, you’re nothing without us.” , stop chewing gum..." You can say this forever.
The most interesting thing is that you really consider this a form of expressing care and showing love. Hmm, would you, a mother of two children, at a time when these children were not yet planned, be happy if your future husband showed his love in such an intrusive way? Obviously, after such “courtship” you would not have gotten around to it with your children. So why do you make your parental love such a heavy burden for your children?
Children and adolescents have a very fragile, sensitive psyche. And a moment may come when, during the next brainwashing, they cannot stand it and choose only one way out - to leave home. Moreover, the question “Where?” doesn't even rise. Only the cry of “From whom?” hangs in the air.
Your child is from another planet
The fact that you live on different planets became clear to your child at the age of six. And since then he considers his own parents to be aliens, and thinks that nothing good can be expected from aliens.
And your child dreams about how nice it would be to receive the manual “How to Survive Among Parents.” And it didn’t hurt you, parents, between caring about your child’s daily bread to at least once think that, oddly enough, he is not your property.
But you live on different planets, you have huge clumps of cotton in your ears, and no hearing aids will help here.
In short, your child packs his backpack and leaves. Wonderful. And then life begins. A rather tasteless cure for illusions.
How it happens
Fifteen year old Anya left home after quarreling with her mother over her grades. She slammed the door and didn’t let anyone know about herself for five days. While the parents were calling hospitals and morgues, the sweet young lady was calmly hanging out with her friend, whose parents were on a business trip, and who, innocently stroking Anya’s parents in the eyes, said that she had not seen Anya for a long time, because she had to go to school for some reason. then she stopped. The seemingly innocent story ended badly. The girls and their classmates drank vodka at that same friend’s house. Anya was sitting on the windowsill of an open window and, losing her balance, fell down. Broke my spine. And now no one knows if she will ever be able to walk.
Sergey was the only child in the family. Mom and dad, scientists, treated their son with adoration, he studied well and did not show himself to be criminal. But starting from the sixth grade, he began to constantly run away from home. It was found in various parts of the republic, and several times even outside its borders. Parents could not cope with this; they looked for reasons in themselves and at school, in relationships with friends and first love. When Sergei turned 18, he went to serve in the army. He escaped from there several times, which already created problems with the law. Finally, we decided to contact a psychologist, who said that Sergei had a disease that did not allow a person to control such impulses and which would worsen over the years.
Olya I left my mom and dad with the firm desire to never see them again. They forbade her to meet her beloved boy Sasha, without whom Olenka, of course, could not live a day. The boy “took care” of her and settled her in the basement of a high-rise building, where their group had a “kamora” (a place for evening parties and skipping school). He fed her with cutlets brought from home and rejoiced in every possible way at her cool action. True, for some reason he did not want to join his beloved and lived quietly at home. After two weeks of such free living, a drunken homeless man came across Olechka at night. He raped her and ran away. She returned home, but it is unlikely that she will soon want to see anyone at all.
Igor ran away from his parents simply because they did not understand him. And Igor’s dad was a big police chief, a very powerful and authoritarian person. The paradox is that while the city and even the republican police were looking for his comrade, he calmly lived at the Minsk station, miraculously filtering through constant raids on street children. He made friends with the station tramps and even managed to gain authority among them. I traveled around the country and felt absolutely free and happy. When they finally returned him home, he said that at the first opportunity he would run away again. But I solved the problem differently. After ninth grade, I entered college in another city and tries to come home as little as possible.
Perhaps these stories of prosperous children will seem simply stupid in comparison with the troubles of those who escape from the beatings and scandals of their alcoholic parents, from their mothers’ constantly changing roommates, from banal hunger. But this doesn't make the situation any better.
What are they thinking about when they run away?
Few manage to escape far. There is not enough money or no money at all. There is nowhere to live, because all your child’s friends are the same prosperous children living with their mothers and fathers. Street companies frighten your child from early childhood. This is the good side. But there is also a bad one.
Your child is simply scared to return home. And he also wants to defend his position. OK, let him prove how small and unrestrained he is, let him slam the door and throw tantrums.
When the child is found and returns in a few days, you, of course, will not scold him. You will be very happy with him, you will walk around him on your toes and blow off the dust that has accumulated during the long walk. And then everything will start again. And it will continue again and again. Not ad infinitum. Exactly until the moment your child proves to you that he is already an adult and independent person, can make important decisions and plan his life.
Don’t wait for relapses; explain to your child that in order to change your life, you need to change yourself. No other way. He, of course, belongs only to himself, but in order to have all the rights to himself, both he and you, his parents, must know for sure that he is capable of controlling such a complex mechanism.
What should parents do when their child leaves home?
Immediately remember everything your child has talked about lately. Call all your child’s acquaintances and friends, and talk not only with the children, but also with their parents, asking them to take appropriate actions if your child appears in their field of vision. Call your relatives and friends and interview them.
Check to see if money or valuables are missing from the house. Try to determine what things the child took with him, what clothes, perhaps books. Analyze all this carefully.
If your child is discovered missing in the evening, be sure to call the class teacher, and in the morning go to school and interview all classmates. Remember or find out from your peers where and with whom your child most often spent his free time, and to whom he could inform about his plans.
If you do not see any signs of your child deliberately leaving home, call an ambulance to find out if your child was taken there as a victim of an accident. Call the police, find out if the child has been detained - children often do not have documents with them, and they do not want (cannot) say what their names are and where they can call their parents.
If all these actions do not bring results, urgently contact the relevant authorities to organize a search for the child. Go to the district police station, taking with you the documents for the child and his photographs. Write a statement at the police station and put him on the wanted list. Police officers are obliged to accept your statement upon request; do not accept any careless excuses like “He will run away and come back.”
Continue calling your child's closest friends, emphasizing that you love him very much, are worried, are waiting for him at home and are not angry at all. You can go around all your friends, talk - it doesn’t cost anything to hide a 13-year-old girl under the bed so that the parents don’t even realize that there is someone else in the house. In addition, personal contact may cause friends to “split” if they know where your child is hiding. Use cunning, say: “I know for sure that you are in the know, because Seryozha said that he trusts you with all his secrets, and if something happens, he will only tell you.”
Having found your son or daughter, do not immediately attack him with questions. But after a while, try to talk about the topic of escape, find out what caused it, try to understand your child and find mutual understanding with him. Remember that you are not a galley overseer, and your goal should not be to completely impose your views on life on your child.
The material was prepared with the assistance of psychotherapist Leonid Shemlyakov
The situation is not easy. On the one hand, here you need to do something right away, change the state of things as quickly as possible. On the other hand, are there opportunities for this? Do parents have leverage over the child, are they ready to use their power? It happens that parents have levers of influence, but due to certain circumstances they do not dare to use them, they immediately cower, saying: “No, no, we cannot take radical measures. We can’t leave him without dinner, it’s too cruel.” The result is that children are hanging out in the streets, and it is unknown what will happen to them there. These can be much more cruel things than sitting without dinner once. Anyone who feels sorry for their children does not really care about them. If you think that the situation could be dangerous for the child, you need to insist that he does not leave home.
- Is it possible to prevent the occurrence of such situations?
It’s both possible and necessary. Where does it come from that parents suddenly cease to be an authority for the child? This has nothing to do with adolescence; during adolescence, relationships only worsen - what was in the relationship before now becomes sharp and obvious. If your children don’t listen to you now in big things, it means they didn’t listen to you in small things before. They did not listen to you, and you did not bother to become parents for them. If your children do not listen to you, your requests fall on deaf ears, read Nikolai Ivanovich’s article “Teach your child to listen and obey you.” It describes in detail step by step how to teach a child to obey his parents. It doesn’t sound very nice, of course: “we force children to obey,” but parents know that in our time they are the only ones who really raise a child and are responsible for his life. Children always listen to someone, but not always to you. If it is not the parents who are raising the child, then their children are raised by television, the media, glossy magazines, peers, and their influence is not always better than the influence of their own parents.
If the parents are smart and want the best for the child, then let the children listen to what they say. This is not only natural, but also saves everyone a lot of effort and time; instead of bickering and long discussions about discipline, you can do more interesting things. On the other hand, it is necessary to reconsider your relationship with your child: monitor your behavior, how honest I really am with my child, how consistent I am in what I say, how much I myself follow the principles that I tell the child about. This is the personal work of parents: to think, monitor and, perhaps, change their behavior.
I would also advise you to go directly with your child to Dmitry Morozov and in a neutral environment, during the training, see what exactly is wrong, what pain points there are, and take steps towards it. Despite all your pain and anger, you need to spend more time with your child, talk more (about anything), listen to him more in the evening. You need to learn to listen to your child without immediately giving advice, to use the active listening skills that both I and Daria Ryazanova teach. This is the art of talking to another person without lecturing all the time. And then the child knows that he will now share something with his mother, and then she will not remember it for 10 years, especially in some difficult situation. You need to communicate like family.
If we assume that difficulties are associated only with adolescence: for example, a child feels like he is already an adult, but does not associate adulthood with taking responsibility, but associates it only with “adult behavior,” which may mean to him: “I walk.” I don’t let anyone know where I want to go, I do what I want, and my parents don’t tell me. Mom doesn’t report, and I won’t.” In this case, it is necessary to have a conversation with the teenager about the following: “If you are an adult, then behave like an adult. Growing up is not only about rights, but also about responsibilities.” Advice to parents: from the very first moments of a child’s life, when appropriate, associate growing up with both acquiring greater rights and greater responsibilities. “When you get older, you will be able to go here and there on your own, but at the same time we expect you to behave like an adult. We adults, taking care of our family, usually tell us where we are going, why, both so that others do not worry, and simply because we like to share with each other, discuss something. And you can behave just like us. Not because we control you, but because we live together, we are interested in everything that happens in our family.”
If you teach your children from childhood that you are a family, that you do everything together, you will definitely succeed!
Every two days a child disappears in the Kaluga region - such alarming data is provided by the investigative committee. Many people remember the story of 15-year-old Karina, who wandered for several months with friends in different cities and villages. And just recently, a little boy decided to “teach his mother a lesson” and also staged an escape, disappearing for the whole night. Why children leave home, how to get them back, and, most importantly, what parents should do in such a difficult situation - says Olesya Ignatova, Candidate of Psychological Sciences, Deputy Director for Organizational and Methodological Work of the Psychological, Medical and Pedagogical Center for Diagnostics and Counseling in Kaluga.
I planned to escape
Why do children leave home? There may be at least three reasons for this. The first reason and, perhaps, the most serious is poriomania, a mental disorder manifested in an unmotivated and irresistible craving for vagrancy. It’s like claustrophobia or agoraphobia, only fear is caused not by open or closed spaces, but by the constancy and monotony of the environment. The patient periodically experiences a restless state, against the background of which an uncontrollable desire to change places manifests itself. Initially, he tries to suppress the emerging desire, but it becomes more and more dominant, irresistible, and finally reaches such an extent that the patient, without thinking about the consequences, goes to the nearest station, pier, often without a penny of money, without warning anyone, boards a train, a ship and goes wherever his eyes look.
As a rule, the trip lasts several days, during which the person eats poorly and is in poverty, but nevertheless moves on. Then comes a state of relief, mental relaxation. A half-starved, dirty, exhausted person returns home on his own or with the help of strangers, but the bright period is very short-lived and after a while the previous picture is repeated.
Recent studies indicate that this is not just a behavioral addiction, but one of the indicators of a mental illness, for example, schizophrenia or neurotic disorders.
It is impossible to keep such people either at home or in relationships, so the only way out is treatment in a psychiatric hospital.
The second reason, less dangerous, is a violation of the construct of basic trust in the world, which is formed in a child under three years of age through communication with his mother and relatives. Moreover, it manifests itself as distrust of the world in general. For a normal person, the world and people are a priori good, and only then this opinion is adjusted depending on the specific situation.
But for some people, the world is dangerous and evil, even the closest people are trusted only for a certain time: a person is constantly waiting for a catch.
Such people often leave home precisely because they do not trust. This condition is a bit like paranoia, but it is not a disease in the literal sense of the word. With such symptoms, a person needs to go to a psychotherapist, who will return the person to a normal state through long-term therapy and conversations.
The third thing that psychologists work with is situational vagrancy - when children, most often in adolescence, leave home. Why are teenagers at risk?
Everything is very simple: the bombardment of the brain with hormones, the restructuring of the body, the completion of gender-role identification - all this happens simultaneously and in a fairly short time, therefore, of all age-related crises, this is the most turbulent and most complex. Children leave home not because they have mania or cravings, but because something does not suit them in their relationships with family and friends. Let's talk about this in more detail.
And I have a hundred reasons for this
If a teenager leaves home, first of all, look for the reason in the house: not a single normal person will leave his native and cozy place unless he is pushed.
Most often, the main reason to slam the door is the destruction of harmonious parent-child relationships.
A teenager is a border guard, not yet an adult, but no longer a child. And parents often forget about this, out of habit they continue to treat their son like a little boy: they control him and do not listen to his opinion. Leaving home is a kind of protest, a loud statement, a declaration of one’s rights.
Hypoprotection and hyperprotection can also provoke a child. An endlessly caring grandmother with the eternal question “Did you tie a scarf?” or, on the contrary, an indifferent and indifferent mother who does not care where and with whom her daughter disappears. The second option is the saddest. The child does not form an attachment to home, to his parents; he, like a tumbleweed, wanders from one place to another.
But the child does not always act as an innocent victim. Children are excellent psychologists; they understand that if you want to get what you want, you just need to put pressure on the sore spot. Hence the demonstrative statements: if you don’t buy a new phone or if you don’t allow me to go out until twelve, I’ll leave home. Parents should not panic, this is a common manipulation. Remember yourself. We all ran away, but then, after standing in the entrance for two hours or making a couple of circles around the area, we returned safely to our native land.
The fact is that the child is torn between not wanting to be at home and fear of the outside world.
Young children also leave home, but these cases are quite rare. And the reasons for such actions, as a rule, lie on the surface. This could be a really serious mental disorder, but more often than not it’s just a simple manipulation. A separate story is escaping from a dysfunctional family.
By nature, children are more patient; they get used to the system in which they find themselves. Even if they are constantly beaten and humiliated, they will still stay close to their parents.
Therefore, if a little boy starts to wander, this is a very alarming signal; that means things are very, very bad. Imagine how unbearable the situation in the family must be if it is easier for a child to wander with peers or fall under the influence of adults than to return to his parents.
Mom, we're all crazy
First of all, parents, as adults, experienced people who know how to cope with their mood, should change the system of relationships as soon as the first signs of growing up appear. It is necessary to encourage the child, to say that this is good, correct, this is how it should be, because the teenager does not have confidence that everything that happens to him is normal.
The visible symptoms of growing up - changes in physiology - are often quite painful. For example, when a child’s skeleton grows faster than the rest of the body’s systems, the teenager constantly experiences aching pain, stoops, this physical discomfort is incomprehensible and unpleasant. At the mental level, the teenager feels that no one understands or accepts him. Unmotivated attacks of aggression appear, which disappear as quickly as they appear.
I want to laugh and cry; sometimes being alone, sometimes hanging out with friends - “mood swings” cause a lot of anxiety not only for parents, but also for the child himself.
The teenager manifests a desire to conquer the outside world, to establish himself among adults and his peers. Why are they such nihilists, why do they get into trouble and constantly argue? This is how an idea of the world is developed, and one’s own opinion is formed.
Parents need to be very careful: a teenager's trust is easy to gain and easy to lose. If previously the child did not show antisocial behavior, then in adolescence he suddenly begins to run away from home and issue ultimatums: “If you don’t stop coming into my room, I will leave home!”
But don’t panic and run to fulfill all the requirements. Manipulation is a healthy mechanism for avoiding unpleasant situations.
Unhealthy manipulation - suicidal manipulation, when a teenager says: I will hang myself or cut my wrists. It is more dangerous, since the child can get carried away: even if he decided to cut the veins in a dramatic way, then simply out of ignorance he can, for example, cut deeper than he planned. Teenagers do such things for show, as a rule, they write notes, go to the bath an hour before their parents arrive... It cannot be said that they do this consciously and planned. More precisely, at this moment they are in a state of passion, he really wants to achieve something, he really feels bad. But you need to maintain reasonable composure and understand that this is an attempt at manipulation; in fact, he does not want to kill himself.
How can one distinguish an episodic suicidal person from a pathological suicidal person? The latter will hatch a plan, perhaps share it with close friends on social networks, but will never demonstratively talk about it left and right, and will most likely see it through to the end.
A demonstrative suicidal person expects to see from heaven how his loved ones mourn him. A teenager believes in a myth that his body will die, and after a while his soul will be reborn in another family with wonderful parents, and everything will be perfect. Work with such children should go through the keys of consciousness: “Firstly, no one has returned from the other world. You will not see everything that will happen after you. The future that you have dreamed for yourself will never come - it is impossible. "You will meet a person who is dear to you. You will not fall in love, you will not give birth to a child, you will not do what you love."
I won't tell anyone anything
If the child suddenly up and left without explanation, then either the parents missed something, or the child hid his intentions too well. In fact, if the parent-child relationship has not been destroyed at an early age, children trust their parents. Yes, they quarrel and conflict, violate prohibitions. But nevertheless, parents are the people through whom teenagers learn about the outside world.
And even if a child has committed a bad act, he will go around for two or three days, complain to his friends, but then he will still tell his parents and ask for advice, because for him mom and dad are the highest authority.
This is a control switch: whether I think and act correctly or not. If the child does not return, it means that trust in adults was once lost, the child experienced betrayal.
We don’t think twice when we say: tomorrow I’ll buy you a toy, a book, a dress... But I won’t buy it tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow I won’t buy it, and I’ll generally forget about the promise in five minutes - these little betrayals accumulate, but we exhaust the credit of trust.
If outwardly everything is fine, the child goes to school, meets with friends, then parents still need to pay attention to the so-called products of activity: drawings, books, music . They may not be harmless at all and raise many questions. Warning signs in drawings include, for example, the use of gray colors, shading, or the depiction of small figures on a large sheet of paper.
Parents should keep their ears open too during a conversation :
If a teenager breaks off the conversation mid-sentence, freaks out, and unmotivated, it means he has a plan that he wants to keep secret.
But, fortunately, the teenager does not know how to lie, so it is quite easy to see through his tricks.
Talks about difficulties in the social sphere unexpected appearance of friends and acquaintances, which were not there before, especially if late walks and dubious visits began. For example, a child talked and talked with one company, then suddenly fell out with everyone and made new acquaintances. This could be a harmless group of teenagers united by a common interest, or it could be a sect with elements of a youth subculture.
In this case, parents need to extract information in all possible ways, and it is not necessary to initiate the child into the intricacies of intelligence work.
Decreased academic performance in adolescence - it is natural and understandable.
Many parents complain about their child: in elementary school he was an excellent student, but now he has slipped into two grades. This is normal: different motivation and other interests appear.
What is on his mind now is how to gain a leadership position among his peers or, if there is a stronger leader, how to maintain his place. Hence the statements and ultimatums that seem ridiculous to us: if you are friends with me, do not go with Nadya! This is the definition of belonging to one's group. But parents should still be aware of their child’s school affairs: go to meetings, communicate with teachers and other parents, and get to know classmates.
If your child spends a lot of time on social networks - also a danger signal. Of course, it is better if the child's computer is not password protected, so parents should take computer training to keep track of where their child is sitting. When there are a lot of available sources of information, it is easier for a child not to ask his mother, but to find the answer on the Internet.
You may not find out what issues really interest him, you won’t give him the right advice in time, and you won’t protect him from a rash act.
A good indicator is younger brothers and sisters , they immediately hand over everyone. Here you don’t even need to go to a psychologist, just talk to your youngest child. This is how sibling rivalry manifests itself - competition for the attention of parents.
But the children understand that they will still have to exist together, so they figure out when it is beneficial to be friends with their sister in order to ask her for a skirt or lipstick, and when it is beneficial to be friends with their mother. Mom needs to approach this moment very subtly and take younger children as allies not as informers, but under the banner of helping the older sister.