Just got back from a really enjoyable visit with the folks at Spring Station Middle School (http://www.wcs.edu/sstms/). If you haven’t seen the Summit High School/Spring Station Middle School campus, it is this new, beautiful, modern school complex out in the rolling pastures of central Tennessee! Unfortunately for me, it is WAY down south in the county while my office is way up north in the county.
Katie Barkley (one of their school counselors) was kind enough to invite me out to talk. I had the pleasure of meeting Kristin Devereaux (one of the other school counselors) for the first time. I met Nicole Wallis, PTO President, of course. (She heard me talk at Trinity Church several weeks ago and she still showed up. Well, technically, she had to be there but I like to think she would have attended anyway.) And, as a special treat for me, I got to catch up with Paula Pulliam, their truly gifted principal. Paula and I have worked together trading kids back and forth for many, many years.
It was raining, there was a tornado warning in the neighboring county and still a sizable crowd of parents showed to talk about the essentials of parenting. The content of the talk was taken from one of the chapters in my parenting book WHICH IS NOW AVAILABLE. After writing a lot about specific strategies for dealing with a whole range of typical issues parents encounter in raising teens, I tried to distill the most important things parents should do. Whatever else, do these. They include things like be a role model, know your kid, use positive discipline, say “no”, eat together. There are 16 so I won’t repeat them all here. Besides, you can find them in my book WHICH IS NOW AVAILABLE! I think I put a link so you can purchase a copy somewhere on this website. You might have to search around a bit. Oh, wait. It’s everywhere you look!
I got to spend a couple of hours talking to some wonderful parents and laughing at teenagers behind their backs. What a pleasure.
