Welcome to the one-stop shop for everything you need to successfully work with teenagers, and particularly the extra tricky disengaged ones!
Aimed at anyone who has an interest in helping challenging young people in their day to day lives- social workers, teachers, youth workers, youth justice workers, students and their parents.
The overarching aim of this site is to help you all become teenage whisperers: people who can relate to, understand and help teenagers break out of negative behaviour cycles so that they can truly flourish.
This site comes from my firm belief that teenagers behaviour problems, whether it is aggressive behaviour, antisocial behaviour, youth offending, alcohol or drug abuse, self-harm, eating disorders, or extreme vulnerability to sexual exploitation or negative peer pressure comes from a place of hurt, of unmet needs and a great disappointment with life and with some, and often, many of those they have met in it. I also firmly believe that with the right approach, with the right tools and coming from a place of care that young people can be empowered to change their lives for the better.
To help you achieve this in your work I provide advice and tips in regular blog posts, a regularly updated resource list, complete programmes of work to use with young people, a newsletter and a forum for sharing problems, ideas and news on Twitter and Facebook. Not only will all this help you to engage young people, but will hopefully also feed you as a hard-pressed worker- motivate you to be the best you can be in reaching out to these young people.
The site consists of several sections:
Their Voice : a regularly updated monologue of a severely disengaged young person and what they would tell you if they could.
Out the Box : Regular blog post to get you thinking and to feed and motivate you!
Resources : tried and tested books, DVDs, TV programmes and programmes of work (external and in-house) Regularly updated.
To keep up to date with all the latest posts, news and developments to the website, please sign up to the email newsletter and join me on Facebook or Twitter. Latest news items, research & commentary are regularly posted via social media as you can see below (well most of the time when Twitter is co-operating), so come join in!
