Welcome to Teenage Whisperer, the place that will help you to
successfully live or work with troubled teens,
and particularly the extra tricky disengaged ones!

 

Geared towards anyone who has an interest in helping youth at risk turn their challenging behaviour around, including parents, foster carers, social workers, teachers, youth workers, youth justice workers, probation officers, and adolescent mental health workers.

 

The 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.

Teen

This site comes from my firm belief that teen behavioural problems, such as aggressive behaviour, antisocial behaviour, youth offending, alcohol or drug abuse, self-harm, or eating disorders to name a few, come from a place of hurt, and of unmet needs. Some young people ‘blow out’ in destructive ways and some ‘blow inwards’, but a common feature of both is a struggle with depression and low self-esteem as they try to cope with their deep inner pain. Hurting teenagers play their cards very close to their chests and it can sometimes be seemingly impossible to reach them, to get them to open up, to trust you with their deepest anxieties and pain.

However, I also firmly believe that with the right approach, with the right tools and coming from a place of care that young people can open up, address their pain and be empowered to change their lives for the better. We can help them do this by striving to constantly improve the quality of the work we do with them- whether that is our professional work or the ‘work’ of bringing up teens in our homes. It’s all about excellent communication skills, about improving our ability to relate to them and build solid trusting relationships and keeping abreast of the latest research and techniques in how to engage and help them.

hand of help To help you achieve this I provide advice and tips in regular blog posts (latest post here) with many including videos that I post on my YouTube channel and a resource list. I also regularly post items of interest to LinkedIn, 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 or parent/carer- motivate you to be the best you can be in reaching out to these young people. So subscribe now and don’t miss out! You can also sign up to my email newsletter so you never miss a post!

The website has several areas:

Just Understand Me: a regular blog post written in the voice of a troubled teen, giving insight into their problems and their thought processes and also providing practical strategies for you to use when trying to reach out to them and help.
Out of the Box: a regular blog post written in my voice to get you thinking and to feed and motivate you, because we all need some of that!
Resources: tried and tested books, DVDs, TV programsĀ and programs of work.
Teen Engagement Book: the book that shows you how to engage the most challenging disengaged teens.
Teen Anger Book: the book that makes you rethink teen anger management work.