Tame Your Teenager

You really need no formal training at all to know that boys and girls are different, especially if you have at least one of each. For you parents who have tried to keep weaponry out of the house and away from your boys, you know first hand that a carefully chewed cookie easily becomes a revolver. Likewise, your little girl continues to hone her social skills in the absence of friends by throwing a tea party with her fifty-two favorite stuffed animals.

The reality of these differences is never more telling then in how children resolve conflict. Two seven-year-old boys who get in a scrape on the baseball field one afternoon are back the next day playing on the same field. However, if you have three third grade girls who one day are the best of friends, and the next day two of the girls decided to ostracize the third, they will have the uncanny ability to carry that grudge through graduation and to their twenty-year high school reunion.

Girls have a very tough row to hoe. Read the rest of this entry »