Talking With and Listening to Adolescents

Communication is the cornerstone of our relationships with our children. Creating a safe, open, and honest channel of communication helps us share information and hear what our youth thinks, needs, or is doing. Finding time is also a factor—youth at this age are spending more time working, hanging out with peers, and on social media, reducing the opportunity for conversations. Because adolescence is a time of developing personal identity, testing boundaries, and increasing independence from family, communicating with an adolescent is different from communicating with a younger child, so you may need to try new strategies.

Our resources for parents/caregivers are free to download. If this resource is beneficial for you or your practice, please consider supporting the Adolescent Health Working Group with a donation to keep our work going.

All of our present resources serve as handouts with pages of information and tips. We are actively in the process of updating our resources. Note that our resources for parents/caregivers are not meant for direct youth consumption. However, these do contain resources for parents/caregivers to facilitate conversations with youth and their providers.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.