Teens and Hobbies

Encouraging your teen to develop a hobby will take some time and effort on your part. You’ll need to find different interests to give him some choices and allow your teen to decide which hobby really interests him. Then, you’ll have to help your teen find all of the necessary resources to enjoy his new hobby. While, this may be hard to do in your busy parenting schedule, here are four great reasons to work it in:

1. Hobbies help build your teen’s confidence. By finding an area of interest, a teen can build competence and skill. This leads to positive results and builds your teenagers confidence. This will lead to more competence and skill… a brilliant catch-22.

2. A hobby helps your teen have a sense of his identity. Our likes and dislikes help define who we are as people. One of the main jobs of the life stage of adolescence is scoping out our personal definition of who we are – more professionally know as developing our identity. Hobbies help by sending a signal, “I like doing this. This makes me feel good about me. Therefore, this is a part of who I am.”

3. Hobbies keep your teen from getting bored. Boredom is like the plague to a teen – and it can have the same type of devastating effects. Bored teens look for things to do and are more apt to get involved with negative peers. Helping teens develop a hobby is helping them stay out of trouble.

4. Hobbies will give you a reason to praise your teen. When your teen is involved in a hobby, you have easy access to something to praise him about. You can use your teenager’s hobby to keep balance in your communication with your teen when things have been tough or to just increase positive interaction with your teen.

Take this article one step further:

Find out how this advice prevents teen smoking.