Robin Theiss - Motivating Adolescents: Practical Wisdom To Help Ignite Your Teens Inner Drive

Motivating Adolescents is an expansive and soulful book that will no doubt offer insight to any parent or educator guiding teens through their most promising and perilous years. Drawing on her background as a Waldorf teacher and mother, Robin Theiss invites us on a journey filled with practical wisdom and lessons gleaned from a lifetime of devotion to anthroposophy, science, and mythology. Its a rousing call to the adventure of adolescence.

Nicholas Ibarra , Journalist

Concise, intelligent, and openhearted, Motivating Adolescents will lead you towards a more compassionate relationship with your child, finding/generating the time and space in which their lifes purpose may flourish. Robin Theiss is an amazing mentor and coach, bringing deeply nourishing insights into the mysteries of human development in a warm and accessible style. Through the EMERGING process, Robin has condensed her great expertise in adolescent education into both a practical guide and spiritual inspiration for parents. As an educator, I meet many parents who are confused about how best to support their adolescent in negotiating the modern world, who believe that education should be about finding ones purpose in life but cant see that in the available options. Robin is able to explain complex ideas in an accessible way, from scientific research to classical philosophy, woven together with personal stories and analogies which bring the material to life.

Campbell Davidson , Lecturer in Education at Goldsmiths College, University of London and Cofounder of The School of Human Movement

Warmhearted, practical, and intelligent! Finally an educator provides a thorough understanding of why so many children fall through the cracks. In my thirty-five years of practice, I have witnessed too many of our children failed by our outdated model of education, not the other way around. Robin Theiss combines science, psychology, and direct experience to offer an alternative to traditional education. Motivating Adolescents is a comprehensive guide to educate and empower our children.

Dr. Alexandra Rosenburg , Psychotherapist

Intrepid! Who but a highly motivated and intrepid student would even consider taking a teacher training course requiring an airline commute from Orange County to Oakland for thirty weekends a year for three years? Robins enthusiasm for her commuting adventure inspired three fellow travelers all of them young employees at the coffee house she owned at that time. In retrospect, I can see how Robins commitment and determination to pursue the Waldorf teacher training evolved into the program she lays out in this book. Still youthful some twenty years after becoming a flying commuter, she now transmits to her teenage students her sense that the world is waiting to be discovered. Having had to rebound from many of lifes challenges, she has succeeded in tempering youthful energy with pedagogical insight. Inspiring others, whether her former employees, her high school students, their parents, or her colleagues and friends, that is her gift. She understands the biographical quagmires facing our youth because she herself is unafraid of the mounting challenge to humanness each of us faces. Her book is a practical guide interspersed throughout with apt, often poignant and revealing personal anecdotes. Robins humor, and selfeffacing yet profound grasp of the issues she presents qualities I remember well from her time as my student in the teacher training run through the book and provide us with a hopeful program, a cando attitude. Let us be intrepid and aspire to grasp it.

Dorit Winter , Author of several books including, Train a Dog, but Raise the Child: A practical primer and Fire the Imagination, Write On!

Motivating Adolescents

MOTIVATING

ADOLESCENTS

Practical Wisdom to Help IGNITE
Your T eens Inner Drive

ROBIN THEISS

NEW YORK

LONDONNASHVILLEMELBOURNEVANCOUVER

MOTIVATING ADOLESCENTS

Practical Wisdom To Help Ignite Your Teens Inner Drive

2021 Robin Theiss

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing in partnership with Difference Press. Morgan James is a trademark of Morgan James, LLC. www.MorganJamesPublishing.com

ISBN 9781631950346 paperback

ISBN 9781631950353 eBook

ISBN 9781631950360 audio

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933249

Cover Design Concept: Nakita Duncan

Cover Design: Christopher Kirk www.GFSstudio.com

Interior Design: Chris Treccani www.3dogcreative.net

Editor: Emily Tuttle

Book Coaching: The Author Incubator

Author Photo: Danielle Cohen

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For Maya and Sage, my two daughters.

Thank you for continuing to achieve your success with grace, authenticity, and love. You are the light of my life.

The big question is whether youre going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.

Joseph Campbell

Parenting is an adventure of a lifetime. It can be planned, studied, thought about, prepared for, and still, you find yourselves in unknown territory. It is like an adventure to another country. Even though you can read volumes of books about the geography, the laws and customs, the people, the language, and the many experiences others had, nothing quite prepares you for the unexpected realities that meet you when you arrive. The guidebooks, maps, language apps, and all of the recommendations can seem useless when you find yourself lost, unable to find your way, and desperate for anyone to help. As in life, it is in these moments that you have the most opportunity for transformation. Parenting is the ultimate transformational adventure. Once you step on this new soil, with its own language and customs, your life will never be the same.

One of the cornerstones of parenting responsibilities is to provide a good education for your children. You want to provide them with opportunities that will set them up for a successful journey and a happy, fulfilling life. Whether you are in a situation with limited resources, and therefore seemingly limited choices, or you are overwhelmed with the choices you have access to, choosing an education can become a whole journey in itself. Parents are becoming increasingly aware of the need for education to change in order to keep pace with the new developments in the world, especially in the area of technological advancements. They are also learning that education needs to be more than just information acquisition.

Of course, you want your children to be educated and set up for a successful and happy life. However, you also know that part of that success and happiness will depend on their humanness, not just their skills and knowledge. Whether your child becomes a doctor, lawyer, engineer, professor, business owner, or Uber driver, you want them to be good mothers and fathers, kind and loving partners, reliable businesspeople, honest neighbors. and good human beings. You want that not just for your children and yourselves but for the world.