🌟 Quick Overview: How to Keep a Barely Legal Delinquent Teen Busy
- Primary Solution – Difficulty managing one’s emotions has a lot to do with being busy or productive. Having a routine or system that helps your teen be productive is a key solution. However, therapy and self-regulation is a key to long-term solutions.
- Meditation, Mindfulness, and Therapy are the long-term solutions for delinquent behavior and help in mental well-being.
- Making meaningful relationships and having positive social interactions. Teenagers are most influenced by their peers, and having a quality social circle with your child has a positive effect on your child’s well-being.
- Being engaged in hobbies and extracurricular activities.
- Adopting a healthy lifestyle at an early age. Sitting on a couch or not moving all day has a direct effect on the mental health of a child.
- Being active via sports, gym, or doing light cardio like walking or jogging helps a lot.
- Volunteering
- Learning new skills
Now let’s get into a brief about How to Keep a Barely Legal Delinquent Teen Busy.
Acting rebellious in teens is quite natural; the body is transforming from a child to an adult. However, primary caregivers, parents, or older siblings can become concerned about delinquent behavior.
Being busy with productive and meaningful activities can help combat teen delinquent behavior. This ErrorExpress article is about how to keep a barely legal delinquent teen busy.
Let’s get started with an interesting study conducted in 2022 on teenage psychology.
Table of Contents
A Study on Teenage Behavior
Among 581 participants, 25% showed a tendency for aggressive behavior. That shows that 1 in 4 teenagers tend towards aggressive behavior. The findings concluded that the major factors affecting aggressive behavior were –
- Overprotective mother or female figure
- Parents or mothers who are too involved score higher than 30 in intelligence.
In simple words, self-autonomy is an important trait in an adult’s life, teenagers having overprotective parents take the autonomy from their children. This further contributes to low self-esteem and low self-confidence in an individual.
(Citation of Study)
Zhang, Y., Shi, P., Gao, M., & Chang, H. (2022). Factors Influencing Aggressive Adolescent Behavior: An Analysis Using the Decision Tree Method. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 183(6), 537–548. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221325.2022.2094213
How to Keep a Barely Legal Delinquent Teen Busy – Practical Tips
Adolescence is a transformative phase in children’s lives as they undergo physical, psychological, and emotional changes. Understanding them can be significantly helpful in their personality development.
Making them unreasonably busy is not possible moreover, here are some practical solutions for being busy in a productive manner.
Primary Solution – Having Structure/Routine in Life
We all have 24 hours a day, and most of us spend those hours in an unproductive manner. Binge-watching, endless scrolling, being on a couch all day, etc, are common ways to kill time.
Later, this may result in mood swings, anger, frustration, anxiety, and even depression.
A solution to this problem is having a structure or routine in life.
👉 How to Create a Goal-Based Routine
- Sit with the teen with a pen and paper.
- Form a long-term vision of their goals. For example, what do they want to achieve in a year? Get fit, have good ranks in class, win a sports prize, and learn a new language.
- Now break down those goals into everyday actionable tasks
- For example, if a goal is learning a new language, its actionable step could be 1 hour daily on Duolingo (language learning app).
- Now, add those actionable steps into a routine.
At the start, it’s difficult to form new habits or routines, but if you start with a conscious and mindful effort, you can rewire your brain with new habits in 21 – 30 days.
2. Meditation and Mindfulness
For a person who is delinquent and lacks emotional regulation, meditation and mindfulness are the long-term solutions. Practicing it for 15 minutes a day can improve one’s emotional and mental well-being.
👉 Mediteto is a free meditation app that has many personalized guides and makes meditation a lot more easy and fun. It is available on the Play Store & App Store.
3. Learning Positive Socialization
Humans are social animals. Hence, socialization helps our brain to secrete positive hormones like serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, etc. These chemicals are responsible for having emotional regulation.
Hence, learning some social skills and implementing them is a fun process. One can join a community, sports academy, public event, family gathering, etc, where you get a chance to socialize.
👉 If you want to learn social skills and polish your communication, read the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
4. Being Engaged in Hobbies & Extra Curricular Activities
Sometimes, living a daily monotonous life creates frustration, boredom, and feelings of being overwhelmed. Changing your environment by incorporating new hobbies in your life can help your teen combat such feelings.
5. Being Active
Having a sedentary lifestyle is one of the major causes of bad moods, delinquent behavior, and emotional dysregulation. Getting active in life or having moderate has a positive impact on your emotional well-being.
Your mood stays stable, it relieves anxiety and improves self-esteem.
You can start with a new hobby, such as sports your teen enjoys or getting a gym membership Even, having 30-minute morning and evening walks helps in heart health. Being active or investing 1 hour daily in your physical health is mandatory for people for a healthy and stress-free life.
6. Learning a New Skill
An adult brain is fully developed at the age of 25, and hence, learning new skills requires effort. However, children and teenagers can pick up on new skills quite easily as their neurons can form new connections much faster (Neuroplasticity).
Hence, learning skills during your teens is much easier than later in your life.
- Join an offline class or institute
- Learn from online courses
- Learn new language
- Join a sports academy, etc
Related – Top 8 Courses to Learn Python Online
7. Volunteering
Volunteering helps you in community living and encourages individuals to socialize. Plus, from a psychological point of view, it helps individuals build identity capital, which is highly influential in developing confidence.
You can use Facebook and other social media platforms to find communities that interest your teen.
It will also help them to stay busy and productive. Additionally, you’ll also know what causes they believe in.
8. Summer Internships
Last year, I got a chance to do an internship at an AgTech startup, and that was one of the most amazing experiences. It helped me get busy and make some money.
Personally, it helped me improve my confidence and overall personality. I was less anxious in social situations and not scared of presentations or meeting new people.
Likewise, doing internships can be a great way for a teenager to improve his overall personality and be busy in the most productive way. You can find internships at LinkedIn, Google Careers, and Indeed.com.
Learn – 16 Practical Ways to Earn Money as a Teenager
Seeking Professional Help
Professional help includes therapist, child counseling, psychologist, parent counseling, etc. Nowadays, online therapy is quite relevant. Any article, blog, or YouTube video can’t give you a personalized answer, seeking professional help is highly impactful in this case.
- TalktoAngel
- The Spark Counselling
- OnlineCounselling4U
- Ritu Singhal
Professional therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) are very helpful in your case.
Conclusion
I am not a professional psychologist; however, I have devoted many hours to reading about teen psychology. Based on that knowledge, this article is drafted, and I truly feel it will help a lot.
Tips and actions provided in the article are science-backed and quite practical.
Before ending this article, one of the major factors influencing teen behavior is their peer circle. Much research has shown that teenagers are not highly influenced by their parents, teachers, or experts but by their peers.
That’s a worrying result, having a bad social circle can have a negative influence on your child.
