Five ways parents can teach healthy relationship skills
You’re 14 and you’re at a party. A group of friends come up to you and one pulls out a cigarette. “Wanna smoke?” she asks, as she lights up and starts passing it around.
You don’t want to get in trouble for smoking. But you also don’t want to get “unfriended” for not smoking.
How do you respond? How do you teach your children to respond?
This is the kind of question participants discuss in the teen healthy relationships programs that are funded by the Canadian Women’s Foundation. The programs teach strategies for developing boundaries, empathy, assertiveness and conflict resolution -- skills that parents can also teach at home.
Like many of you, my main interaction with technology is what I find on my cell phone, my laptop and my kids’ play devices. I am not tech-savvy and I cannot be described as a geek or a nerd, except in that I wear glasses and watch Star Wars. I don’t usually worry about what lies behind the platforms, interfaces and social media sites that I waste so many important hours on. 
Lately, more and more people seem to be waking up to the fact that women’s style of leading through listening and collaboration brings enormous benefits to just about every kind of group you can imagine. That includes large and small businesses, nonprofit organizations, sports teams—you name it.
