Parental Leadership: 7 Principles to Lead Your Teen in the Digital Age

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Today, more than ever, America’s young children, teens, and young adults need and want leadership. This leadership they desperately seek is from their parents, not their teachers, sports coaches, or the negative influence of the internet and social media. Without proper leadership, the developing young mind will absorb all the easy and negative attributes of those around them that can lead to self-harm and other negative behavioral and emotional problems.

Parental Leadership: 7 Principles to Lead Your Teen in the Digital Age gives a hard and real look at the current crisis millions of families face in today’s new digital world from “conflict resolution,” the damage of “labels” on the young mind, to the need for “hard discussions,” and the rise of Family Dysfunction and Denial – FDD and what author Christopher S. Mahan calls PLADD or Parental Leadership Attention Deficient Disorder. To help parents, caregivers, and older grandparents to best understand their leadership role, Mahan breaks this needed leadership into two new parenting styles. First is the problem: Mahan describes what he calls the MANAGERS Style Parent or the MSP.

The MSP is a confusing parent. This parent is kind one minute, abusive the next. The MSP will use guilt or shame to further humiliate their teen into behavior submission, all while placing all the parent’s problems on their teenage. The MSP embodies the current cornucopia of negative parenting styles we see every day in America.

As a society, parents and caregivers are witnessing a rise in teen suicide, teen pregnancy, and school dropouts. Mahan dives deep into the rise of shocking adult-like crimes at the hands of teens across the spectrum of socioeconomic backgrounds, affecting all types of small towns to

large cities across America. To counter this negative style of parenting, Mahan created what he calls the LEADERS Style Parent or LSP. The LEADERS Style Parent is the type of parent that children to older teens desire to lead them well into their adult years with confidence, self-discipline, and courage, all while feeling loved, encouraged, respected, and supported. The LEADERS Style Parent is not perfect; in fact, Mahan openly admits that he too was once a class A MANAGERS Style Dad. Mahan stated that the weak father is a crisis that must be addressed in the home. This is the problem; many fathers are what Mahan calls WEAK fathers. The WEAK father allows their own childhood trauma and fixed mindset to control their parenting leadership style, causing more problems in the home. Parenting as an LSP is a daily task to develop a young mind into an emotionally strong, growth mindset for young adults. The LEADERS Style Parent is the CEP Chief Executive Parent. As the leader, Mahan walks you through the 20-year parenting plan, the SWOT analysis, and goal setting.

This book took 10 years to write. Christopher S. Mahan began writing the original book in 2013 after seeing over a dozen teens die of suicide in his local county. Right away, Chris and his family started Crazy 8 Freedom, a non-profit to combat teen suicide. Chris ran Crazy 8 Freedom from 2013 to 2014 when he began working for a federal youth jobs program for ages 18 to 24. Chris is a family and teen life coach and former mediator for the Florida Supreme Court from 2011-2013. Chris has worked with hundreds of youths ages 14 to 24 and has taught over 5000 hours of his Employment-to-Employment workshops to high school teens with IEPs for Vocational Rehabilitation and the state of Florida and the WIOA youth program in Pasco and Hernando County, Florida. Chris hosts Lead Your Teen, a podcast on Spotify.