THE REASON PARENTING TEENS IS SO HARD
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Before we get started, I want to tell you about my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. Consider this, Mom 2.0 is able to step off the rollercoaster of painful emotions that comes with raising teens.
She understands the root cause of her anxiety, frustration, guilt, and sadness and is able to decide how she wants to show up as the mom she wants to be for her big kids as they navigate big challenges. She's learned a skill set that she can apply to any relationship, challenge, or opportunity in her life. She prioritizes her family without sacrificing herself.
Can you imagine this being you? I know it's possible and I know how to help you achieve it because I've been there and I've done it. Are you ready to get started? Join me in Mom 2.0. Now on to the show. Episode number 38.
Hello, my friends. As I was thinking about what I wanted to say today, my town was hit with a severe storm with rumors of a tornado passing through doing considerable damage. The sky was absolutely covered in dark gray clouds, making it look like it was night, even though it was still mid-afternoon.
I had to laugh that it seemed appropriate that I was thinking about a topic of the teen years while this was happening. Like a tornado that hits us out of nowhere, unprepared, blacking out the sky, leaving us drenched, cold, stuck, wanting to seek shelter, some relief. Heartbreakingly hoping it'll be over with as little damage as possible.
If you're bracing yourself against the teen years, I'm right there with you. I could spend hours talking about all of the reasons it feels hard. If you could come over right now, we could have a really good laugh and probably also a cry over the insanity of what we're going through.
We might find some relief in unburdening ourselves. Some of these things are hard to talk about. Our high school kids are navigating a complex social world where they're connected to their peers 24-7, and these connections are not all positive.
The college application process has become increasingly competitive so that our kids are under a lot of pressure, not just to get good grades, but also to be a star athlete and a musician and the president of the class and get $1,500 on the SATs, and then these kids don't get accepted to their top choice schools. And this is the story for those of our kids who are interested in school. Many of our kids hate school, and getting them to check the boxes to get through it is an absolute nightmare.
I imagine that the pandemic is going to have a lasting impact on our kids. Many of them lost important and formative years. When they would have been engaging with other kids their age, they were in lockdown with us.
Many kids feel behind in school and are struggling to catch up academically and socially. COVID has had a lasting impact on our kids' mental health as well. Even before the pandemic, high school students' mental health overall had been worsening, and COVID only added to the problem.
According to the CDC, in 2021, more than a third of high school students reported they'd experienced poor mental health during the pandemic, and 44% reportedly have felt regularly sad and hopeless during the past year. There are also challenges of how our kids spend their free time. Maybe we're worried that they seem to be home a lot and not engaging with friends, or they're out a lot and we're not sure what they're up to, even though we try to track them on their phones.
Alcohol, sex, drugs, these have always been categories that parents through the ages have worried about, but now we have access to so much more information than our parents did. We maybe know too much about what our kids are up to. So I'm sure I left out many topics that might be a challenge for you, but whatever your personal list of concerns about your teen might be, these are the circumstances we're facing.
Quantifiable facts and statistics about all of the things that could go wrong. So what do we do when faced with any problem? We go to the source. We try to fix it.
Eradicate the problem. Makes perfect sense. So if our kids are struggling in school, we get them a tutor.
If they have a particular interest or goal, we support it. We spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on SAT prep, baseball uniforms, music equipment, tennis lessons, travel to away games, robotics motors, soccer cleats, trainers, college counselors. I could go on and on.
If our child is struggling with depression or anxiety, we seek out therapy for them. Social problems, we encourage them to get out there and connect with people. Or if they're too social, we try to curb their behavior in whatever way we can.
We remind them not to do drugs, or we supply them with alcohol and tell them to drink at home because we reason at least then we know where they are. It feels safer. We buy them condoms.
We track them on Life 360 or their phones, telling ourselves we'd rather know. We want to fix it. Really, what we want to do is feel better, damn it.
I mean, yes, we absolutely want our kids to be safe, happy, and successful, but it's not entirely selfless. Let's be honest. Look, I want my neighbors to be safe, happy, and successful.
I really do. They're nice people, but would I spend thousands of dollars to help them be safe, happy, and successful? Would I make it my life's work, my job, my responsibility to make my neighbors safe, happy, and successful? Of course not. I'm not their mother, right? But it's interesting to make that comparison because there is something about our view of our role as a mother that makes this so incredibly personal for us.
It's not just our job. It literally feels like life or death to us. We care that much.
And that's why I want to suggest that this mission-driven endeavor of being a mother isn't entirely selfless because we do get a reward for our efforts. That's not at all to say that this is a bad thing. Maybe our intrinsic motivation to feel the rewards of motherhood are exactly what have caused us to evolve to be so driven to support our kids' success in life.
Maybe if we didn't feel a reward, we'd have abandoned our role as mothers centuries ago, leaving our young to fend for themselves. So what are these rewards? Well, I'm sure you can think of a few. The love we feel as a mother for our children is exquisite.
It's like nothing we've ever felt before, a fierce kind of love, the kind of love that would have you sacrifice yourself literally to protect your child. Do you remember the first time your child smiled at you? That smile? I will remember my boy's first smile until the day I die. It was like my heart exploded with love.
I was already in love with both of them, but somehow all of the investment of time and love up to that point, about eight weeks into their life, and this was my reward, this simple, beautiful, perfect smile. Perfection. These are the rewards that money cannot buy, something that's priceless, matchless.
As a mother, I live for those moments of perfection. It's like seeing our children smile, laugh, hearing them say, I love you, Mom. Those signs, so simple, but perfect and priceless.
Those signs are our reward because we make them mean so much. When my boys were little, those smiles and giggles meant everything was right with the world. They were happy, and I felt like there was nothing else I needed, nothing I needed to do.
No way I was failing. I might not have given myself credit for the smiles. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I know I really didn't give myself credit for the smiles, but it was almost like my brain gave me permission to relax.
Like, you did it. They're okay. They're happy.
Like, I had met the threshold of what was required to be a good mom for a fleeting instant until they started whining or crying or fighting, and then I was back to having no idea how to be a good mom, how to keep it all together. There was a beautiful period when my boys were 10 or 11, a number of years when they were so much fun to be around. Most of the time, they were interesting to talk to.
They had ideas that they wanted to share with me. They laughed easily. They for sure had their challenges, but home at least was a safe space for them.
They felt like they could share things with me, so even when everything was hard, I knew the category of hard, and I could help them through it. They trusted me, so when I gave them advice, they generally took it, or took my word for it when I said everything would be okay. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was also relying on my boys' words and deeds to help me think that I was doing okay as a mom.
Their easy smiles, the way they confided in me, the way they were always willing to go on an adventure with me. It didn't seem to me like they thought spending time with me was a chore, and look, I was also benefiting from my own joy, from just being in their presence, doing fun things with them, things as simple as going to the movies or bowling or going on vacation to the beach, walking in a 4th of July parade. I loved those moments because I got to be in the presence of these beautiful humans who I was lucky enough to be a mother to, but also, also I loved these moments because their actions and deeds made it easier for me to think that they want to be with me too.
There's something so powerful about that security, having confidence that someone loves you because of what they say and do. That is so powerful when it comes to our kids. It's our reward, a feeling again that money can't buy, that feeling of loving and being loved back.
Well, teenagers, there are many affectionate teens in the world, so I'm sure there are millions of moms out there who have at least one child who gives them a lot of love and affection, but there are many of the rest of us who find ourselves in this state of limbo with our kids. It's often not because we don't think our kids love us anymore, although for sure there are some of us moms that might wonder or seriously believe our kids don't love us, but more often we're not questioning whether our kids love us, but rather missing that reward, the feedback we used to get when our kids were smaller, when the evidence of their love, their big hugs and I love yous, they made it so much easier to not only know that our kids love us, but that they appreciated our effort, that we mattered as moms, that we were doing it right. How often do you think to yourself that you're doing it wrong now that your kids are teens? I mean, I know there were times when I thought I was doing it wrong when my kids were little too, but they didn't hold it against me or at least I never thought they were holding grudges.
I questioned myself as a mother all the time, but my boys never did. I was mom. Even when I was mad or losing my mind or just off my game, I was still mom and they loved me.
Now I continue to question myself as a mother, but my boys do too. They're not always obvious about it. Sometimes it's just in the way they ignore me.
I remind them to do things they don't do them or I give them advice and they don't listen. When they were little, I had expectations around how I wanted them to show up in the world and they pretty much lived up to those expectations within reason. I had the ability to enforce my expectations back then and of course it's not like I had control over their behavior by any means, but if there was an expectation that was really important to me, like not hitting or not running out into the busy street, I could enforce those expectations pretty easily with a simple consequence if they didn't meet those expectations.
It's easy to watch our kids gain all this freedom and know that they have many opportunities to choose a dangerous path and it's like we're watching them run out into the busy street all the time and we have no ability to enforce any boundaries or consequences anymore. And that's not even to say that they're intentionally doing the wrong thing, but if you've gone through the experience of teaching your baby to drive and then giving them the car keys for them to drive on their own in the days and weeks after they first get their license, you know it feels like you're sending them off to run out into the busy street. A reminder is to drive safely, look both ways, avoid busy intersections, to not speed, to get home by curfew.
All these reminders can fall on deaf ears. In so many little ways, our big kids ignore us and no matter how much we might remind ourselves that this is part of the process of our kids growing up, it's still a challenge for us. Our opinion used to be their opinion and it's not anymore.
So in these ways we feel a little powerless and possibly frustrated because we notice that our kids are doing things that seem to be opposite of what we suggest. In a lot of ways, these are the easy issues. The time when our kids give us the subtle message that we don't have all the answers and they're not going to listen to our advice all the time.
But there can be other times when our kids tell us to our face that we're doing it wrong. This can feel like a punch in the gut. When your child, the same one who used to hug you and look up to you as if you knew all the answers, when that same child looks at you as if they're seeing you for the first time and they don't like what they see.
Have you ever experienced this? Maybe it's just in the times when you tell them no and they stomp off in anger, clearly in disagreement with your decision. It could also be in the times when you're trying to talk to them about something and they push back or shut down completely. They make it clear they don't want to talk about it or even worse when they think that they fundamentally disagree with something you've said or something you've tried to teach them and they push back hard.
You find yourself stunned, still holding on to whatever conviction your child is pushing against but also desperate for them to understand and to be able to clear up the misunderstanding because that look in their eyes. We can't help but think that all along we've been afraid that we're a terrible mother and now our kids see it too. We've been on a long beautiful journey with our children and along the way we've reaped so many incredible rewards from our role as a mom.
Those big hugs, the cuddles and I love yous. It's really no wonder we feel so nostalgic for those simpler times. We really didn't get into this role of being a parent just for that positive feedback but let's face it, those beautiful moments are what we've lived for as a mom and now we're experiencing somewhat of the antithesis of those feelings.
Our kids seem to be rejecting us, at best ignoring us, shutting us out, maybe not all the time but a good amount of the time. Our relationship with them has changed and it's continuing to change. I want to change gears and ask you to think about something.
If you were to walk down the street and see an eight-year-old child holding his or her mother's hand and smiling up at her, how would you feel? Maybe nostalgic or maybe just nothing much. You probably see kids and their moms walking by you all the time and you don't have much of an emotional reaction, certainly not the same kind of deep warm love and gratitude you might have been feeling if it were your own child smiling, holding your hand and looking up at you. Why not do you think? I imagine you're thinking because it's not my child, that of course it's different with your own child and here's something really interesting to explore.
What is it about our own children that makes us feel this deep love when they're showing us signs of affection and misery when they seem to withdraw their love or at least their validation, their feedback that we're doing okay as their moms? We may not realize that this validation is important to us but when it's withdrawn, when we observe our child and we think that our child truly doesn't like us or want to be with us or respect us anymore, when our kids become less affectionate, more withdrawn or maybe a bit more combative, we can make it mean that they no longer like us even if we can still hold out hope that somewhere in there they love us, maybe because they have to. We're their moms after all. So the first thing I want to invite you to explore for yourself is this question of the reward.
What emotional reward have you enjoyed as a mother over the past 15, 20, 20 or more years? What are those feelings that you've had that you would give anything to experience again? I could imagine you would be thinking love, gratitude, peace, joy, bliss, happiness, contentment, pride, so many incredible emotions, the highs of motherhood. There is nothing better. I'm somewhat of a romantic so I love the heavy feeling of falling in love but the love and gratitude and joy I've felt as a mother, nothing can compare.
The highs have been so high and these beautiful feelings they actually weren't created by your child although your brain wants to give them all the credit. The feelings were actually created by you, by the lens you viewed your child through, the narrative you have in your mind about how this child is yours, your responsibility, a gift in your life, how when they smile your whole world lights up, how you think I can't believe how lucky I am to be this person's mother when they unexpectedly give you a big hug. All along it's been you, your lens, your story about your role as this person's mother and how the times they did something or said something that you liked that made you smile, how those actions and words meant something to you.
If some child you didn't know came up to you on the street and gave you a big hug you'd probably be confused but you wouldn't feel love but your child, their hug, it means something else entirely for you. I want to invite you to explore the possibility that this might be true and that it's actually amazing news because if it's true that you created the feelings of love, gratitude, joy, contentment, and all of the other beautiful feelings you've felt as a mother then it also might be possible for you to open your mind to the idea that it's you who creates the feelings of frustration, sadness, anger, fear, and all of the other painful feelings we feel as moms of teens. I'm not saying these feelings are your fault and I'm not saying that you shouldn't be feeling these feelings.
Your feelings, whatever they may be, are 100% valid and not a reason to beat yourself up further. They're not your fault but you do have more power over them than you think. So here's how.
When we think about our child and we observe what they're doing and we like it, they're doing something we perceive to be loving or kind, responsible, impressive. When we observe these things and think positive thoughts about what our kids are doing, we get the reward of feeling the positive feelings. But when we observe what our child is doing and it's not what we want, we perceive their actions or words to be disrespectful, mean, hurtful, inconsiderate, dangerous, irresponsible.
I could offer a long list here. When we view our kids with this lens, we inevitably feel negative emotion, anger, fear, annoyance, frustration, anxiety, sadness. And look, if our kids say the words, I hate you mom, of course we're going to feel something.
We're human. We feel. But before that feeling, there is a sentence happening subconsciously in our minds.
It could be, how dare she say that? And we would feel anger. We could think, after everything I've done for you, I can't believe you'd treat me this way. And then we'd feel hurt.
Or we could think, he doesn't mean it, he's just upset. And then we might feel understanding. There's no right or wrong way to feel here.
What I want to point out is that our feelings are a function of how we interpret the situation and not the actual situation itself. Here's another example. If we discover our kids are doing drugs, we're going to feel something.
But before we feel, there's a sentence in our minds. It could be, he's going to overdose and die. And then we'd feel fear, anxiety.
Or we may think, I told him explicitly that he should never do drugs and he disobeyed me. And then we'd feel anger. Or we might think, I remember those days and actually feel a little nostalgic.
Look, I'm not passing judgment on any of these thoughts or feelings. It's just so interesting to explore that there is not one response to any of these situations. As parents, we're all going to react differently based on our values, our history, our hopes for our kids, our view of how much independence our kids can handle, or how responsible or irresponsible we think them to be.
Our feelings are driven by our lens, our perspective. And the perspective we have and the perspective our team has, these perspectives are diverging. It was so nice when they just agreed with us and pretty much did what we said when it really mattered.
Now they're off exploring their independence and we're sitting at home thinking about the worst case scenario. We wake up in the middle of the night, our heads racing with fears of what ifs. It's not actually what our kids are doing that's making us crazy with fear.
It's the story we have in our minds of how horribly wrong it could all go. And we have evidence. It happens.
Kids get into car accidents, teens overdose. And the thought that these things could happen to our own baby, it's excruciatingly painful. And nothing has gone wrong in these moments.
But our minds are creating this pain. Our big kids are trying to figure out who they are apart from us. And what that sometimes looks like is silence, a lot of closed doors, them responding to us in ways we think are short or rude.
In our minds, it can seem like our kids need our help now more than ever, but they're rejecting our help. They're closing themselves off to us. We don't like what they're doing and we feel so frustrated and angry.
Maybe we should feel frustrated and afraid. When we see something we don't like, maybe we need to feel angry. When I think about the worst case scenario with my kids, I'm petrified.
But the awareness that our feelings are coming from our own minds opens an opportunity for us to gain agency over our emotional life and the way we show up for our kids. How do you show up with your kids when you're angry with them? How do you show up for yourself when you're overcome with anxiety in the middle of the night? What do you make it mean about you as a mom when you think your teen doesn't want you in their life in the same way anymore? Time is fleeting, my friends. We only have a short time left with our kids at home.
Maybe your child has already left and you only get to see them on breaks or over the summer. How do you want to show up for your kids, for yourself, in this new stage? The rewards you got all along for being a mom, the love, pride, joy, you gave them to yourself all along. Could it be possible then that those rewards are still in your power to give yourself? Life will be filled with joy and pain.
There's not one without the other. And maybe our superpower as moms is that we get to, are actually able to, experience exquisite joy and excruciating pain. What a gift to experience that joy.
And perhaps that possibility of pain is part of this crazy experience of motherhood. But also, what if it were possible to experience more joy and less pain? Because you know how to harness your mind's power to design your emotional life. That possibility is here for you.
Until next time, friends. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
