RELATIONSHIP GOALS - RECONNECTING WITH YOUR TEEN
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional roller coaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 86.
Hello, my friends, and welcome back. I'm really excited for this week's episode. I'm returning to the conversation about goals, but this time I'm going to veer back to the of goals that relate to our life with teens and adult children.
For us moms, is there any relationship as important to us as the one we have with our kids? Most of us aren't in the business of ranking the importance of relationships, but when push comes to shove, this one, the relationship we have with our babies, it's everything. There's something about motherhood that drastically shifts your perspective and priorities away from yourself and most other people or things in your life, and centers your focus on raising your children. Often, if we're not diligent about it, the relationship we have with our spouse or partner takes a big backseat or even a hit when we become mothers.
We might lose touch with friends who don't have kids or aren't at the same stage of parenting as we are because this is the most important part of our lives, raising our kids. As time goes on, you start creating friendships at your kid's school or with the moms of your kid's friends. Of course, it makes sense because you have those things in common.
But it's interesting that I've even seen these friendships fall by the wayside as our kids become older and they form different friendships. It can be hard to be friends with a mom whose kid just isn't very nice to your child. Or maybe our kids just end up in different friend groups so we don't have that in common anymore.
Sometimes you don't feel like you can be as open and honest anymore. You feel isolated. We've been focused on our kids for so long, neglected other relationships for so long, but all that aside, no matter what other relationships you have in your life, your kids are most likely at the top of your list.
As I think back to life with my boys when they were younger, there was a period of about four years or so when they were just my little buddies. If we planned an outing or vacation, there was no question we would be together. We spent most of the weekends together.
I had control over their plans and even their friend groups for a while. It was always clear that I was their mom and not their friend, but mom felt like a special role. I was someone meaningful and important in their lives.
When did that change? I heard someone on social media saying that you never know when the last time will be that you pick up your child. It just happens one day. You pick them up one last time and then never again.
You don't even realize that was the last one. It's so subtle, the change, and yet looking back, you wonder how you missed it. When did that change happen? When we went from being the center of our kids' world to being one of the many relationships in their life, and most likely not the highest priority relationship.
Look, we know at some level that our kids do love us. Some of us are even lucky enough to hear our kids say, I love you, mom. Maybe only sporadically, but they still say it.
Some of our kids might still talk to and be open with us. It's not that we're not an important person in their life by any means, but it changes, subtly, maybe drastically. And meanwhile, we're still here prioritizing and loving our kids more than anything else in our lives.
This will never change. And in my humble opinion, I don't think that there's anything wrong with this. A mother's relationship with each of her children is special and important.
And I feel so incredibly grateful that my husband and I took the leap of faith to start a family 20 years ago. I had no idea what I was jumping into, but it has been an incredible journey. If you're anything like me, you couldn't imagine a world in which you didn't have a relationship with your kids in the future.
It would be inconceivable. But also, is there a part of you that wonders what that will look like? As my boys grow up, our relationship has no doubt changed. The way we spend time together and the amount of time we spend together has drastically shifted.
When women come to me challenged by the relationship with their teens, they'll often tell me that they feel disconnected. Think about what a powerful description that is, that we were connected, and now that connection feels severed, or at least doesn't feel as strong as it used to. When I ask my clients about their goals, they'll say they want to reconnect, to strengthen their relationship with their kids.
I get it. I think we all get it. But how many of us, when we've gotten to this place where the relationship we have with our teens feels disconnected, that we find we have absolutely no idea how to reconnect with our kid? God knows we try our best.
We try everything, day in and day out. I've said before, this is one of the reasons I love working with moms. We are these powerful creatures who literally will try to move heaven and earth for our children.
We're literal superheroes, although it doesn't feel like it. When it comes to our kids, we don't wait to feel motivated to take care of them. We help them in any way we can.
We don't wait until we feel like it. We literally just do it. I mean, seriously, can we all stop and give ourselves a collective well done, ladies? I mean, seriously.
So we have the heart and absolute willingness to do whatever it takes for our kids. And these are people we've known all of their lives. Literally, we've known these people longer than anyone.
So you would think that because we have this longstanding relationship with our kids, that it would be easy, or that we would at least have some concept of how to manage our relationship with our teen as they get older. One would think that we would have a pretty good clue about how have a strong and connected relationship with these people. We're willing to do whatever it takes.
And we have this long history. And we have unconditional love for them. We literally have done and would do anything to have a good relationship with our teens.
Now let's reflect back on where we started a few episodes ago when we were talking about other goals, like changing habits or weight loss. One of the very first lessons I talked about was that in order to achieve any goal, you have to be the person who achieves that goal ahead of time. So if we're talking about body goals like weight loss or fitness, in order to achieve whatever goal we have in front of us to improve our bodies or improve our health, we have to be the person who takes the action of eating healthy foods and finding time to exercise.
Basically doing whatever it is we think will help us move towards achieving our goals. Same with habits. If we want to start a new habit or end a less productive habit, then we have to be the person who either starts the new habit or just stops doing the old habit.
So if we were to apply this seemingly simple formula to our relationship with our kids, it would stand to reason that in order to have a positive connected relationship with our teens, that we'd have to be the mom who takes actions related to connecting with our teens. Okay, but wait a minute. Aren't we doing this already? Aren't I trying my best, loving my kid unconditionally, willing to do whatever I can for them? But still, my relationship with them isn't what I want it to be.
It's heartbreaking to think I am literally doing everything I can to connect with this person and I'm failing. In prior episodes, I talked about how when we're pursuing personal goals like weight loss or changing habits, we can feel guilt and disappointment with ourselves when we're not able to stay on track. Especially when we start to think that we're never going to be able to stay on track.
That maybe there's something wrong with us, that we can't make progress towards this goal. Interestingly, guilt and disappointment can play a huge role in how we perceive our relationship with our teens as well. But to be honest, I think what I've observed in my clients and even personally in my own relationship with my boys is that when you come against these challenges in your relationship with your teens, you not only feel guilt and disappointment, but your heart breaks a little bit as well.
You can feel loss and even grief when you feel disconnected with one of the most important people in your life. Somebody who you truly would give anything to love and support. That is heartbreaking on a whole different level.
We can experience this when our kids leave for college or even frankly when they're right here physically with us, but somehow so far away. Our teens to us represent everything that's been so special about our journey through motherhood so far. And the prospect of losing this relationship with them can feel devastating.
I think I've shared this before that I follow a fitness guru who regularly says, if you're doing everything right and you're not seeing the results that you want, then you're not doing everything right. Now this is truly frustrating if you believe that you've been trying your best. And I don't know any moms who would say that they don't try their best.
What happens more often is that we feel like we're trying our best and our best isn't good enough. Right now that James Ingram song comes to mind just once. Anyway, I think there are so many different ways that we might try our best.
We go out of our way to show our kids that we love them. We try to show them that we're interested in what they're doing and what's going on in their life. We try really hard not to take things so personally.
We try not to react to their moods. We try to give them space. My clients will tell me how intentional they are about trying to reconnect, but they feel like nothing gets better.
So let's talk about how we measure our success for a minute. When we're looking at changing habits or losing weight, it feels like it's a bit easier to quantify what success looks like. You're looking at a number on a scale or a certain number of days you've done something, maybe times you've exercised, or number of consecutive days you've practiced a new habit, number of steps a day.
In these examples, you have some clear way to measure, a clear indicator of how you're doing, what kind of progress you're making. But if your goal is a relationship, or more specifically in this case, the quality of a relationship, with the goal being that you want to maintain, strengthen, or at the very least, not lose the relationship. So wherever you are in your stage of parenting, whether your child is away at college, living at home after college, or still in high school, whether you have a close, distant, or combative relationship, whatever the specific circumstance is, I imagine you have a goal in terms of how you want the quality of your relationship to look.
Now again, we all might have very different goals depending on our kids and circumstances. But let me ask you, how would you know if you achieved your goal? How would you know if you had succeeded in creating the relationship you want with your teen? And I'm not even necessarily talking about in the future, I'm saying right now, today, how would you know if your relationship was what you want it to be? Because it's not like you can get on a scale and measure or weigh your relationship. The metrics you might use to evaluate any relationship are a bit more subtle than counting steps or counting calories.
Relationships are hard to quantify. Interestingly, you might not realize it, but your brain does quantify relationships. It may not do this like a habit tracker or a daily weigh-in, but when you have a relationship with someone, your brain is constantly evaluating that relationship.
Because what is a relationship after all? A relationship is literally the series of thoughts that you have about another person. That's it. That's, at the end of the day, what a relationship is.
The way you think about another person. And these thoughts then translate into a certain feeling that you have about that person. So we evaluate, we judge, we observe our interactions with these other people, in this case, our teenager, and we compare these observations against our expectations for what we want in that relationship.
Maybe even what we think the relationship should be. And based on these comparisons and judgments, all of these thoughts we have about our teen and our relationship, in essence, this is the way we decide whether or not the quality of our relationship with our teen is what we want it to be. So think about it.
We have expectations for how our teens are going to behave. We have expectations for how they'll treat us, what we want them to do when they enter a room with us, whether or not they say hello, how many words they say when they answer our questions, whether or not they make eye contact, how many hours a day they spend in their room, whether or not they willingly eat dinner with us, if they're away at college, how many times they call, how quickly they respond to our texts, how much they tell us about their life. You may not even realize how many ways you're judging the quality of your relationship with your teen.
It's subtle, likely not even conscious. And this applies to any relationship you have. Every single relationship has a different dynamic based on who the other person is and based on how you are with them, what you expect from them, how the other person behaves vis-a-vis your expectations.
So think about one of your children for a minute. What do you expect from them? How do you want them to treat you? How do you want them to behave? How do you want them to engage with you? Do you want them to smile at you when you talk? How long do you want the conversation to be? Do you expect them to make eye contact with you? When you give them advice or ask them questions, do you expect them to answer right away? And in what way are they meeting or failing to meet these expectations? It's so fascinating, right, to really think about our expectations in an explicit way because they're there under the surface. I can even think about my boys.
I have certain expectations of them that they are already meeting. Maybe at times I've allowed my expectations to meet them where they are, but I have other expectations of them that they don't meet. And you know how I know? Because I notice that I have feelings about it.
A few years ago I was having a really challenging time with one of my sons. It felt like in a very short period of time he changed. He wouldn't look me in the eye.
I noticed that he couldn't wait to get out of the room when he was talking to me. He stayed up in his room, in fact, most of the time and he spent a lot of time away from the house altogether. My son was not only not meeting my expectations of what I wanted and hoped our relationship would be, but his behavior wasn't even matching my memory of who he was just a few months before.
It honestly felt like overnight I had lost him. When you go through these challenging times with your kids, you go on hyper alert. I started noticing everything.
I noticed even more how he wasn't smiling at me, how little time he spent at home. I've had clients who've experienced a very similar drastic shift in their kids seemingly overnight. It's not even just about expectations of what you want hypothetically.
It's this drastic shift. You can find your child is different even from the version of themselves they were only a few days or months before. And these shifts don't have to be so dramatic.
Sometimes it happens slowly and all of a sudden you realize some of these behaviors have been building up to the point where you don't even recognize your teen anymore. The way they're acting towards you or behaving just feels so different. I also don't want to leave out the empty nester who clearly has a very different dynamic of interaction with her child now that they're off at college.
This mom has expectations too. Judging the number of times she talks to her child, the number of texts she gets, judgments about whether or not their child is telling them everything. I've even noticed I am apparently counting the number of times my son at college calls my husband instead of me.
It's not a competition, but I notice I must be judging this because I have feelings about it. It's hard not to let go of judging and evaluating our teens for signs that they're in danger, that they're not happy or struggling in some way or are pulling away from us. Of course, judging the quality of our relationship with our teens is a huge red flag.
If our relationship isn't healthy, then something must be wrong. Some moms will express to me this in terms of feeling a loss of connection. Other moms express frustration because they feel their teen is disrespecting or being mean to them.
Then other moms will tell me that their kids tell them everything and that they're then kind of saddled with all this information. And as much as these moms appreciate that they're somewhat in the know about what's going on with their teens, it can feel like then their relationship is so interwoven or enmeshed that it feels like as a mom you can't extricate yourself. It's really hard not to want to dive in and try to fix it when you see your teen struggling.
So I've given a bunch of examples to point out just how many factors can be at play with our teens, but also how incredibly dynamic and powerful our brains are in evaluating the quality of our relationship with our teens. Here's something funny to consider. Even though we're constantly judging and evaluating our relationship with our teen, it's not like we have a clear way to articulate what that relationship is.
You know how when our kids have a new love interest, maybe at first they'll say we're just talking and then maybe they move to the dating stage. This may have even been true for us to a certain extent when we were going through this when we were younger. Then there's the stage where you want to define the relationship with the big hurdle being are we boyfriend and girlfriend.
Wouldn't it be great if we had these same terms that we could use to define the relationship we have with our teens? I've suggested before that there's the rich aunt relationship where your teen literally only engages with you when they want money. There might be the left me on red relationship where you text your teen at college and they literally never respond. What words would you use to describe your relationship status with your teen right now? I'd love to hear.
I think we all probably aspire to be able to say that our kids are our friends, but even that doesn't seem like enough. We'll never be just friends with our kids. We'll always be mom.
But suddenly the definition of what that means feels like it's turned on its head. Who are we to our kids once they stop needing us to be all of the things we thought we were to them? Earlier I mentioned that all of the evaluations and judgments that we have about the relationship we have with our teens cause us to feel something. Either we feel disconnected or hurt or rejected or dependent, maybe enmeshed.
It's also important to point out that it's these same thoughts, these evaluations and judgments that make us feel loved, needed, and supported by our kids. These evaluations can make us feel both wonderful and terrible. Notice how I'm very deliberately articulating this to demonstrate that our kids are behaving the way that they're behaving, but those behaviors themselves are actually not what's causing us to feel either loved or rejected, connected or disconnected.
It's not what your teen does or says. It's your thoughts about those actions and words that create the feelings that you have. It's funny because in my own relationships with my boys, I have certain expectations that match reality.
There are many times that the actions my boys take and the words they say match or even exceed what I hope and expect from them. So in these instances, I might feel loved or grateful or connected because I'm thinking I'm so grateful that they said that. I love that they do that.
To be honest, sometimes I might not even feel anything. For example, if I expect my son to go out on a Friday night, I don't feel anything when he tells me I'm going out because his words have met my expectations. And also, I'm not making this mean anything about me.
But then there are other times when I notice I have less positive feelings about my boys' words or actions. And I always use this as an opportunity to be very clear about what's happening, specifically to be clear about what my boys are actually doing or saying, and then what my expectation was that's causing me to have a moment where I'm experiencing negative emotions. Because all of our thoughts and feelings about another person, in essence, this is the quality of our relationship.
We could think anything we want about the relationship we have with our kids, but when their behavior doesn't match our expectations, we can subconsciously extrapolate from that situation that there's a problem with our relationship. How do we make that leap? Well, our teens do something, and in our minds, like the supercomputers they are, they're judging whether or not that behavior meets our expectations. And this is all happening in fractions of a second, subconsciously.
But if you stop to slow it down, you can watch this happening. Let's take the example of our teens wanting to eat dinner in their room. I didn't even realize this was a thing until it started happening in my house.
And then I started talking to countless clients who all have kids who also lock themselves up in their room and often want to have dinner alone by themselves in their room. It can feel like a real problem. Because let's face it, we expect our kids to have dinner with us, and maybe also to not want to be locked in their room whenever they're home.
If we moms were all sitting together in the same room chatting about our lives, we might all agree that kids shouldn't spend that much time locked in their room. But the truth is, some of them do. We have the reality, which is our teen spends time locked up in their room and often prefers to eat dinner in their room.
And then there's our expectations of them, that they shouldn't be doing that or shouldn't be doing as much of it. Just this discrepancy between reality and our expectations is enough to make us feel frustrated and annoyed. But then you add to it the way our minds might also take their behavior personally.
Not only should they not be doing this, but the they are means that they don't want to spend time with me. Clients will tell me they feel like their kid is trying to get away from them, or maybe that they're up to no good in there, or maybe there's something wrong with them that they're in there. Notice how we can add to our own negative emotions by the way our brains decide that there's a problem with our teen or our relationship because of their behavior.
What if none of those things are true? What if you're wrong about the way your brain is interpreting your teen's actions? Just consider that the way our brains measure and evaluate our relationships are not absolute and true metrics. Just because your teen smiles at you one time, doesn't say a word, and then spends two and a half hours in their room doesn't actually mean anything about your relationship until you start to fill in the blanks and decide whatever they did means your relationship must be broken in some way. Consider how deep and complex the narrative around your relationship with your child is right now in your mind.
What are you telling yourself about the quality of your relationship with your teen and why? Okay, again, I've said this many times and I'm going to reiterate it that in order to achieve any goal, you need to be the woman who achieves this goal right now before you've actually achieved the goal. And again, I have no doubt with your teen right now, you are trying your best. This isn't about effort and intention, but I want to invite you to consider that if you're thinking there's something wrong with your relationship with your teen or just something wrong with your teen in general, maybe also you're thinking there's something wrong with you, all of these thoughts are going to create negative feelings which will then translate into how you show up with your teen.
If you're feeling disconnected, hurt, or frustrated, then you take action from these emotions. For example, if I'm feeling disconnected, I might show up in a way that shows I need to connect. If I'm feeling frustrated, I'm almost always demonstrating to my teen that what they're doing is wrong and needs to change in order for me to feel better.
If I'm feeling hurt, I might show up in a way that makes them responsible for hurting me. Notice how when we do this, we're very focused on what we want and potentially closed off entirely to what our kids want or need. If you really think about connection, it's not a one-way street.
Relationships aren't simply about one person's expectations being met. Look, all of our teens are different, but I think it's really interesting to consider that as our kids navigate this period of growth where they're trying to define who they are, they are very naturally, appropriately evaluating who they are as separate from us. And there is a part of that that is inevitably going to involve them pulling away from us.
That's just reality. None of that has to mean anything about our relationship unless we decide that it does. So in past episodes, I've also talked about curiosity being another one of those essential tools to accomplishing any goal.
So what if you were to get really curious about why you're not feeling connected with your teen? The first place to look is within. How are you going about creating connection with your teen? And again, I know you're trying your best and I have no doubt you love your teen, but what would look different if you were to take responsibility for your own judgments and expectations of them? What if you were willing to be open to what they need right now rather than being focused on what you need? Your teen's growth and evolution right now is almost definitely not about you. Their actions might come out in a way that feels directed at you.
It can feel really personal and I get it, it hurts. But what if it's not about you? How can you take responsibility for your expectations so that you show up in a way that's curious rather than hurt? Ask yourself, why might they be acting in the way that they are? They might have even told you. Have you listened to them? Could you be open to considering that your teen is also trying their best right now? I think one of the most powerful things that I was able to do when I was struggling in my relationship with my son was to stop making our relationship a power struggle based on my own needs and expectations.
The minute I decided to understand how my son might be trying his best, my entire mindset about the situation changed. We love our kids more than anything in our lives. We want them to be happy and safe and successful.
And when we see evidence that they're struggling or pulling away, we can't help but want to dive in and fix it. And if it seems like it's our relationship with our kids that's in jeopardy, we most definitely want to fix that. But what if this has nothing to do with you? Think about the power of just being willing to accept your child for exactly who they are right now, even if that looks drastically different than your expectations.
Just think about how powerful it is to love your child truly unconditionally. Because I guarantee you that if you have judgments and expectations for your teen, the feelings of disappointment, frustration, and hurt that you are creating with your mind are showing up in the way that you're interacting with your teen. And I don't know about you, but when people come to me showing how hurt and rejected they feel, and they say to me that I've done something to cause their hurt and rejection, especially when in my mind I haven't done anything wrong, certainly not on purpose, that can be a problem.
I immediately go on the defensive. I withdraw. I want to interact with that person even less.
Could we be inadvertently doing this to our teens? Think about how disconnected our teens might feel if we as moms come to them saying they've made us feel hurt. You might not want to hear this, but that's a lie. Your teen hasn't made you feel hurt.
Your thoughts about your teen, your judgments about your teen have made you feel hurt. Here's something really powerful. Through many mistakes and failures with my boys, I have learned that I never want to make my boys feel like they're responsible for my feelings.
It actually really is not their job. And think about how much pressure we create when we want our kids to meet every single expectation we have of them, just so we get to feel happy and connected with them. In fact, what I really want is for them to be themselves.
I want them to be exactly who they are. We as moms have the privilege of being fully open to embracing exactly who our teens are, which frankly isn't hard when you shift this perspective and understand that they may truly be trying their best, however they're showing up, that it's not hard to love them. I truly understand the pain of feeling disconnected with your child, but I promise you that being the woman who is connected with her child no matter what, no matter how my boys show up, is everything.
No matter what my sons do, I always get to love them. I always get to feel connected with them no matter how often I see them, no matter how much they text me back. The love I have for them is always mine.
I will never lose that connection. And when I let them be who they are, I only feel that love even more. This is the work we do in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. Could you imagine a greater gift than being able to feel reconnected with your child without needing them to be any one other than the perfect?
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.
