LESSONS I WISH I KNEW SOONER
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 102.
Hello, my friends. My oldest son's first year of college is officially in the books. We picked him up from school on Mother's Day, and I'm not gonna lie, I had some feelings about that.
As I looked ahead to that Sunday, I was of course excited about bringing my son back home. I hadn't seen him since early March, when I'd gone to New York to see him in a show when he was on tour. Two months since I'd seen his beautiful face.
What's my story about that fact? Well, it felt like a really long time. I didn't really have any thoughts like, I should have seen him and I didn't. Those thoughts can be extra painful, like it's someone's fault that we didn't see each other.
But the truth is, my son has thrown himself into college life and it's kept him pretty busy. He toured during spring break with the school's musical comedy troupe, where he plays guitar in the pit band. The group had 40, maybe more, performances from January through April, just about every Friday and Saturday night.
Plus he formed his own indie rock band. He's in a jazz band. Oh, and he's taking some pretty hard math and engineering courses.
On top of all of this, he rushed a fraternity. So it would be a lie to say that I should have seen him over the past two months. Because the truth is, I didn't.
And it's pretty clear why, based on how much he had going on. My son has taken advantage of college in all the ways that I dreamed he would. Is there a part of me that wishes he responded to my texts a bit more frequently? Yes.
Have I missed seeing him? Absolutely. But at the same time, I am so incredibly happy that he has flown. Don't get me wrong, it has not all been easy.
He's had his share of disappointments, heartaches, and a considerable amount of stress. But he is living his life. Joy and pain.
Agony and ecstasy. There have been two related lessons that I have really embraced over the past few years. And this has made my own transition to having a child in college so much easier.
The first lesson, believe it or not, was how to love my children unconditionally. That one might trip you up for a second. So let me explain.
You might be thinking, well, I already love my kids unconditionally. So what's wrong with you, Jennifer? I get it. And three or four years ago, I might have also been defending the depth and unconditional nature of my love for my kids.
There's nothing I wouldn't do for them. And I feel like this has been true since the moment they came into this world. Before even.
So I'm not at all suggesting that you or I don't love our kids. In fact, I think it goes without saying, or else you wouldn't be listening to a podcast like this. But here's the distinction I want to make.
Unconditional love is something very specific. Unconditional love means that you love someone without any condition. Said another way, you love the other person for exactly who they are, no matter what they do.
Now, on the one hand, I think it is true that I have always loved my boys for who they are. And I told myself that I would love them no matter what they did in life. There have been times in the past that I would joke that if they ever ended up on death row, God forbid, I would visit them every day.
I couldn't imagine ever giving up on my kids. I'd like to think that they know this about me implicitly. And I can imagine that despite whatever challenges you're going through with your own teens, that you could probably also say that your kids know if things got really bad, my mom will always be there for me.
We're the safety net, the insurance policy, the one we hope they know they can always come to. All this sounds good until it really gets put to the test. Let's face it, the teen years are a time when the concept of unconditional love really takes a hard hit.
Don't get me wrong, I still stand by my belief that both you and I are unwavering in our commitment to do whatever we need to do for our kids. And in a lot of ways, during the teen years, we often feel like we need to double down on the way we support our kids. The challenges are so much bigger, the risks so much higher.
We might even get to the point of wondering if we're doing too much of whatever we need to do to support our kids. How much do we help? Are we loving our kids too unconditionally? How do we say no? You've likely heard me talk about the tinted sunglasses we all wear and how we view our lives through these glasses. The color or tint of each of our glasses is unique, based on our values and experiences, maybe based on the way we grew up.
Things we love about how we were raised and things we are determined to do better. You can think about these glasses as the way we perceive or interpret the world around us. But you can also think of these glasses as a tool that we use to measure the reality of our lives against our expectations of what should happen.
I can't stress enough about how this lens, your expectations, impacts the way you raise your children. Women come to me for coaching and often express that they want to show up for their kids as understanding or patient, that they don't want to react or judge as much. They want to stop trying to fix what's wrong with their kids.
And often the reason they've gotten to this point is that they feel like they've tried everything they can think of to try and none of it has worked. What that means, specifically, is that our teens are not doing what we want them to do or acting the way we think they should act. One example is when our teens react to something we're doing or a conversation we're having and our perception of their reaction is that they're pulling away or fighting back, ultimately moving us farther away from the goal we have.
Maybe we were hoping for a closer connection with our kids and somehow what we've actually created is that they're pulling further away. Or we were hoping to get our teen to try a little harder in school or talk a little more at the dinner table. Maybe get out there and make some friends.
Just get out of being locked in your room all the time. Or maybe quit it with the partying. Stop vaping.
You name it, a mom has come to me hoping to help influence her kid with so many different types of behavior. I remember back when my youngest was in middle school. It was actually during COVID and he was addicted to gaming with his friends.
He did it during class when he was supposed to be listening to the Google Meet. He did it during every minute of his spare time. One morning I even found him having stayed up all night to game.
I was beside myself and I literally tried everything to get him to stop. We tried putting timers on his online access. I tried negotiating exercise time when he would have to get out of his chair for 30 minutes just to have a break.
I threatened to cut him off entirely. I was obsessed. In fact, you could even say that I was addicted to thinking about gaming.
That's how much I obsessed about it. Because, of course, I was catastrophizing, thinking about the impact this was going to have on his ability to be successful in school. I worried about his physical health, his mental health.
And, of course, I was sure that when these terrible things happened it would be all my fault. The mindset trap of personalization. I was also for sure falling into the trap of the illusion of control.
Nothing I tried seemed to change my son's behavior or his desire to game. And the more I failed, the more frustrated I got. And just think about how I showed up with my son when I was frustrated, which was all of the time.
I bet I don't even need to spell it out for you. I was pretty terrible, definitely annoying, and absolutely ineffective. The simple fact is I expected my son not to game.
Well, I expected him not to game as much as he was gaming. But reality wasn't meeting my expectations. And look, I don't necessarily think I was wrong with my expectations.
I still don't think it's healthy or productive to game all the time. In fact, this is just one example of the values and expectations that we as moms apply to the way we raise our kids. For me, it's a key part of my values to believe it's my responsibility as a mom to raise responsible, hardworking, kind human beings who strive to reach their potential.
I don't think I'm unique in having this belief. So, of course, the way I've gone about parenting my boys, whether unconsciously or consciously, has been informed by this expectation about the type of person I wanted my boys to grow up to be. Or maybe I would even say the types of values I wanted my boys to grow up to have.
As you can imagine, with this expectation or a vision of who I wanted my boys to become in my mind, over the course of their lives, in age-appropriate ways, I've made my expectations clear. I praised my boys for working hard and working through their challenges. I acknowledged acts of kindness and helpfulness.
I enforced consequences if my boys weren't kind or didn't follow the rules. So through positive reinforcement and consequences, and even the way I would talk about goals and responsibilities with my kids, I underscored on an almost daily basis my hopes and expectations about how I wanted my boys to engage and behave in their lives. When my boys were little, they didn't always do what I said.
But I had some sense that my view of the way they should behave was something that I could get them to fall in line with. Again, I had this illusion of control. But for each one of our kids, in different ways and at different times, our kids start forming their own view of who they want to be and how they want to show up in their own lives.
And spoiler alert, at times this can look very different from what we want it to look like. Even if the way they test boundaries or rules is a relatively temporary defiance, it can throw you for a loop. This was true for me, even when my boys were really little.
We'd hit a stage where they were refusing to get ready for school, for example, and it was a fight to get everyone dressed and fed and in the car. Even though they were little humans, and I truly thought I was supposed to be in control, there were times when I realized how little control I actually had. The only reason our kids met our expectations back then is because they decided to meet our expectations.
This was true even when our kids were little. Now, maybe back then our kids believed that we had the power to make them do things, and so they were more likely to comply, if only because they were afraid of the consequences. But do you ever feel with your teen that they pull away or defy you, or just go do something that you worry isn't going to be good for them in the long run, and they don't seem to care about the consequences? Whether the consequences are things that we're going to deliver, or consequences that life delivers.
Failed classes, disconnection from their friends, addiction, any number of terrible outcomes that we get stuck worrying about when our minds take us endlessly to the worst-case scenario. Consider this though, could it be that the only reason our kids ever met our expectations was because they decided they wanted to do that thing? That they decided to be that version of themselves that we also hoped they would be? Imagine it, even your child at three years old, at five, at eight, when they behaved, when they shared their toys, when they brushed their teeth, they did it because they decided to do it. Could it be because we told them to do it? Possibly.
But if I say, honey, go brush your teeth, these are just words. They have no power over someone until that person says to themselves, I want to go brush my teeth. Maybe they do it because they don't want me to get mad.
Maybe because they just got into the habit of it. Maybe at some point they actually liked it. Whatever their reason for brushing their teeth, when my boys brushed their teeth, they did it.
And they still do it, I'm fairly sure. But only because they want to. Consider this possibility for a moment and think about how profound it is to appreciate that our kids only ever do what they want to do.
And that this actually is something that has never changed about them. But what has changed as they've grown up is how willing they are to take our expectations as the truth about the way they should live their lives. In fact, it's a pretty important aspect of our kids' development that they start to question where their parents' values and expectations end and their own self-identified values and expectations for how they want to live their life begins.
Maybe it starts with how they dress or the way they want to wear their hair, but gradually becomes the way they want to tackle their homework and study for tests, how much time they want to spend online or with their friends, whether or not they ever want to leave their room. And they gradually move on to deciding whether they'll try alcohol or even drugs, if they should date, what kind of person they want to date, whether they want to have sex, if they want to go to college, where they want to go to college. All of our kids' decisions, whether or not we agree with them, they're making these decisions based on what they want to be doing.
And here's where we can quickly get into problems, because not only can we as moms disagree with the choices our kids are making, but we can disagree about the fundamental values that are behind those decisions. Or, and this is an interesting nuance, we can disagree about the fundamental values we think are underlying the choices our kids are making. For example, when my son was gaming in middle school, I disagreed not only with the amount of time he was spending on Minecraft, but I fundamentally disagreed with what I believed were the values driving his behavior, that he valued this mindless activity more than focusing on school or having a balanced and productive life.
So let's apply this concept, that my son was gaming because he wanted to be gaming, and clearly he had reasons. I assume that his reasons were frankly because he was being lazy and short-sighted, not responsible, defiant. I started labeling, overgeneralizing, catastrophizing.
Now I can't know exactly what my son was thinking, what was driving his decision to spend so much time gaming in middle school, but especially now that I know he eventually stopped gaming, and in fact now rarely games, it's probably easier to have a bit more of a philosophical view of the situation. So if I were to guess what was driving my son's behavior, it was most likely thoughts like, gaming's more fun than school. I never get to see my friends because I'm stuck at home, again, COVID, so this is the only way I get to hang out with them.
Thinking about homework or going on a bike ride with my mom, not so fun in my son's mind. In retrospect, I see it so clearly. My son was coping the best way he could in a situation none of us wanted to be in.
He wasn't sitting there weighing his behavior against long-term consequences, and I don't think he fundamentally thought he was being lazy. But we were both evaluating the situation from a totally different perspective, and even a different set of priorities and values. And of course, it's great when time passes and we see our kids eventually realize what we've been telling them all along, that they learn the lesson, either because they've faced a consequence, or they just grow up a bit more and understand why paying attention to school might be a bit more important in the long run than gaming.
But until our kids have this epiphany, it can feel like a pretty heavy responsibility to get them to see, to remind them of the values and consequences they aren't seeing. I think there are a few fundamental challenges that we face as moms when we see that our kid is taking action or making choices, and it's pretty clear to us that they're taking action from a place where they're not fully taking into account the consequences of their actions. Here's the conundrum we face.
We try to get them to see our perspective, and when that doesn't work, and we fail miserably to change their mind or even get them to listen to us, it feels like the only option is to be stuck in powerlessness, to just let it go. And of course, the problem there is it's really hard for us to accept the thought that our only choice is to let go of our belief that our kids deserve more for their lives. And think about this when you're talking about issues about safety and happiness.
How are we supposed to let go of that? Failure in that context, it's terrifying to think that our kids wouldn't be safe or that they would be drastically unhappy. I really love that we as moms see the most bright and vibrant version of each of our children's potential. For each of your kids, I know you have in your mind some version of this bright, happy future that you know they could have the potential to grasp if only they would make the right choices and engage in their life in the right way.
I'm willing to bet that you have very specific expectations around how hard your teen should be working in school or on their other responsibilities, what things they should be doing to make sure they stay safe, how they should behave at home, the types of friends you'd like them to have, or who they should or could be dating, how they engage with the opportunities they have in front of them, how they take advantage of their life. You have expectations around all of this. And if you don't think that you do, my friend, I'm almost willing to bet that you're lying to yourself.
Because it's impossible for us to not have expectations. You may even think that you've set reasonable, even low expectations. But nevertheless, you've still in your mind drawn a line.
You've created a bar. And no matter how high or low the bar, there is still always the potential for your child to fall short of your expectations. Over the past few years, I have had many opportunities to come to terms with my own expectations.
In fact, I've had to learn some pretty hard lessons about the degree to which my expectations were not only making me miserable, but were seriously and negatively impacting the relationship I was having with my oldest son. I thought my expectations were reasonable. And yet, for a period of time, my son had gone down a path I never in my wildest nightmares could have imagined.
For reasons I later learned had nothing to do with me, I was facing the very real possibility that my son would walk out of my life forever. I could never have imagined that this would be a possibility. I could never imagine losing my relationship in connection with my beautiful son.
This is a fundamental expectation, my friends. This goes beyond us expecting our kids get good grades or say please or thank you. A relationship with our kids.
This is everything. Which one of us would ever expect our child to break off ties with us? To not want a relationship with us? And yet I've worked with so many moms who feel like they're in this exact situation with their teens, where they feel so shut out and discounted at times, that they really do wonder if their kids even want a relationship with them anymore. I don't know what you're going through with your teen, but I can imagine there has been parts of the journey that have brought you pain.
I can relate. This motherhood work is not for the faint of heart. I started this episode talking about the two things that I've learned over the past few years with my sons and frankly want to really keep these lessons in mind as I approach the summer with my son at home from his first year in college.
I mentioned that the first lesson is related to unconditional love. We all like to think that we're going to love our children no matter what, but there are times when our teen's actions and words fall so short of what we hoped would be true, what we expected, that we're left having to grapple with the possibility that our love does have conditions. Sometimes my clients will phrase it like this.
They'll say I love my son but sometimes it's really hard to like him. And I get it. I think there really can be a distinction.
We can still love our children and also not like their behavior and how they're showing up right now. But is this the same as putting conditions on our love? I think in our minds it is possible to separate these things, to love your child unconditionally and also not want to be anywhere near them for some periods of time. But relationships are a two-way street, my friends.
And on the one hand, your relationship with someone is quite simply the sum of your thoughts about them. And someone else's relationship with you is simply the sum of their thoughts about you and what your interactions mean for them. So while we might be able to hold space in our minds for both unconditional love and a little dislike for our teens at times, think about how you show up as a mom when you're operating from this dislike, from the disapproval.
How often do you communicate to your teen how they're falling short of your expectations? How often do you remind them of the type of person you hope they'll remember to be? How often do you tell them you disagree with their choices and that you think they should be doing something different? How often do you communicate that their behavior might mean something about who your child is? Lazy, unmotivated, rude, disrespectful. As we, as moms, try to fulfill what we view as our responsibility to help our kids reach their potential, when we show up in a way that repeatedly highlights how our kids are falling short of our expectations, my friend, you have to wonder whether or not our actions and words are communicating to our teens that our love is in fact conditional. The way we show up when we're so determined to take responsibility for helping our kids be who we believe they should be.
Could it be possible that we're not demonstrating to them that we believe that they're capable of so much bigger, but instead that we're demonstrating to them that we believe that they're not good enough, or that they need to be something more in order for us to truly embrace who they are? I don't know, nor could I ever really know, how my past actions have impacted my son or specifically made him think that I didn't believe in him or somehow thought he wasn't enough as he was. But I do know that when I started embracing truly unconditional love for my sons, that they both began to respond to me in an entirely different way. For me, loving my sons unconditionally has meant that I've had to take responsibility for my expectations.
These expectations are mine. They're based on the way I see the world. But I've cultivated a respect for the fact that my son's expectations for themselves in their life might be very different.
Remember, our kids do what they want to be doing. Even when I've fundamentally disagreed with their behavior or the way that I perceive they're approaching the decisions they're making, I've cultivated an ability to be willing to have respect for the truth, which is they are doing what they want to be doing. Whatever their reasons right now, the way they're showing up is what they want to be doing.
As a mom, I've learned how to take a step back and try to really see my sons. What is it like to be in their shoes right now? Why might they be making the choices they're making right now? In the gaming example, I could come up with a lot of reasons in hindsight why my son would be gaming, and all of them actually made perfect sense to me. Even when I think about the really painful struggles during that time when I was able to embrace fully unconditional love for my son and to try to see the world through his eyes, his choices, the way he was acting, even then, it made perfect sense to me.
I didn't like it. I didn't want it. But through love, I could see it.
I could see him, my beautiful son. In fact, this young man was making choices out of empathy and out of love. And just because that didn't look like what I wanted it to look like, and just because I saw red flags and I saw consequences he was starting to face, I resisted and fought against all of it until I was able to embrace unconditional love and accept the reality of what is, the reality of the choices my son was making.
I learned to fully embrace and respect his decision-making process. Even when your child isn't communicating with you, not giving you a clear understanding of why they're acting the way they're acting, when you really stop to ask yourself why your child might be making the choices they're making or acting the way that they're acting, you can find it. I'll often ask my clients, how is it that this might be the best your child can do right now? We often jump first to the reason that has something to do with us.
He's being mean because he doesn't respect me, or she's being rude because I was too lenient with her. Our kids are doing what they want to do, and the truth is that their actions have everything to do with them and how they're viewing their life. It's not about you.
And until you fully embrace that your child has in their mind valid reasons for showing up in the way they're showing up, you're going to be cutting yourself off from truly loving who your child is right now. This is unconditional love. I can't tell you how often I work with clients and when they open themselves up to true compassion for their child's experience, they let go of the blame and the guilt and the anger.
When you can truly embrace showing your child unconditional love, it doesn't take long before your child starts to reflect that back to you. My friends, this isn't about letting go of your values. This isn't about letting go of your hopes and dreams for your child.
It's not about just letting them do whatever they want either. This is about loving your child unconditionally so that as you approach your relationship with your child, as you approach the way you talk to your child, and the way you set boundaries and expectations with your child, this shift, this shift from anger, frustration, and guilt to unconditional love drastically changes the way you approach your own interactions with your child. This is about you taking responsibility for how you show up in this relationship.
This is about you intentionally living into being the mom you want to be. That is the power you have, my friends. You don't have the power to control your child.
You actually never did, but now it's becoming painfully obvious and it feels really uncomfortable. So this is the first lesson to embrace unconditional love for your child. Evaluate how you want to show up for them from this love.
I know it's there, so it's not hard to find and to tap into that love I know you have for your child. The second lesson is related, and that is being willing to not only find compassion for a teen's experience, but to cultivate a love for what is. A love for the reality of life.
Here's the truth. In life, you are going to experience pain. Your child is going to experience pain.
Life brings beautiful highs and terrible lows, and if you really think about it, that is exactly as it should be. In those dark days when I truly feared that my son would break off his relationship with me and our family, I held on to this. That if that was my son's choice, that was a gift that I could give him.
I had the capacity to love him so much that I was willing to let him go. What a gift it has been to be his mother, but that doesn't give me a right to demand anything from him. Embracing the reality, even the grief, of that period of time in our life helped me to find the blessings in even the smallest interactions with my son.
He was still home. He hadn't left. He was still living under my roof, even though it felt like he was so far away from me.
He hadn't made the decision to leave, and that was a gift I held on to. And as I approached our relationship with unconditional love and acceptance for who he was, I swear it was like shining a light, a beacon for him to find in the dark. And wouldn't you know it? He came home.
He came back to me, and I will never discount either of my son's potential to find their way again. They are going to make mistakes. I am still making mistakes, but it's their journey.
It's their time to figure out their life. So this summer, as I embrace the gift of having both of my sons back home, at least for part of the summer, I am going to show them my unconditional love. I'm going to love what is, and of course set any boundaries I need to set, but only from a place of love.
This skill is exactly what we do in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0, empowering you to be the mom you want to be for your teens, to be the woman you want to be for yourself. It's not my boys' job to live up to my expectations. They need to live up to theirs.
My expectations are mine, and as I take responsibility for them, I am better equipped to love the journey, watching my boys figure it all out on their own, with me, cheering them on, and being here to support them in any way they need me. Love unconditionally. Love what is.
This is how you find peace, no matter what storms you're facing. Until next time, my 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.
