Password: tween

Transcipt: 

Okay. Friendship and independence with our tweens and young teens. Oh boy. Oh, what a thing this is, right? Um, so let's zoom out. You know, I love zoom out. I'm always going to be asking us to do this.

If we understand our larger, I'm going to speak specifically right now to American culture, larger American culture and parenting culture specifically is obsessed with independence. You know, you could even say genetically, not all of us, but especially white people are built from people who left their countries and came here to be more independent, to have more, um, agency and free will. Now we have a huge group of people for whom that is not true. Uh, see African-Americans black Americans, right? Um, who came here not under their freewill.

So we have a big percentage in the country that is obsessed with independence. And then we have numbers of cultures who still deeply understand and are rooted in, the need for each other in their families. Right? If we look at the larger predominant culture of white culture, though, independent bootstrapping doing for yourself, being with yourself, not needing other people, it may not be openly said all the time, but that is one of our quote unquote goals of parenting, right? We want kids to leave the nest. We want them to fly out of our homes. We want to launch them. We, our goal is to make them not need us.

So I'm going to be gently pushing back on that narrative over and over and over, because I'm not looking for our tweens and young teens to become needy for us and to become enmeshed with us and to not have autonomy. I am. But it can't be done in this way that presupposes, that independence is that other side, that, that our goal is to, um, raise tweens and young teens who don't need us. Humans are made to need each other. We are made to belong. We are made to be with, we are made to, um, grow with each other, right? So when we look at that, then independence is not our goal. And we often mistake independence in tweens and young teens as this kind of like, Oh, um, you know, my kid's just on their own and isn't this great. And sometimes I don't see that as a sign of being great.

So then if we flip that into friendship, right? What our goal is with our tweens and young teens, if we have goals, is that we want our friendships to be, um, we want our children to have friendships that are affirming, um, supportive and foster, both autonomy and interconnectedness. So , yes, your kids are going to disappear into their rooms with their phones and, and be, you know, have secrets, have a private life, have things that they keep inside. That is part of individuation. And we, I want to keep our tween and young teens in community, in the community of the family, in the larger culture of our attachment village, whatever that looks like. I don't care if it's nanny and afterschool programs and friends who are like family or your church or your synagogue or your temple or your, it doesn't matter. Right. But, we want that kind of scaffolded multi-age community for our tweens and young teens. Now you may be feeling really overwhelmed right now. Like God, Meghan, but I will point out little places where you're already naturally probably doing this. And if you're not, we can get it going.

So don't stress. Okay. Don't stress. We can do this. We can, recapture our tweens and young teens. If we've let them wander into the wilderness capture, maybe the wrong verb, but we can go save them and we can work more on autonomy than we do on independence. So let's get it started.