Password: tween

Transcript:

The number one reason that parents of tweens and young teens reach out to me is because they cannot stop fighting. And the main reason they cannot stop fighting is because the parents cannot stop controlling their tween and young team. And trust me, I wrote an entire book parenting outside the lines about my issues around control and how poisonous they can be.

So when I talk to you about this, I know what you suffer from. I get it. So I just want to first explain that culturally, you have been set up to stay in a place of panic and fear you, knowingly or unknowingly, have taken an extraordinary amount of bad news nonstop. You, um, hear of horrific occurrences of bullying, suicide, kidnapping, terrible friendships, kids disappearing, all manner of horrors, whether or not, you take that information in almost daily.

And so your nervous system is perpetually jumpy and perpetually on the lookout for danger for your young tween, your young teen and tween. And as soon as you're a limbic system, our nervous system finds a place of like rational relaxation. You still, will then go into a cycle because another news story breaks, another horror occurs. Another, you know, young girl goes missing, or boy is bullied and you just cannot take it. Add to that. You know, many of us, as I mentioned in the previous video, were left on our own as children, to face all kinds of things and that manifested in all kinds of good and bad issues.

But now we, we know a lot and we know that maybe your young teen or tween has, um, executive functioning issues. Maybe they fall into LGTBQ plus, population. Maybe your child is part of a group that is often targeted. As I make this video right now, Asian Americans are being targeted daily due to the coronavirus and the fears that circulate around that. And so you may legitimately feel as if your child is in danger. So we have all these forces coming at us at parents. And so, you know, I look out into the larger parenting world and I just see a lot of critiques of, of us. I see a lot of like, we don't let our kids be resilient. We don't let our kids fail. We don't let our kids do hard things. We don't let our kids go outside.  And yes, maybe that's all true, but I, I want to let you know that it's not because you're a crappy parent it's because we live in perpetual fear that we either know or don't know, and/or, we are living with known unknown trauma and/or, your child, right, as we kind of get smaller and smaller, like from a broad view into a smaller view, your child may, your young tween, teen or tween may not be capable of having a lot of, uh, friendship, social life, um, autonomy and independence, right? They make decisions that they don't learn from, right. They, they just keep getting hurt or hurting others. And so they require more monitoring.

All of this is to say that what ends up in my lap as a parent coach, because it ends up in your lap as a parent, is fighting. Despite the fact that we may have great reasons to be afraid, although they're not bases in fact, they're based in fear. You can Google kidnapping rates now compared to the 70s: they're down extraordinarily.

So, humans are allergic to being controlled. Independence and autonomy, if you're in a healthy environment, will spring forward and demand to be acknowledged and grown. Your tween or young teen will unapologetically let you know when and how they are ready for more. Sometimes they aren't, sometimes they aren't, but there is an engine in them that is often ready for more, and to prove more and to have more agency over their decisions and lives.

There's also a deep desire for privacy. And so you will experience a lot of shutting of doors in your face. A lot of it's, none of your business, a lot of don't ask me questions and depending on how you are and who you are that can hurt your feelings and can cause you to be more rigid. So similar to chaos though, rigidity for rigidity sake will never yield you what you want in your relationship with your tween and young teen. It will never give you the relationship, trust, and love, and compassion.

You're looking for rigidity, rigidity always yields, not always, but mostly yields two issues. Your child will either kind of be beaten down and resent and hate you quietly, or they will become sneaky, chronically sneaky. We don't want either of those outcomes for your family. Being a rigid Parent, also extraordinarily exhausting in the family. You are trying to beat social media or technology or, um, spy on your kids, or you're always creating rules or consequences about breaking the rules. And, um, and then there's a chronic fight discussion argument, or simmering silent resentment around these rules.

And it is just a shitty way to live in parenting. It is exhausting. And again, cancerous for the relationship. I have a lot of empathy though, for parents who are on this side because, um, I find they don't want to be, they just don't know what else to do. Okay. So if you're over here, you know, take heart that you're in good company, our whole culture, our whole culture, where we've monetized this fear, we have, we have created, um, products and ways to live and apps to try and satiate this fear and quell this fear. And it ends up kind of growing it more.

So yes, there is bullying. Yes. Friendships are hard for tweens and young teens. Yes, it is confusing. Yes. The pain that you see these kids causing each other will bring back extraordinarily painful memories for you, maybe. Yes, they need guardrails. And when we are overly rigid, we rob our children of the opportunities to experience life and consequences that help them to make the better decisions as young adults. We rob them of the interior voice that is in all of them. We rob them of the ability to hear it. We rob them of the pain that is necessary and all humans, the pain that helps grow this up. And you know, it, it goes it's at cross purposes to be rigid and controlling is at cross purposes with our ultimate goal of raising a mature human, not a happy human, not a successful human, but a mature human to the greatest capacity So just take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. Let's keep going.

Lesson Activity

Grab Your Journal:

What is the scariest part of facing letting go of your rigidity?

Are you dealing with Trauma or trauma that is feeding fear (you were abused, ignored, abandoned, severely bullied, etc) or are you having your fear buttons pushed due to our culture and the daily horrors it feeds us?

What is your rigidity around friendships and autonomy doing to your relationship with your tween/young teen? What are the repetitive power struggles you are having?

Or has your tween developed anxieties around friendships or independence because failure and mistakes are not welcome? Is there bandwidth for pain, loss, and hurt feelings? Has your tween/young teen become needy and untrusting of their own voice?