Parenting Teenagers: Staying Connected While Supporting Independence

Darlynn: [00:00:02] Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I’m your host, Darlynn Childress, a life and parenting coach, and today we’re going to talk about teenagers. Over the last few weeks, I’ve talked a lot about managing bedtime, mornings, screen time, homework, dinner, and all of those friction points in a family. But most of that advice was tailored toward parents of preschool, elementary school, and maybe early middle school kids. Obviously, parenting teenagers is different.

Darlynn: [00:00:32] I want to talk today about what’s going on with your teenager: where their brain is, where their social identity is, and how you can best support them. The ultimate goal for all of us is to have great relationships with our adult children, isn’t it? As a parent of adult children now, next week I want to share what it’s been like having college-age children and what it looks like to parent and be in a relationship with young adults.

Darlynn: [00:01:01] I think my relationship with my young adults is really good. We have a lot of mutual respect. They rely on me for social, emotional, practical, and financial support, but they’re also independent and moving toward taking over their own lives, which is natural in the college-age years. I’m feeling pretty good about having young adult children, and I’ll talk about what that looks like next week.

Darlynn: [00:01:30] But as I was thinking about it, I realized that a lot of the success I have now is because of choices I made when I was raising teenagers. The other day I was at my book club, and the moms there have kids ranging from a freshman in college to a sophomore in high school, a couple of high school freshmen, and one middle schooler. They were all talking about how stressful parenting teens is. And I absolutely agree, parenting teens is so hard.

Darlynn: [00:02:10] As they were sharing, I realized that everything you go through in the teen years sets you up for the young adult years. There’s that slow separation as your teen pulls away from you, and there’s the tension between what you want and what they want. You want to keep them physically safe and help them have long-term success. They want to develop independently from you, have short-term pleasure, and have social success, because they want to be socially safe.

Darlynn: [00:02:40] That tension you go through from roughly age 14 to 18, basically the high school years, sets you up for the young adult years. In the young adult years, you have very little control over their physical safety. They’re completely in control of how they live their lives: what they eat, where and when they sleep, how they use their phones and devices, and their social interactions. Essentially every part of their life is theirs, except you probably still control the money. That’s the last frontier of helping them become independent, giving them access to their whole life, including financial freedom.

Darlynn: [00:03:30] So as I thought about my life with young adults, I realized that so much of what I learned parenting teens set me up for a good relationship with my young adults. I said that to my book club friends: everything you’re going through is totally normal. This is a very challenging, tense time when your interests and your teenager’s interests don’t align, and their brain is going through a massive reorg.

Darlynn: [00:04:00] There are things you can do during this time, like slowly letting your teenager go a little, letting them make mistakes and flounder, and being the support they need. That prepares you for the young adult years. So I thought it would be useful to talk about what’s going on with your teen’s brain and social identity, and then give you some best practices. If you have a teenager, this episode is for you.

Darlynn: [00:04:20] I also want to say my heart goes out to you, because having a teenager is so challenging. You really are letting go of a lot of control. A lot of our identity as moms is making sure our kids are well taken care of: that they eat well, sleep well, follow screen time rules, get good grades, and stay safe. In the past, you knew all their friends and all the parents, and you had a lot of control over how your child spent their time.

Darlynn: [00:05:01] The more independence they get, the less control you have, and that’s very scary and very sad. It’s okay to feel those ways. It’s okay to feel stressed, overwhelmed, and scared, but you don’t want to dump those feelings onto your teenager.

Darlynn: [00:05:20] So let’s talk about what’s going on with your teen. The first thing is that their brain is doing a massive reorganization. We want our young adults to have access to the prefrontal cortex, which handles executive functioning. It’s the part of the brain that does the best thinking about the future: what do I need to do now to set myself up for success later?

Darlynn: [00:05:50] When you have access to the prefrontal cortex, you’re able to control your impulses, which means you can delay gratification. You can delay pleasure and experience some pain in order to get better results later. That’s what we hope for our teenagers, that they make good choices now so they don’t get hurt and so they can have success in the future.

Darlynn: [00:06:09] The problem is that they don’t have great access to their prefrontal cortex. A lot of their decisions are made based on feeling safe with their peers. They want to make decisions that help them with their identity and their relationships with their peers. Their priority is not physical safety, it’s social safety. Their priority isn’t future success or delaying gratification for a better result later, it’s short-term success and pleasure now.

Darlynn: [00:06:49] It’s a little like a toddler. Toddlers are very impulsive, they don’t think about the future, and they want what they want. The difference is that what your teenager wants is social success. They want to feel good in their group of friends.

Darlynn: [00:07:09] That’s why their identity around their friends, who their friends are, and their social status at school are so much more important to them than their grades. Their relationships with their peers in class matter much more than their relationship with their teacher. When your child is in elementary school, the relationship with their teacher is very important. But as they get older, they care less and less about the adults and more and more about their peers.

Darlynn: [00:07:38] I notice that parents of elementary school kids are often very focused on whether their kids have a good friend group. It is important for kids to have friends, but in elementary school their primary relationships are with their parents, siblings, and teacher. Their friends are fun, but they’re about the moment. Friends don’t create identity for them, because children aren’t working on creating identity yet.

Darlynn: [00:08:08] It’s in adolescence that your child’s developmental job is to create an identity outside of your family. They’re defining themselves against who you are in many ways, not so much your values, but as a unique individual. So they need to spend time away from their parents and siblings to figure out who they are. Family is a pretty loud voice in a child’s life, as it should be, and we want a lot of influence over our kids. But in adolescence, a kid really needs to define themselves outside of their family, and they use their peers to do it.

Darlynn: [00:08:58] Part of that involves the amygdala, the part of the brain that scans the environment for hazards. As a mom, you’re scanning for physical hazards for your kids, like cars going too fast or whether they’ve eaten lunch or gotten enough sleep. We’re very focused on whether our kids’ physical needs are being met. But in a teenager, the amygdala starts to scan for social hazards, and its perception of social danger becomes hyper-aroused.

Darlynn: [00:09:38] Their antenna is up all the time, asking: Am I accepted? Am I liked? Am I good enough, worthy, lovable? They want that feedback from their peers, and it’s so important to them. They’re hypersensitive to social signals, perceived judgment, and perceived rejection, and they’re trying to figure out what other people think of them, including you as their parent.

Darlynn: [00:10:07] Because of this bias, they’re always asking: Who am I? Am I well-liked? Am I socially successful? Even the most popular teenager, the kid with the most social success on the outside, still feels insecure because their identity itself is fragile. They don’t know who they are yet, so they can’t define themselves as great, popular, loved, liked, or successful. They’re still defining those parts of themselves.

Darlynn: [00:10:38] So even the kid who appears to be doing very well, the social butterfly or the most popular kid in school, may still worry that other kids don’t like them. That’s a big part of adolescence. When you’re worried that people don’t like you, you have your guard up. You’re protective, trying not to make social mistakes, not wanting to stand out too much, be made fun of, or be seen as lame or uncool. If all the kids are going to a party, you might think that if you don’t go, you’ll face social shame and won’t be as accepted.

Darlynn: [00:11:17] So your teenager is working through their social identity quite a bit. When they come home from school moody, dump their bag, don’t want to talk to you, go to their room, and close the door, you might feel rejected, abandoned, hurt, or worried. Your parental spidey sense might want to go find out what happened. But if you go too quickly, without allowing enough time to decompress, you approach your child while their guard is still up. Then they don’t give you information, because they don’t want to feel vulnerable.

Darlynn: [00:12:07] They don’t want you to think they’re a loser. They think they’re a loser, and they think their friends think they’re a loser. They have this negative perception of themselves, and they don’t want you to know that too.

Darlynn: [00:12:18] So we want to give them time when they come home from school to let that amygdala calm down and decompress. They need to get out of that social anxiety, stop thinking of themselves as the center of the social universe, and come back into their family home feeling safe, seen, and understood. That’s why, as the parent, you want to be neutral. Don’t be needy for your kids’ attention or for them to tell you everything that’s going on every day. They’re not ready to be vulnerable and share that information yet, especially right after school.

Darlynn: [00:12:57] There’s one more thing I want to say about coming home from school and feeling safe in your family home. It’s a beautiful gift when kids get to come home and feel like they can relax, be with their family, and be safe. We want our kids to feel that way. The problem in today’s society is that the social anxiety from school, all those conversations and all that hyper-awareness, often carries on through their devices.

Darlynn: [00:13:37] It used to be that you could come home from school and your school life would shut down for the next 12 hours until you went back. The conversations among your peers and your social fears could be quieted. But now those conversations continue in Snapchat, DMs, and comments on TikTok videos. So a lot of our kids, especially our girls, come home and don’t really get to turn off.

Darlynn: [00:14:08] They continuously manage their friendships and monitor the group chats, and that takes a massive toll on their time and energy. When your teenager doesn’t have access to their phone, notice that their social anxiety goes up, because they’re scared they won’t know what’s going on. It’s an unfortunate reality of raising a kid in a generation where phones are 24-hour life.

Darlynn: [00:14:27] The other thing that’s different is that not only do the conversations continue, the memory continues too. When most of us were in high school, something would happen, but there wasn’t a way to document everything with video, pictures, and screenshots the way kids can now. Nowadays your mistakes have a digital life that lives long past the moment. That creates more social anxiety for our teenagers, who worry that their mistakes could take on a life of their own, or that they have to keep monitoring their social identity even when they’re away from their peers. It’s a lot for our teenagers.

Darlynn: [00:15:17] So I want you to understand that what’s going on for your teenager is important to them, and their life is much more about their social life than academics. That’s hard for us as parents, because we’ve been programmed to make sure our kids do well in school so they can get into college. You go into that digital grade book, you get hyper-focused on their academics, and you come to talk to them about it, but their biggest thing is their social life. So there is a tension there.

Darlynn: [00:16:06] Their academic life is important, of course, but their social life is more important to them, and they want you to know and see that. Not that they want you to tell them how to live their lives. They want you to know they’re going through something very important that has nothing to do with a history test, their algebra homework, or a big essay that’s due. There’s a lot on their mind that they won’t necessarily tell you, because they don’t want the vulnerability or the judgment, and they’re trying to create an internal life and an identity outside of you and their family.

Darlynn: [00:16:36] So your teenager has a lot going on. That’s what I want you to understand. You also have a lot going on raising your teenager, and there’s a tension between your priorities and theirs.

Darlynn: [00:16:56] So what are some best parenting practices? The first is what I just said: understand that their social life is the most important thing to them. But I also want you to hold the perspective that the social intensity of adolescence is temporary. You don’t need to minimize or dismiss their experience by saying, “This will pass, don’t worry about it, who cares?” And especially don’t say no one will remember tomorrow, because in the digital world people do remember; they can pull up the receipts, as they say.

Darlynn: [00:17:25] We don’t want to minimize it. But this is a very important parenting practice: don’t get sucked into fear about their social struggles or even their academic struggles. The intensity of this moment is temporary. They will work through this period while their brain organizes itself and they gain more access to executive functioning, to thinking about the future, delaying gratification, controlling impulses, and caring for their own physical safety. They’re learning all of those things right now.

Darlynn: [00:18:15] You don’t have to get sucked into the intensity. You can validate it and acknowledge it for them, but you don’t have to buy into the idea that this is the way they are now and who they’re going to be.

Darlynn: [00:18:35] I like to think of adolescence as making a cake. In the preschool and elementary years, from 0 to about 13, you’re putting all the ingredients into the cake: the baking soda, the flour, the sugar. If you’re making a lemon cake, you’ve got the lemon oil, the butter, and the eggs, and you’re creaming everything together. Then in adolescence, you put that cake in the oven and wait five or six years for it to bake and find out whether it came out good.

Darlynn: [00:19:14] So you don’t want to look at your 15- or 16-year-old and think, “This is who they are now.” I want you to have the perspective that they’re in the middle of a transformation. They started out as goopy, wet ingredients, they’re in the oven now, and soon they’re going to come out as a beautiful cake. Trust that it’s going to work out.

Darlynn: [00:19:33] Then, when you have young adults, that’s when you let it cool a little, put on the frosting and decorations, and make that cake presentable and ready to launch into the world. Right now the cake is in the oven, and you don’t need to judge it yet. Their social life is important, and even their academic life is important, but it’s temporary. Don’t get wound up in the intensity of it all.

Darlynn: [00:20:03] The next parenting practice is to be open to listening to their problems without falling apart, without getting scared, overwhelmed, angry, frustrated, or worried. And don’t try to fix their problems either. Don’t come in with a rescue or a solution. Be genuinely curious and hear what happened.

Darlynn: [00:20:33] Be like a friend, or even a plant or a piece of journal paper, as neutral as a piece of paper, while they tell you the story. Maybe you ask a couple of guiding questions, like “What did you say?” or “How did that make you feel?” Or you respond with “That must have been frustrating,” “Tell me more about that,” “Wow, that sounds hard,” or “It sounds like you really took that in stride.” You’re validating their feelings and also acknowledging how well they handled the situation.

Darlynn: [00:21:03] Pick out the kernels you want them to take away, the lessons you wish you could tell them, and point out what they’ve done and how they’re growing. That’s a much better conversation than “Well, you know what you could have done,” or “This is what you should have said,” or “Here’s what I would have done.” None of that is useful.

Darlynn: [00:21:23] It can be helpful to come back later and say, “Hey, I was thinking about what happened, and I had an idea. Do you want to hear it?” Notice that there’s consent, that I’m asking whether they’d like input or feedback. If they say, “No, I’ve got it,” you say, “Yeah, you probably do. I trust you, and I’m sure you can figure it out. Come back to me if you need some guidance.” If you’re open to listening to their problems, genuinely curious, and validating, your child will feel safer and safer coming to talk through problems with you.

Darlynn: [00:22:02] The next practice I want you to think about is being available but not needy. You want to be a presence in their life. Sometimes people say to be a houseplant with teenagers, or to be available for the right five minutes. Be a presence in your home, somewhere they can reach you if they want to talk, but try not to need them to talk to you.

Darlynn: [00:22:32] Try not to use their behavior as evidence of whether you’re still close, whether they’re okay, or whether they still like you. If you’re looking at your teenager’s behavior to prove something about yourself, to yourself or to others, you’re going to be in a lot of pain. In adolescence, your teenager is going to be taking care of themselves, not you. They’re going to be self-centered and focused on their own needs, wants, desires, short-term comfort, and avoiding pain. All of those very difficult teenage behaviors are going to be present.

Darlynn: [00:23:21] That means your needs, desires, and life aren’t going to be that important to your teenager, so don’t make that mean anything. Don’t look to them for the validation you want. Your relationship is also changing: they’re going to need you less, and that’s a good thing. We want them to grow into adults who aren’t needy for their parents.

Darlynn: [00:23:51] So watch your adolescent and be okay with the fact that they’re solving their own problems and working through their own issues. They’re relying on their friends, or maybe a mentor at school, a coach, an aunt, or an older sibling they feel good talking to. Allow that relationship to change and evolve.

Darlynn: [00:24:11] You may have some grief about that. When you acknowledge that the nature of your relationship with your teenager is changing, you might feel sad, and that’s okay. Allow for those feelings. What I sometimes see is parents trying to recapture childhood, pulling the child back into an old dynamic because the parent needs that relationship.

Darlynn: [00:24:41] I’d love for you to recognize that your child’s childhood is over. You did it, and you did a great job. You have a good relationship with them, and they had a good childhood, or they didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. That part of them is no longer accessible. What we want to do is look to the future and who they’re becoming, instead of focusing on who they were and what we used to have.

Darlynn: [00:25:10] Your job now is to become the person your young adult child will choose to be in a relationship with. Right now, your child has to be in a relationship with you, because they depend on you for survival. But as they get older and depend on themselves, we want them to want a relationship with us. So we start becoming that person in adolescence: available, open, and listening, but not needy.

Darlynn: [00:25:40] One thing that happens when you’re raising teenagers is that their behavior can create a lot of anxiety in us. The self-centeredness, the impulse control issues, choosing pleasure and avoiding pain, pushing us away, shutting us out and shutting us down all create sadness, but also anxiety. We start to get scared that this is who our kid is now. We start to judge that cake and want to pull it out of the oven to fix it and change the ingredients. But you’ll ruin the cake if you take it out of the oven too early.

Darlynn: [00:26:20] If you’re managing your stress, anxiety, fear, and sadness by trying to get back control of your teenager’s behavior, through over-managing, excessive criticism, overcorrection, and lots of consequences, you’ll push your teen away at a time when they really do need your guidance and advice. Even though your child is naturally pulling away from you, you don’t want to do anything that actively pushes them away.

Darlynn: [00:26:50] Remember, they’re hardwired to treat social rejection as a genuine threat. In self-protective mode, they may stop caring about your opinion or avoid being vulnerable in front of you, because they feel you’ll be critical and reject them. If your teenager hears from you mainly when something is wrong, your voice becomes associated with criticism and the anticipation of being told they’re not good enough.

Darlynn: [00:27:20] When a person’s nervous system consistently predicts that an interaction is going to feel bad, it does the very logical thing and tries to avoid it. So your teen starts to avoid you because they’re afraid you’re going to be critical. We want to be very careful not to overcorrect and overcriticize our children out of our own fear and anxiety that they’re going to mess up their lives.

Darlynn: [00:27:49] Of course, I do want you to have rules and boundaries and to be very clear about them. Think about your curfew, where they can sleep over, what parties they can go to, what your expectations are for grades, and what privileges they get when those expectations are met. And decide what happens if they don’t get home in time for curfew. If your boundary is that they can go out on Saturday night as long as they’re home on time Friday night, and they’re not home on time Friday, then they don’t go out Saturday.

Darlynn: [00:28:20] If your rule is that they can have their phone in their room from after school through the night as long as they keep a C, B, or A average, whatever your rule is, and they don’t meet that standard, you say, “Look, I’m not going to let you have your phone in the afternoon because it seems to be a big distraction. I’m going to hold on to it until these grades come back up.” The same goes for video games, use of the car, allowance, or anything else you decide. Your boundaries are clearly communicated, and when your child experiences the consequence of not keeping that limit, you follow through.

Darlynn: [00:29:09] Expect tension. Expect your teen to be upset, annoyed, and frustrated with you, and to express that frustration with protest. Instead of monologuing and launching into a lecture like “Don’t be disrespectful, you know these grades are really important, junior year is the most important year, and you don’t care about our rules or our boundaries,” remember that none of that is helpful. The best thing to do is be neutral and communicate, “This is the boundary in this family. You didn’t keep it. Here’s the consequence.” Then let them have their feelings about it, and validate those feelings without being permissive.

Darlynn: [00:29:39] You want your kids to experience the consequences of their actions as much as possible, because that’s where they learn responsibility. So don’t be afraid to have rules in the teenage years. Don’t worry about their frustration with you or their pushback. That’s all normal and valid.

Darlynn: [00:29:58] One way to avoid being overly critical is to choose a generous and positive perspective on your child. We don’t know what the future holds, so we can pick either a negative or a positive future. You don’t know how the cake will taste while it’s in the oven, so you get to decide: “I’ve done a great job. My kid is great, and they’re going to figure this out. They’re going to get through adolescence and become a responsible, caring, loving, not super self-centered person who thrives and overcomes all these hard parts of their life.”

Darlynn: [00:30:39] Your child is also worried that they’re not good enough, that they won’t be successful, that they won’t figure it all out. If they look at you and see your fears, that’s going to be contagious. Your child may sense your negative thoughts and emotions. So instead, try to be as neutral as possible, or even move to hope.

Darlynn: [00:31:09] Hold onto the idea: “Yes, this is hard now. Our relationship is tense, but we’re going to be okay. You’re having academic troubles and social problems, but you’re going to figure them out. It’s normal and natural to pull away from your family and spend time separate from us. You’re going to figure all of this out.”

Darlynn: [00:31:18] You get to have a positive perspective on your child’s future, on yourself, on your relationship with them, and on the job you did. I’d rather you look at raising your kids and think, “I put in some really good ingredients, and I can trust that this is a good kid who’s going to figure themselves out.” It might be ugly and might not look good during the process, but we’re going to get to the other side and be stronger for it. My kid is going to be a resilient and responsible young adult. That’s the goal.

Darlynn: [00:31:59] As someone who has been through this and is on the other side of it, I can say that raising teens is really challenging. One of the most challenging times of my life was when the boys were a junior and a senior in high school, dealing with so many shenanigans, teenage issues, and frustrations. When I felt that frustration coming on, I’d get centered and spend time by myself while they were out or in their rooms. I’d make sure I was neutral and could get to that positive vision, so that when I approached them, I wouldn’t come at them with criticism first.

Darlynn: [00:32:39] I’d come with curiosity. I’d ask how they were doing and find out what was going on in their day, what was on their mind, what YouTube videos they’d been watching, and what shenanigans were going on with other kids at school. I tried to be as curious as possible before getting into any conversation about schoolwork, chores, cleaning their room, or any other kind of correction.

Darlynn: [00:33:09] I’d be careful to pause, regulate myself, and remember that my goal was to have a good relationship with them, to not make them feel criticized, and also to hold them accountable to the boundaries in our family. I’d approach them from that calm place, and I’d practice connection before talking about limits and correction.

Darlynn: [00:33:39] So I want you to know that it does get better. They are hard years, and teenagers are challenging. I’m really glad I’m not raising teenagers anymore. I really like having young adults, even though that stage has its own tensions, which I’ll talk about in next week’s episode.

Darlynn: [00:33:59] If you’re raising teens, I want to encourage you and let you know that all the feelings and frustrations you have are normal. Your teenager is normal, and you’re normal. No one’s a sociopath. Everyone’s going to be okay, you’re going to get to the other side, and all of this hard work will be worth it.

Darlynn: [00:34:09] So I hope you enjoyed this episode and learned some new things. If you want to talk with me about raising teens, you’re welcome to book a consultation on my website, calmmamacoaching.com. I’d love to talk with you. Otherwise, I hope you have a great week, and I’ll talk to you next time.