21 Keys to Sanity While Stewarding Teens

Jun 4, 2022 | Blog

21 KEYS TO SANITY WHILE STEWARDING TEENS

1. We are rewarded in our willingness to endure difficult, painful, and even messy conversations with our teens, in which complexity, triggers, and tears might arise, on both sides.

2. It’s never about perfect. It’s about stretching into this new, vulnerable territory, wherein the unfathomable profundity of our love gets to include what’s utterly confronting and maddening about the ways our teenagers test, trigger, and call us out.

3. It’s OK to allow the conversations to end badly sometimes, failing to come to perfect, tidy endings. If we can give it the necessary space, this allows the conversations to authentically circle back around for further resolution and evolution.

4. We can trust love enough to let love carry us through this difficult moment/phase/season. We can trust love enough to hang out in the discomfort and pain of lack of resolution together.

5. When we give our teenagers the space to self-reflect, this allows their own choices and behaviors to echo in the chamber of their awareness.

6. We can be ever waiting, with open ears, minds, and hearts, to join in a fresh moment of meeting our teenagers anew.

7. We can stay open to being surprised by how our teenagers show up! We can remember that teens are in a moment of accelerated evolution. We can be careful to not project the disappointment from past exchanges onto the ever-changing present.

8. Sometimes our spacious silence (not to be confused with punitive love-withdrawal, bypass, passive-aggression, or conflict-avoidance) speaks louder than a reactive response.

9. It’s useful to be the more mature and generous one in the relationship! (Duh, I realize, but this can be embarrassingly hard sometimes when our own inner teen is reeling in the face of our outer teen’s behavior.)

10. We can lead the way towards resolution, even while still feeling hurt and upset. We can be the one who takes the conversation and relationship deeper into mutual trust, empathy, and understanding.

11. We must resist the temptation of taking our teenagers’ behavior personally!

Gosh, that’s such a big one. (Easier said than done, right?) I remember when my older child first entered adolescence, a brilliant therapist I was working with said: “You cannot take the behavior of your teenagers personally. It’s their job to test, trigger, and push you away as they discover their distinct selves. They will be awful. They will lie and say and do terrible things to protect their dignity as sovereign beings. And your job is to remember that it’s not personal.”

I confess it wasn’t until my second-born recently entered his unique exploration of adolescence that this teaching has really become relevant for me. Each child is uniquely designed to challenge us in distinct ways as they individuate and differentiate.

12. Cherish chauffeuring them around. Knowing that this exhausting, tedious, sometimes agitating, yet inherently fleeting stage of parenting is over in an instant.

Before long they’re driving themselves, and we are likely missing the intimacy of that time with them.

13. May we never lose sight of the deepest truth of who our children are. It’s powerful also to reassure them of this, continuously.

Sometimes when a relational dynamic has been particularly challenging with one of my kids, I’ll make a point of saying out loud to them, “I see you and I believe in you. I think you’re absolutely amazing. I respect you deeply. Even when things are hard between us, I never forget who you are or how much I love you. It’s virtually impossible.”

14. May we find the courage to surrender our children to their own destinies. (My heart aches to write that last sentence.)

It’s so vulnerable as parents to let our kids live their own lives, to make mistakes, and learn difficult lessons. We’ve been fiercely devoted to keeping them safe and protecting them from harm their whole lives and this primal instinct runs deep. It’s mammalian.

So it can feel excruciatingly counter-instinctual to let our kids go, and to trust them with their own lives, and to trust Life with them!

This is a tightrope of continuous discernment of course; an ongoing navigation of paying close attention, setting limits, guiding them, while also listening to their souls, and stretching to let them explore and experience new levels of independence. As scary as this can feel, we must allow them to discover their own authentic discernment through the feedback they receive from life.

15. It’s humbling to recognize we can’t always know what lessons or tests our kids require in order to attend to their own soul assignments.

16. When we make mistakes with our kids, we can truly apologize. We can model self-reflection and healthy remorse, self-accountability, self-responsibility, self-compassion, and self-forgiveness.

We can validate their emotional intelligence and experience around where we, as their parents, are off, thereby supporting their capacity to track relational nuance and to discover their own boundaries.

17. As we track our own growing edges, limitations, and failures in parenting, we can humbly expose and own this seeing, naming our commitment to do better.

We can let our kids in on our vulnerable insights, intentions, and prayers, which can encourage them to notice what their own insights, intentions, and prayers might be.

18. It’s essential to feel what we feel! When our dynamic with our teens makes us feel broken-hearted or sad or mad or scared or futile, we can face and feel those things directly.

19. What a gift to receive the mirror our kids provide. We can realize this is our work to do, and give humble thanks for the way our teenagers reflection is serving our deepening self-awareness.

We can let this relational growing edge with our child be a mirror for our own spiritual growing edge!

20. We can let our teens be our teachers, guiding us towards ever-more-skillful relating.

21. In our willingness to be fully human alongside our teens, we reveal the ways in which our humanness, in all its tender vulnerability, is part of the holy mess we get to reckon with.

✨🌟✨

PS: We will be discussing all of these and more in my upcoming low-ticket, 3-Part Webinar Series, entitled: “Gleaning The Treasure in Parenting Teens”. Part 1: Meeting the Trigger & Receiving the Mirror. Part 2: Modeling Humanness & Self-love. Part 3: Tracking, Vulnerability, & Surrender.

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE

I’ll be offering a similar one for parents of younger children later this month as well! LEARN MORE HERE

 

Facebook Comments

More Blog Posts

Dream Prayer: Loving The Thief

Heading into prayer space this weekend. So deeply grateful to have the chance to gather with kindreds around the flame and sit with what is churning in our hearts, and in the great heart of our world in these tender, troubling times.I had a potent dream a couple of nights ago that I am still working with deeply. The dream was about my car (a common symbol for me) getting stolen by an irreverent, narcissistic, nonchalant and arrogant drug-lord thief! I tried everything to get the thief to give m […]

Birthing A Star

This morning as I lay in my bed in the dark, gently transitioning into the new day, I saw the light pouring out through the crack of Ezra’s bedroom door, which shares a wall with my own bedroom.

I stretched my ears to listen to the most marvelous sound~ a sound that is deeply familiar to me by now~ of him […]

My Grandmother, The Queen

My beloved Grandmother, my mother’s mother, Dorothy Dannenbaum Rudolph, fondly known by us all as “Dede,” passed on from this world late last night at the seasoned age of 94.

She died in the comfort of her own home, in her own bed, with her two loving daughters by her side. She had been […]

“Come In”

Tonight I go to tuck Ezra (7.5) into bed, and there’s a little handwritten note taped to his door that says: “Come in.”
I walk into his room and find him already in his bed, lying there quietly in the dark, waiting for me.
He asks, somberly: “Did you see the note?”
I say: “Yes, I did!”
He says, still serious in tone: “So that’s why you came in?”
I chuckle a little and say: “Yes, that’s why I came in.”
He asks: “Did you see the *first* note I put on my door?”
I say: “No I didn’t. What did it say?”
He responds: “It said: ‘Do not come in.’”
I say with surprise: […]

Mother

For Mother’s Day today I wrote to my mother:

“My dear, beautiful, amazing Mom!!

Happy Mother’s day!! I love you so much. What a lucky life I live with you as my mother!! 

If you knew all the moments my heart beats with sheer gratitude for who you are, and how you show up in this world, and in my life specifically, along with the […]

Retrograde Mama Morning

This morning was one of those mornings where it was quite clear that all the retrograde planets were colliding and exploding in my very home! Ezra’s alarm didn’t go off at 6 am as he was expecting it to, disrupting his cherished self-made morning rhythm of showering and playing early, before Arayla and I rise, so he can claim his 7-year-old space and his center.

And so I woke […]

The Thankless Job~ & How It Invites Us To BE The Thanks

I remember one time, when my kids were much smaller, maybe 5 and 2 years old, we had just gotten over a horrendous family stomach flu. You know the kind~ where just like dominos, everyone goes down? One by one, everyone is violently, grossly sick, all over the house. And then, after scrubbing the bathrooms and doing 15 loads of laundry and taking care of everyone for days, finally the Mom gets it too?

I distinctly remember speaking to my dear mother at the time over […]

​Sandcastle Lessons for Tenacity, Generosity and Surrender!

Enjoying a glorious beach day yesterday in Point Reyes with the children and our beautiful puppy, I had the luxury of just sitting there, quietly, soaking in the abundance of beauty~ while witnessing them all playing in the sand together, my gorgeous beach-loving little ones.

Towards the end of our time I noticed the kids were intently focused on building a sandcastle together, but […]

A Birthing Day

Last night I curled up with my beloved girl at bedtime, on her 11th birthday eve, stroking her long, auburn hair, massaging her sweet golden shoulders. I snuggled in to tell her, lingeringly, in annual ritual fashion, the glorious and epic story of her body’s birth...

Unconditional

Several weeks ago, one night at bedtime, my son Ezra (7) got overly exhausted and intensely triggered, and in his fury he yelled at me, viciously: “You aren’t even my MOM!!” And then, fuming, spitting, he said: “You are such a fucking!!”

I felt astonishingly calm in the face of his foul-mouthed rage. In fact, I found myself […]