Do you feel totally disconnected from your teens? Do you feel like they’d rather do just about anything that carry on a conversation with you? Do they shut you down the minute you open your mouth? Roll their eyes? Ignore you? Make you feel like an idiot? Do you hear all this stuff about connecting with your teens and think – that’s all great but how do I actually do that when they won’t even respond to me?

Well, I’m gonna’ tell you. Stay with me.

This is Speaking of Teens, the podcast that helps parents who are struggling to find peace and connection with their teens. My name is Ann Coleman; I’m an attorney turned parent educator and a mom who has been there - and I’m on a mission to help you build a stronger relationship and decrease the conflict with your kid so you can help them grow into the young adult they’re meant to be.

Today’s episode is the first of a series on connection; what it means, why you need it, how you do it…it doesn’t get any more important than connection when talking about your teens. So, today I’m going to be brief – I’ll tell you in a minute why – I’ll tell you a little about what connection really is and why you need it and one quick tip on how to go about it.

…Aly Pain and I talked about connection in Tuesday’s episode. And we mentioned that we know parents are probably tired of hearing about how you need to connect to your teens. But as Aly pointed out, you probably think you understand what connection is but if you were raised the way most of us were – more authoritarian, controlling and punishing – do as I say sort of parenting – you actually may NOT understand what connection is or what it feels like and that may be keeping you from having the best relationship with your teen.

 

So, you can think of connection as the ingredient that keeps your teens safe and mentally healthy. It’s the foundation of your relationship, the stronger your connection, the safer they’ll feel with you. And the safer they feel, the more they’ll trust you. And the greater the trust, the more they’ll share with you about their lives. And you need them to share You need to know when they need help or advice or are worried or afraid – you want them coming to you for advice and input – or to at least imagine what you might say or want them to do in the moment.

If you don’t have this connection, they don’t have this feeling of safety and trust, they won’t care when you think, they won’t ask your opinion and they won’t want to do things that align with your values.  In short – no connection means you’re shut out. You have no influence with them. They’ll be both physically and emotionally separated from you.

Let me give you a scenario:

A group of teens decide to go to a concert an hour away from home on a Friday night. 2 of those teens are your daughter and her best friend. You and your daughter have not been doing well at all, you’ve become very disconnected, lots of consequences being doled out, a lot of defiance and lying and a lot of putting your foot down, threatening and lecturing.

They get to this concert and things get out of hand fast. Someone brought a handle of vodka, and they were passing it around in the car on the way to the concert. By the time they got there, all of them were waisted except the driver, who started poppin’ weed-infused gummies in the parking lot – now everyone’s out of it.

Your daughter’s getting really nervous, she’s not feeling so well, there are several older guys trying to get her to go party, she keeps getting separated from her best friend, and all she can hear in her head is, “If I find out you’ve been drinking again or using drugs, you’ll no longer have a phone and forget about going anywhere for months.” So, she knows there’s no way she can let you find out, much less call you for help, so she decides to hang tough and if the driver is not okay to drive back she’ll see if she can catch a ride back to town from one of the guys she met tonight.

But if you and your daughter had a strong connection, where she felt safe to come to you no matter what, where she could confide in you and trust you to be on her side (even if you had to correct her behavior after the fact), she could have called you when she knew she’d gotten in over her head, knowing you wouldn’t lecture, shame and punish her, but would help her figure out how to avoid this situation next time, how to live up to her own values and make better decisions.

Connection isn’t some pie-in-the-sky concept that parenting experts like to throw around because it makes them sound smart – it’s real and critical for you and your teen. If they don’t feel connected to you then you’ll have no influence in their life whatsoever. You can issue consequence after consequence, you can lecture and yell and plead and cry and it will be for nothing…if they don’t feel like you’re their safe place, if they don’t know that you’re going to always listen to them and hear them out and assume they’re telling the truth.

Why would they ever want to ask themselves, “What would mom or dad do?” if you don’t believe in them, if you don’t support who they are and who they want to be, if you don’t obviously enjoy and relish who they are rather than trying to mold them into who you want them to be. If you aren’t interested in them and in what they’re interested in? If all you do is nag and complain and criticize and correct?

Who could blame them for not feeling connected to someone so disconnected from them?

There are many different facets of having a strong connection with your teen but the main 3 are 1) making sure that you support rather than threaten their autonomy; 2) making sure you’re you are teaching them skills for adulthood rather than punishing them, and 3) making sure that you have more positive interactions than negative.

So, the reason this is short today is because yesterday the pipes froze and burst in our ceiling, and water rained down through all the light fixtures in the kitchen – I mean buckets upon buckets – every pot and pan available – every towel in the house. We had to turn all the water off in the house last night and although it was a real experience to have a pioneer woman bath in a bucket this morning, I am decidedly not pioneer woman material (as my husband pointed out today, we would have never discovered Missouri had it been left up to me) – and he’s right. I would have said – you guys go ahead – have fun – write when you get there.

Anyway, (I’m also not Ms. Snooty 2 shoes) so we’re roughing it at the Red Roof Inn down the street tonight and having grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. So, here’s what I want to tell you today.

Alright, starting at the end with #3 – having more positive interactions than negative. I’ve talked before about the emotional bank account and looking for small ways to connect on a daily basis and I’ll probably get more into that in the next episode. And  along those same lines, the other day when I was working on the newsletter, I was reading an article on Axis.org – a newsletter they write called the Culture Translator. I don’t even remember what it was that I read but it lead me to their podcast called The One Conversation and that’s exactly what they were talking about on that episode (and I’ll try to find it to link to it in the show notes).

Their concept is that rather than having a big sit-down discussion with your kids about sex, and another big sit down about drugs, and another about social media, that you have one long ongoing conversation about all of these things over the span of your life. And this is what everyone says – we don’t need to sit our kids down ever and say “We have to talk”  - I mean that’s a sure-fire way to shut their brains right off. They won’t hear more than 2 sentences. So, we always say, catch a break when you find one, have a quick talk in the car or on a walk, when something comes up in a movie to spark a conversation about something that can be valuable to your kid, to your connection, to teach them life skills, emotional awareness.

And what they were saying was that conversations that you want to have can also start by talking about something that interests them. By talking to them about things that they’re interested in, you buy credibility with them, you buy trust, they won’t be so likely to say “Okay Boomer” This is a way to connect – connect so you can gain influence with them at the right time.

I’ve said before to find out what their favorite YouTuber is and ask hem to watch videos with them or find out who their favorite music artist is a do a deep dive on them or look up the latest news so you can drop something in passing. Get them to teach you how to play their favorite video game.

These are conversations, they’re activities, it’s about connecting over something they’re interested in – that’s all it is.

We have to remember that just because we want to have conversations with our teens about important things – things we think matter in life – they are not going to listen to the sales pitch without a little warm up. You can’t make a cold call with your teenager – you have to get to know them, do a little entertaining, get them to relax around you, get them to buy something small maybe first, then you sell them the big shiny luxury sedan.

You don’t walk right up and say let’s take a test drive, sign here on the dotted line, right? So, think of connection as the warm up to the big sale. You’ve got to earn their earn their trust.

You do that by showing interest in their interests. As these guys said, “if it’s a big deal to your kids, it should be a big deal to you too.” This is so true. Rather than acting like the typical adult and shaking your head and telling them you just don’t get it – ACT like you get it. Fake it ‘til you make it.

And you may not actually make it – you may not ever love country music or magic tricks or football or Fortnite, but will it kill you to pretend a little? Didn’t you pretend to eat play food when they were little? Didn’t you pretend to wrestle with them or pretend to love playing Barbies or Thomas the Tank engine or Ninja Turtles or Paw Patrol or whatever it was then?

So, why are we so opposed to watching a weird cartoon show or dancing to K-pop or singling along to Taylor Swift? When we do these things we buy ourselves time with our kids. We get closer to them if just for a minute. They get to know us better and we certainly get to know them. You want to know how to connect? This is how you connect. Instead of watching the news or doing extra work or folding clothes, show an interest in what they’re doing.

You can’t possibly think that they’re going to listen to you talk about something they don’t want to listen to when you’ve never done them that courtesy. Time about is fair play. Get in there and get interested in this stuff despite your general distaste or lack of enthusiasm – we’re talking about your kid – you want them to talk to you, this is your way in! Now, go learn some K-pop.

Thank you for listening to this mini episode – I hope you got something out of it and if you did please share it with someone who needs a community of people learning more about their teens.

Come join us in the Facebook group and I’ll see you next time – remember, a little change goes a long way.