As the parent of a teenager, I think the prominent emotion many of us feel on a regular basis is FEAR. I mean and why not, right? There are so many things we can worry about if we let ourselves. There’s drugs and alcohol and vaping and social media and gun violence and mental health – the list is never-ending.

But you know what? That fear prevents us from parenting the way we should – the way that would actually allow us to have enough influence in our teen’s life to have the best chance to actually keep these things from happening.

So, how do you even know if you’re parenting based on fear? And what impact does that emotion have on the connection with your teen and their ultimate behavior? And how the heck do you turn things around if you’ve gone too far? Well, stay with me because you’re about to find out.

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’s been there - and I want 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.

When I was a teenager, my younger brother wreaked havoc on our homelife. It was horrible - I did whatever I could to stay out of the way, and avoid the constant chaos and conflict, my mother crying and screaming – I lived in a perpetual state of anxiety mixed with fury and depression.

My younger brother started smoking marijuana before getting out of middle school and by high school, he was using anything he could get his hands on. He was a drug addict until he died a few years back.

My parents were clueless, in denial, enablers, and suffered endlessly right along with him. Life was miserable for them and for me until I left home. I couldn’t stand being around him and hated him for what he did to my parents – but I also blamed my parents for not being able to control the situation.

In the back of my mind all throughout my young adult years, I thought – I’m not going to be a parent – I don’t want that heartache. And I didn’t change my mind until my early thirties.

My husband and I adopted our son at birth. And I KNEW I would never be as unaware and passive as my parents had been. I would have a totally different relationship with my son – and he’d never want to treat me the way my brother had treated them. And I wouldn’t stand for it if he did.

Fast forward a few years and I have a 16-year-old who not only has extreme anxiety and ADHD but has been diagnosed with major depression, is smoking weed like a madman, dabbling in other drugs, having uncontrollable rages at home, hanging out with people we did not want him hanging out with and getting in trouble at school and with the law.

My sweet boy (who’d always had temper tantrums) but had never been in trouble at school a day in his life, went to a private episcopal school until 9^th grade, wore khaki shorts and polo shirts every day, was a fantastic golfer, soccer player, smart as a whip, funny and polite, was, suddenly, in the back of my mind somewhere, turning into my drug-addled brother and I was not going to have it.

Smelling weed on him or cigarette smoke or getting a smartass comment, finding weed in his room, all of it sent me right back to my own adolescence – those feelings of having no control of what was going on around me, being anxious and depressed and disgusted by my brother’s behavior. How the hell did this happen to me – I was determined that it wouldn’t.

And that was the problem.

At every step, I disagreed with my husband who, in my mind, wanted to take a too lenient and touchy-feely approach.

I insisted that we had to take a hard stance, show him we were not going to let him do this, and save him from himself.

Plus, I felt judged as a parent by friends, teachers, neighbors, society…I was not only putting pressure on myself to bring him under control, but I was feeling all this external pressure as well.

The bottom line? I WAS TERRIFIED.

Based on my personal experience, my brain was telling me that I had every reason to be. This was a rerun of my brother’s life. I couldn’t let this happen to my child. I wouldn’t let him screw up his life, his opportunities for the future, his chance to go to college or have a successful and happy life. Hell no.

So, I kept on fighting my husband and staying on top of my son. I questioned and policed his every move, (who are you talking to, where are you going, why is your bedroom door shut, what was that you just put in your pocket, where’ve you been, are you telling me the truth?)

If I thought he was lying or caught him doing something wrong, I instantly confronted him, demanded answers, lectured, begged, cried, argued.

I took his computer, his phone, his I-pad, his X-box, kept him at home, restricted the people he could be around, ultimately took him out of school to homeschool him.

I once even nailed his bedroom window shut (just for a couple of hours) because he was sneaking out.

And what do you think happened? His behavior and our relationship disintegrated. For about 2 years there was never a moment’s peace. It was constant chaos. He was so angry it was frightening – we called his outbursts rages – he punched holes in walls and put his fist through every solid wood door in our house.

But at other times he’d collapse on his bedroom floor in a puddle – sobbing and frustrated and saying he wanted to do better…to feel better. Those were times I didn’t have any words. At that time in my mind I thought – if you want to do better then do better.

What I didn’t realize until he was turning 18-years old, was that he was so out of control – because I was trying so hard to control him.

Somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain I was afraid he was going to turn into my brother. I saw him running his car into the ditch – and I was overcorrecting and sending that car into head on traffic on the other side of the road.

I was so afraid and so desperate and so focused on his behavior that I was willing to do anything just to stop it. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted him to be “normal.” To be that teenager I had pictured in my head – play sports, make decent grades, have lots of friends, maybe get into a little mischief but not like this. He’d wanted to go to college...and I just felt that picture in my mind disintegrating.

It was that fear, that grief over not having the teenager I expected, of having the teenager that felt just like that one I could stand so long ago, that caused me to want nothing more than to change his behavior – to control him.

I tried to listen to him, I tried to get him to talk to me but he didn’t have the words and I didn’t know how to help. I kept feeling it was in his power to change his behavior if he just wanted to. I knew the ADHD and anxiety and even the drugs likely played a role in his out-of-control behavior, but I still felt he could stop if he just wanted to or tried hard enough – he didn’t used to be this way.

And my own anxiety caused me to be in a constant state of fight or flight, always just immediately reacting automatically to his emotional behavior with my own emotional behavior – reacting as if he was my brother and not my son – reacting as if his future was already doomed.

At that time though, I didn’t have a lot of awareness of that fear. I didn’t really acknowledge it or tie it back to my adolescence. As far as I knew, I was addressing the issue with my son’s behavior. I felt I was doing everything I could to turn his life around.

But what we didn’t know, and what none of the top-notch psychiatrists, psychologists, pediatricians, addiction specialists, and counselors told us, was the role our emotions played in his behavior.

They never explained how his brain worked or why he was acting this way – what ADHD and anxiety do to a teen’s behavior, how we needed to be more emotionally aware and regulated and how to listen to him better and how to respond. Nothing.

They let us believe he could be “magically fixed” with us (me) still thinking, feeling, and behaving the same way.

So, I’ll break it to you now, in case you haven’t figured it out yet – that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Becoming more emotionally aware, figuring out what exactly it is that you feel when you’re feeling it and then figuring out why you feel that way, is the key to the kingdom. Figure out your emotions and you will automatically be better able to regulate them, to bite your tongue when you need to, to keep your voice down, to ask politely rather than demand disrespectfully.

And, when we’re yelling or lecturing or scolding that emotion we feel deep down under that angry tirade coming out of our mouth – that emotion is fear.

Why do you get so angry or frustrated when your teen is failing English because she’s not turning in homework? Why? Why do you care if she fails English? Of course – you care because you want her to graduate from highs school on time and hopefully get into the college of her choice, graduate from college and start a career and get married, right? So, what if she doesn’t graduate, doesn’t go on to college, etc.?

So, are you really angry at her from not turning in homework or are you afraid that not turning homework will lead to a less than optimal future for her?

If your son comes home 45 minutes late from baseball practice, as you are telling him he’s grounded for a week, are you mad that he was late or are you afraid that he was up to no good or could have had a wreck?

When we’re afraid for our teens, we don’t stand in a corner and shake with fear – we lay into them about what they should have done better or instead, right? Your heart’s up in your throat, and until he walked in the door, you were almost in tears with worry but you don’t break down crying when he walks in, right? No – you’re too busy scolding him. Our fear comes out as anger.

I would even argue that if your parenting style is more authoritarian and you demand obedience from your teens, and punish them for not meeting expectations, there’s still a level of fear that plays into it. You parent that way because that’s how you were raised, it’s the only way to parent you believe to be correct. You’re afraid if you stray from that, you kids will not turn out the way they should. It’s all fear.

How do you know if you’re parenting out of fear?

Well, let me ask you a few questions:

Of course, the obvious first question is, do you worry about their future?

Do you worry that how they are right now at 13, 15, 17, is the way they will be at 25?

Do you worry how they’ll ever make it in the real world with their current attitude and traits?

Do you go through their phone, their computer, or their bedroom without having an agreement about it in advance and without them knowing?

Do you check Google classroom more than once a week?

Are you always worried that they’re lying or keeping things from you?

Do you panic if they don’t answer texts when they’re away from home?

Have you taken away all the things they love at one point over the past year and their behavior has stayed the same or gotten worse?

Have you talked to them about their behavior until you’re blue in the face?

This isn’t scientific, of course, but if you answered yes to more than a couple of these questions, I’d say you really need to examine your emotional world.

One great, easy and cheap way to do that is to start noticing and writing things down. Any time you have a thought about your teens notice it, pay attention, and write it down. Maybe your notes app where it’s safe from prying eyes but write it down.

And a lot of times, you may not even realize you’ve had a thought. Our internal chatterbox as Dr. Susan David calls it – our inner voice – is always talking to us. “I’m hungry” “What am I going to wear this morning” “I screwed that up” “What was he thinking saying that?” “I need to hurry.”

Start noticing your internal chatterbox – pay attention to your thoughts – bring them into your awareness and start paying special attention to what it says about your teens. What’s it telling you? Write it down and the circumstances that brought that thought up. What was going on when you had the thought or what had just happened?

And I want you to especially write down any time you have an emotional interaction with your teens and exactly how you felt. Download the Emotional Awareness Strategies guide that I’ll link in the show notes. There are literally lists of emotion words in that guide with definitions because it’s scientifically shown that the more specifically you can describe your negative emotions, the better you will be at regulating them. Learn to describe your emotions.

So, again, write it down. What happened? What was going on at the time? Who said what? What time of day was it – everything  you can think of.

After doing this for a week or so, go back over it and see what you wrote. Find the patterns. When did you get frustrated, angry, annoyed, etc. What was it about? Was it really anger, annoyance or frustration? What was the emotion underneath? My guess is a lot of it will be fear. Frustration because she didn’t empty the dishwasher like you asked (“Oh my God she’s never going to be able to keep a job if she can’t follow simple instructions at home.”) – that’s fear.

And that fear will cause you to make a bigger deal out of things than you should. It will cause you to make ginormous mountains out of tiny little mole hills. When you’re fearful – anxious…what comes out in your behavior is that angry exterior. You don’t know how else to manage it – what do you do with this fear that your child is not going to be okay? Is not going to succeed? That you’re not doing your job?

You lecture. You remind. You question. You yell. You snoop. You check up. You argue. You over-consequence…

And that type of behavior causes major disconnection with your teen. Because every time you do one of these things you are treating your teenager like a child, you’re threatening their autonomy and treating them disrespectfully.

And guess what sets a teenager off more than just about anything? Being treated like a child, threatening their autonomy, and treating them disrespectfully. I’ll link some other shows in the show notes so you can understand that better.

But there are certain ways to parent teens that are completely different from parenting kids. Their brain doesn’t interpret things the same way anymore. And if you don’t understand this, and know how to work with it or around it…you are in a world of trouble. Because this disconnection means that your teen is going to cut you out of the loop, not share information, they’ll find it easier to lie to you, they’ll begin to resent you, argue about everything, and do the exact opposite of what you’d want them to do – and they’ll find it impossible to ever ask you for help, because they know you’ll freak out. In short, you’ll build a great big wall between you and your teen, and they’ll be on the other side where you can’t reach them.

You can break down that wall, but it takes work. It takes emotional awareness and learning to reign in your inner voice and your unpleasant emotions so you can respond to your teens with intention rather than leaving it all up to whatever comes out of your mouth at the time.

It takes learning about how a teenager’s brain works and why it makes them act the way they do. Learning about how to support their autonomy and treat them with respect, to understand their emotions and help them understand them as well so they can manage them better. And it takes learning how to discipline through teaching rather than retribution. To discuss and negotiate and to be flexible and reasonable.

There are no short cuts. I wish there were. I’d give them to you right now. But if I’ve learned nothing else over the past 8 years, it’s that we have to do the work ourselves.

If your teen has a “problem” – you both have a problem. We can’t send our kids off to the therapist, or the hospital, or the treatment center and expect someone else to work miracles with them while we stay the same. It will not work. Nothing will change.

Do not kid yourself. No matter the issue. No matter the situation. You have to learn, you have to practice, you have to convince your kid things are different. You have to do the work.

That’s it for Speaking of Teens today, as I said, I’ll have all the links to other relevant episodes, parenting guide and more, in the show notes right through the episode description in the app you’re using right now to listen.

Thank you so very much for being here today. I can’t tell you what it means to me to know I might just be helping another parent get through what we went through a few years back. Please share this episode with other parents you think it could help and please reach out if you have questions or need more resources.

Alright, until next time, remember, a little change goes a long way.