You Gotta Do This One Together

Ok, this one's for both my teen friends and their parents out there.

First the facts.

The chance of messing up in life is 100%

It’s an inevitability.

We all make mistakes,

We all do things that we think, looking back, ‘maybe that was not the smartest decision I’ve ever made’.

But it’s how we learn! Especially as our teen friends are growing, this is really how they learn. They learn by trial and error, and parents we learned by trial and error, and today we still learn by trial and error. So let’s keep that in mind.

Now the gritty stuff.

What happens parents….although you may not feel this, but I can tell you that it’s true….when your kids do something that didn’t turn out as planned or they’ve made a bad decision and are hurting or heartbroken and they don’t know what to do, the person they really WANT to go to is in fact… YOU.

You might be finding that your teens sometimes go somewhere else and I want to explain to you why they go somewhere else.

They go somewhere else because when they do something ‘questionable’ and it goes ‘poorly’, and they come to you for love and guidance (in that order by the way!!!!! LOVE then GUIDANCE) and you lose your mind focusing more on the fact that they made a poor decision (inevitable….remember…..from the facts) than on giving them what they really need in that moment, which is love.

This, this reaction of yours is what makes them go elsewhere. Believe me, they already know they made a mistake.

LOVE, then GUIDANCE.

Losing our minds rarely makes an impact and particularly when teens are already berating themselves.

I’m not saying we don’t need to mine for the lesson and learn from the mistake. What I am saying is for the lesson to take and the growth to happen, first they need to feel loved. That’s what we all need to grow. We need to feel the love.

The Deal.

So I want you both, parents and teens, to get together and make a little pact.

Parents, I want you to pinky swear that you are not going to lose your mind first thing when your teens tell you something that you might not want to hear.

And then teens you’re going to pinky swear that you’re going to go to your parents first, before you go to some other source, to figure out how to move forward.

The results

If you do this together you are both going to be happier.

You are going to have a stronger relationship.

You are going to know you can trust one another.

But to have this magical relationship……you both have got to be on board!