Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy:
Love Her Well, what inspired this book? And it's super heartfelt, it's really vulnerable, there's a lot of stories in here that parents can relate to so what inspired you to dig so deep and put it all down and make it public knowledge?

Kari:
It's one of those books I never planned to write. Actually go back a few years, most books are like that, I think. The story that I opened with is about a big mom fail on my part and when that actually happened, that was one of those moments that I was thinking, "I don't ever want anybody to find out about this moment."

Kari:
So, it is kind of funny that was five years ago, and it just shows how we can grow personally. It gets to a point where we realize some things about ourselves and work through some issues we have, and get to a better place and decide that we want to share our stories and help other parents. I wrote some books for teenage girls six years ago and that was my heart for a while. I wrote, just empowering girls through faith, and I started traveling around the country.

Kari:
And of course, it was their moms who were buying the books for them. I'd meet the moms and they would tell me, "Thank you for writing this book. It's like, you took the thoughts in my head and put them down on paper."

Andy:
Wow.

Kari:
"And my daughter's at an age who doesn't always listen to me. So it's good for her to hear these stories and these things from someone besides me." And the moms would then say, "Now, when are you going to write a book for us?" But I would just kind of shrug and say, "Oh, I don't know." And I never planned to write a parenting book, I think probably a lot of people who do parent, write parenting books, would say that. Because I don't consider myself an expert, but I consider myself more of a resource just because of the stories that I have from raising four daughters.

Kari:
And then also, I've spent six years traveling around the country, meeting mothers and daughters for my book with teen girls.

Andy:
Yeah.

Kari:
What really inspired this book was as my oldest daughter became a teenager, our relationship changed. We started locking horns. We went through some hard seasons, and I really had to search on how do you love a teenage daughter? And my instinct was to buy into all those negative scripts that people had told me since they were babies. "Just wait until she's a teenager, it's a nightmare. You just have to survive it." And when we started locking horns, that's what was my initial thought was like, "Oh, it's coming true."

Andy:
Yeah right.

Kari:
Those predictions. And that just really made me dig my heels in and just be firmer, and think, "I just got to show these girls who's boss." And it really caused the division in my relationship with my daughter.

Kari:
And I realized, "This is not working." And I had a lot of pride on my part that I had to work through. That I wasn't approaching her the right way. And I definitely wasn't loving her. And I knew I wasn't loving her because of how I felt when I went to bed at night. I didn't feel good about our relationship and how coldly I was treating her. So, that's the heart behind the book, how do you be a mom during the teenage years, but also love them well, and find joy and connection in the teenage years, and really finish strong. Because if you think about it, in our last years with our children at home set the stage for our long-term relationship, that's going to last longer than 18 years. And if we want to have a healthy dynamic in place for that long-term relationship, it really starts in what happens during adolescence.

Andy:
I think so. And I think it's so easy to get stuck there, in a place within a relationship where there's stubbornness or something, and neither person wants to kind of be the first one to give in. So I wonder, if you have any thoughts for parents who find themselves in a similar situation like that on how to kind of see a way through it.

Kari:
Yes. I would say it takes a lot of soul searching and humility, and just know that you're not the only one. I know nobody likes to hear that word, but...

Andy:
Was there an easy kind of way to do it without going through all that soul searching and stuff?

Kari:
No, not that I know of. For me, that's what it took. You know, after I had that... There was a breakdown moment and that's what I opened the book with. My daughter and I just had this big fight. We had been fighting for a few months. It just had built up and it was over something dumb. I don't even remember what we were finding over, but she left mad, slammed the door and I'm in... After she left and my house is quiet and then I regretted it and I regretted all these stupid fights we'd had. And I was like, "I need help." And I basically just fell to my knees and my closet. And I just admitted that this was not working. I needed a new approach in this relationship. So, I went to the gym that day and I saw a friend that I trust that has an older daughter.

Kari:
And I asked her, "How do you handle these fights with your daughters?" And she told me, she's like, "You know, we argue, you've got to circle back around. You know, go back when you're calm and you've had time to think and go circle back around.” And you know, “don't let the sun go down on your anger" Like we've always heard. So I did that, that afternoon. And I asked my daughter, I decided I'd say "Well maybe I'm doing something that's causing this division." I didn't think I was, but I thought I'd ask her. So I asked her, "I'm sorry you for our fight earlier. I don't like it. We're not getting along. I really want us to have a better relationship. Am I doing something that's causing this division between us?" And I expected her to say, "No." And she said, "Yes."

Kari:
And I think this is where a lot of parents might find themselves. And she told me, you know, she was, she had just started school as a middle schooler. And she told me that I'd just become more critical lately. And as she told me that, it felt like a punch in the gut, but I realized that she was right. And I realized that I'd been more critical of myself lately. And I had been projecting that on her and I had higher expectations on her as a new middle-schooler. And now I can look back and say, maybe I was being hard to please and that really made me take a look at myself, but I apologize.

Kari:
And this is my big message to parents is that our kids are so forgiving, even as teenagers, they can accept that we're not perfect. They know that we're not perfect because that's what causes a lot of tension. They don't believe we're perfect anymore. They see it. But when we admit our humanity, we own up to our failures. We teach them to do the same. And it just, we also teach them that that conflict resolution, but I think is so important. And then I have seen in my work with teenage girls that they have so much conflict with friends and drama and they don't know how to work through it. And that's a lot of times they just end their relationships when really they could work through certain issues if they had this conflict resolution skills.

Andy:
Wow. I think that's so positive and so difficult to do when you're in the middle of it. It's nice that what you did was kind of take some time off from it. I think that's kind of a common theme with those kinds of really emotional situations, stepping back and being able to look at it with some perspective. And it sounds like you got some good advice from a friend also, which is probably... It helps you get even more perspective. That's really cool.

Andy:
You have a collection in here of "35 ways to speak life to a teenager" and it's a bunch of different phrases and things that you could say are early on in your book in pages nine and ten. I thought a lot of these were really good so I was curious to how you came up with these, it seems to me like, you could not go wrong by saying one of these things to your teenagers every time you talked to them, how can people incorporate more of this kind of language in their conversation?

Kari:
Yes. I just think it's a lot of being intentional and looking for opportunities. And I have to say that one reason I wrote this book was because I feel like I have a lot of smart parent friends and I met a lot of great parents and sometimes they tell me, "Oh, I tell my daughter this" and so I take notes of those things.

Andy:
Wow, oh that's good.

Kari:
Yeah, and so those thoughts have played into these lists like that. It really does it. And I've learned that teenagers are already so critical of themselves and they already feel like maybe they're not pleasing their parents. So just these words that we speak, even when we're disappointed in them, I think there's a way to do it that still offers them hope and still lets them know that, "I don't like your behavior, that was a terrible choice you made but I love you and I'm going to walk beside you as you face the consequences of this mistake."

Andy:
Yeah, "I support you" and that's really cool. Making sure to just keep affirming that, you can't say that enough.

Kari:
Right. You know, one thing that my friends and I talk about is that I really feel like as moms, especially, we've got to have a safe place to vent and sometimes we don't. We've got to have our spouse or our friends or a therapist or somebody that we can just talk unfiltered, if we are angry at our child.

Kari:
If you have those safe places, then you're less likely to say something hurtful to your child. If you have a friend like, "This is what I wanted to say to my daughter but this is what I said" You know? "This is what I was tempted to say, but I bit my tongue" and I have lots of friends who are in therapy and they're counselors and all of that. And one thing that you really do hear a lot is that they're like, it breaks my heart how I hear these parents talk about their kids in front of their children. They'll say something like "She's such a brat." Or "Why can't you be like your sister, Sarah?" and it's just the things that as parents and I get it, we have these breaking points.

Kari:
Sometimes our teenagers push us to the edge. We don't know if they love us. It's hard. And our patients has found, especially in years like this. And so it's really easy to just blurt out those comments so there's hurtful words, especially if that's how we were raised or if that's what we're around, just the negativity, which a lot of us are right now. There's so much negativity, but those words... Our kids don't forget what is said to them from their parents. So I really believe that as moms we have kind of a super power. What we say to them. We're all going to mess up and that's where the apologies and the reconciliation comes in place, but also just to speak life. And it could be something as simple as, "How can I help you this week? How can I pray for you this week? Be alight. Make good choices. This is what some of your classmates are doing, but this is not who you're going to be or what you're going to do, we're going to aim higher."

Kari:
Another good one. I really... I'm big about, if they do make mistakes, how do you handle those moments? I have a friend with five teenagers and no, not crazy. And she said, her husband's big question that they're teenagers is "What will your recovery be like?'" You had this heartache or you didn't make this track team or you didn't get what you wanted or this person broke your heart but what will your recovery be? How are you going to respond to this difficult situation? And I really think that's what teenagers need. They need us as parents to just help them create a vision for their life and help them say that, "You are kind, you are strong, you are smart, you can do this." and just help them walk into what we know they can be, into that potential.

Andy:
I think that's really cool. There's so much research that we need, to let kids fail more and get out of their way and especially during the teenage years. And I think adopting that mindset of your job being to help them figure out a plan to get over it basically, is really cool because then it takes you out of the position of trying to save them from failure and puts you more in that mindset of looking for ways to help them think about their recovery. Learn those strategies.

Andy:
Another question that I had was, I really like this chapter you have on listening and empathizing, you talk about how sometimes it's really, really hard to listen to your kids and actually hear what they're saying because the thoughts in your head about what they're saying are so loud. So how do you turn those down and really listen to what's being said,

Kari:
Right? I think that we just have to be aware of what we're telling ourselves and how sometimes we make their life about us and here's an example. I have a friend and her daughter fell in love with Pepperdine out in California, like who wouldn't fall in love with Pepperdine it's an amazing...

Andy:
It's like the most beautiful place in the world.

Kari:
That's what she said. She's like, "It's impossible not to fall in love with it." She was seriously considering going to Pepperdine but we live in Alabama, that's not a quick flight and in her mind she's thinking; "You can not get to Pepperdine, that's too far away from home." And I think that's just an example of what we do sometimes as parents, rather than just giving them that space, like, "Okay, what is it that you like about this school? What is it that speaks to you? Let's help me understand" Because we can understand our children better. Even if she doesn't go to Pepperdine, you get to know more about your child. There might be another school that is closer, that's a better fit. It's closer, but it's a similar vibe and a similar fit.

Andy:
Yeah. There's something that choice is... She's making that for a reason. Tuning into the deeper reason behind that.

Kari:
And I can say having four daughters, none of them are exactly like me so it really takes the kind of thing, "Okay, well explain this to me because that would not appeal to me, but I want to know why that appeals to you." And I think that's helping them tune in to what they feel they're being led to do. That's really important for them to have that internal guidance, because that's something else you hear about teenagers now is that they're so coached and there's so many voices telling them what to do that sometimes they don't know what they want because they're just doing what everybody else wants them to do. And so helping them tuning into that inner voice and helping them trust what they feel they should be doing with their life, but also discovering like, "Okay, what can I learn about my child through this."