Your teenager pulling away from you is normal, and it’s a sign their brain is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. In the teen years, your child’s job is to build an identity outside your family, and their brain is wired to care far more about social safety than physical safety or future success.

Your job is to stay calm, be available but not needy, listen without fixing, and hold clear rules without lectures. The way you handle these years is what sets up a good relationship with your young adult later.

You’ll Learn:

• Why your teen cares more about their friends than their grades (and why that’s developmentally right on track)
• Why your teen shuts down after school, and how to give them the decompression time they need
• How to listen to your teen’s problems without rescuing, fixing, or falling apart
• Why adolescence is like making a cake

Parenting teens is so, so hard. But as a mom who is now on the other side, with young adult children I have a really good relationship with, I can tell you that a lot of what makes that relationship work now came from choices I made during the teen years.

In today’s episode, I’ll help you understand what’s happening in your teen’s brain so you can give them the support they need and stay connected, even as you let go of control.

Read the full show notes here.

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Related Episodes:

• The Parenting Teens Playlist on Spotify - A curated list of Become A Calm Mama’s teen-focused episodes
• Episode 32: Adolescence & Identity
• Episode 84: Better Conversations with Teens & Tweens
• Episode 86: The Adolescent Brain

Free Resources:

Get your copy of the Stop Yelling Toolkit!

In this free guide you’ll discover:

✨ A simple tool to stop yelling once you’ve started (This one thing will get you calm.)

✨ 40 things to do instead of yelling. (You only need to pick one!)

✨ Exactly why you yell. (And how to stop yourself from starting.)

✨A script to say to your kids when you yell. (So they don't follow you around!)

Download the Stop Yelling Toolkit here

Connect With Darlynn:

• Book a complimentary session with Darlynn
• Learn about the different parenting programs at www.calmmamacoaching.com
• Follow me on Instagram @darlynnchildress for daily tips
• Rate and review the podcast on Itunes

Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlynn Childress. I'm a

life and parenting coach. And today we're going to talk about teenagers. Over

the last few weeks, I've talked a lot about managing

bedtime and mornings and screen time and

homework and dinner and all of those friction

points in a family. But most of that advice was tailored

towards parents of preschool and elementary school and maybe early

middle school. But obviously, parenting teenagers is

different. And I want to talk today about what's going on with your

teenager, where's their brain, where's their social

identity, and how can you best support your teenager.

Because the ultimate goal for all of us is to have great

relationships with our adult children. Isn't that right? And

as a parent of adult children now, I

want to share with you next week what it's been like having college-age

students, having college-age children, and what it looks like

to parent young adults and what it looks like to be in a relationship with

young adults. And I think that my relationship with my young

adults is really good. We have a lot

of mutual respect. They rely on me for social,

emotional, practical, financial support,

but they are also independent. They're also moving towards taking

over their own life and all of those natural things that should happen in these

college-age years. And I'm feeling pretty good about having young adult

children. I want to talk about what that looks like next week on the podcast.

But I realized as I was thinking about what it's like to have young adults

is that a lot of the success that I have now is

because of some of the choices I made when I was raising

teenagers. And the other day I was in my book club and

the moms in my book club all have teenagers from 1

has a freshman in college and then a sophomore in high school,

couple freshmen in high school, and one little middle schooler still left

in the group. And they were all talking about how stressful parenting teens is.

And I absolutely agree, parenting teens is so, so

hard. And as I was thinking about when they

were talking and sharing, I realized that all those things that you go through in

the teen years, that slow separation that your teen

pulls away from you and that tension that you have

between what you want, which is to keep them physically

safe and help them long-term have success, and what

they want, which is to develop independently from you,

to have short-term pleasure and to have social success,

right? They wanna be socially safe. That tension that you

go through from age like 14 to 18,

roughly, basically the high school years, is what sets you

up for the college years or the young adult years,

where during the young adult years you have very little

control over their physical safety, and

they are completely in control of how they live their life, what

they eat, where they sleep, when they sleep, how they use their phones, how

they use devices, their social interactions. Essentially every

part of their life is theirs except for you

controlling probably the money, right? That's kind of the last frontier of

helping them become independent is giving them access to their whole

life, which is their financial freedom as well. So as I started to think

about my life with young adults, I

realized that so much of what I learned as parenting

teens set me up for having a good relationship with my young adults.

And I was saying that to my book club friends. I was like, you know

what, all the things you're going through are totally normal. This is a very

challenging, tense time where your

interests and your teenager's interests don't align. Their

brain is going through a massive reorg. And

there are some things that you can do during this time, which is like slowly

letting your teenager go a little bit and letting them make mistakes and

letting them flounder and being the support that they need

is preparing you for those young adult years. So I

thought it'd be useful to talk about what was going on with your teens. And

what's going on with their brain, what's going on with their social identity, and then

give you some of those best practices. So if you have a teenager, this

episode is for you. And I also just want to say my heart

goes out to you because it's, it's like so

challenging when you have a teenager because you really are

letting go of a lot of control. And a lot of our

identity as moms is making sure our kids

Are well taken care of, right? That they eat well and sleep well and

screen time rules and make sure they have good grades and that

they're safe. And you know all their friends and you know all the parents and

you've done all these things in the past that you had a lot of control

over how your child spent their time. And the more

independence they get, the less control you have. And that's very

scary. And it feels very sad. And

there's—it's okay to feel those ways. It's okay to feel stressed

and overwhelmed and and scared, and

you don't want to dump those feelings onto your teenager. So let's

talk about what is going on with your teen. The first thing that's

going on is that their brain is doing a massive reorganization,

and we want our young adults to have

access to prefrontal cortex, right? Which is exactly. Executive functioning, the

part of the brain that does the best thinking about the

future. What do I need to do now

in order to set myself up for success in the future? When

you have access to prefrontal cortex, you're able to control your

impulses, which means you can delay gratification in the short term.

You can delay pleasure and experience some

pain in order to get better results later.

And that's what we hope for our teenagers, right? That they make good choices now

so they don't get hurt, so that they can have success in the future. The

problem is that they don't have great access

to their prefrontal cortex. A lot of their decisions

are being made based on the feeling of

safety with their peers. They want to make

decisions that help them get better

results in terms of their identity and their relationship to

their peers. Their priority is not physical

safety, it's social safety. Their priority isn't

future success, it's short-term success. Their

priority isn't to delay gratification

for a better result later. Their priority is to have pleasure

now. And it's kind of like how a toddler is a little

bit, right? They are, you know, very impulsive and they

don't think about the future and they want what they want. And the difference is

that with your teenager, what they want is social success.

They want to feel good in their group of friends. That's

why their identity around their friends and who their friends

are and their social status at school is so much more important to

them than their grades. The relationships they have in their

classes with their peers is so much more important to them than

their relationship with their teacher. When you have a child in elementary school,

the relationship to their teacher is very, very important. But as they get

older, they care less and less about the adults and more and more

about their peers. I noticed this with parents of elementary school

kids is they're always very focused on whether the kids have a good friend

group. And it is important. It's important that kids have friends,

but kids in elementary school, their primary

relationships are their parents, their siblings, and their teacher.

Their friends are fun, but they're about the

moment for them. They don't create identity for them because

children aren't working on creating identity. It's in adolescence

where your child's job, their developmental job, is to

create an identity. Outside of your

family. They're defining themselves

against who you are in many ways, not

your values so much, but as a person

who is a unique individual. So they need to spend

time away from their family and away from their parents and

away from their siblings in order to figure out who they are.

Family's a pretty loud voice in a child's life, as it should

be. We wanna have a lot of influence. over our kids. But at the same

time, in adolescence, a kid really needs to then define themselves

outside of their family, and they use their peers to define

themselves. Part of that means that

their amygdala, which is the part of the brain that

scans for hazards in the environment, in the

world— if you're a mom, you're scanning for

physical hazards for your kids, right? cars going

fast or, you know, whether they have eaten their lunch or

whether they're going to sleep or not, right? We're very focused on whether

our kids' physical needs are being met. But as a teenager,

the amygdala starts to scan for social

hazards. Its perception of

social danger becomes activated,

hyper-aroused. Their antenna is up all the

time looking around. Am I accepted? Am I liked? Am I

good enough? worthy? Am I lovable? They are

wanting that feedback from their peers. It's so important

to them. And they are looking, they're

hypersensitive to those social signals and the

perceived judgment, perceived rejection, and

trying to figure out what other people think of them, including you as

their parent. So because they have this sort of bias,

right? Who am I? Am I well-liked? Am I socially

successful? Even the most popular teenager

and the kid with the most social success on the outside

still feels insecure because the identity itself is

fragile. They don't know who they are yet, so they can't define

themselves as being great, as being popular, as being

loved, as being liked, as being successful. They're still

defining those parts of themselves. And so even

someone who who appears to be doing very well, like you know

the. Social butterfly and this, you know, the most popular kid in the

school and whatever, that kid may still be worrying that

other kids don't like them. So that's a big part of adolescence.

And when you are worried that people don't

like you, you have your guard up, right? You're protective. You are

making sure that you're trying, you know, you're trying not to make social mistakes. You

maybe you don't want to stand out too much, or you don't want to be

made fun of, or you don't want to be perceived as As lame or

uncool, right? Or, you know, all these kids are going to this party and you

might, you might think, oh, if I don't go to that party, then I'm going

to have social shame or social problems. I won't be as

successful. I won't be as accepted. So your teenager is

really working through their social identity quite a

bit. And when they come home from school and

they are moody and they dump their bag and they don't want to talk to

you and they go to their room and they close the door, you

might feel rejected. You might feel abandoned. You might feel

hurt. You might feel worried. And your spidey sense of

motherhood or fatherhood might want to go and find out what

happened, what's going on. And you go too quick.

You don't allow enough time for decompression and you approach your child while

their guard is still really up. And then they don't give

you the information because they don't want to feel vulnerable. They don't want to think

you think That they're a loser. They think they're a loser. They

think that their friends think they're a loser. They have this negative perception of

themselves and they don't want you to also know that.

So we want to give them time when they come home from school to let

that amygdala calm down, to decompress, to

get out of that social anxiety, to stop

thinking of themselves as the center of the social universe and come back

into their family home And feel safe and seen and

understood. That's why for you as the parent, one of the things you want to

do is be neutral. Don't be needy for your kids'

attention. Don't be needy for them to tell you everything that's going on

every day because they, they don't want to feel vulnerable

yet. They're not ready to share that information, especially when they

come home from school. There's one thing I want to say about the idea

of coming home from school, coming back into your family home and

feeling safe in your family home. It's a beautiful gift. That

kids have when they get to come home and feel

like, ah, I get to relax. I get to be in my family. I get

to be safe here. We want our kids to feel that way. The

problem in today's society is that the

social anxiety that it happens at

school, all those social conversations and all that hyper-awareness

often carries on in their device. Mm-hmm. So it

used to be where you could come home from school and all

your school life would be closed down for the next 12 hours

till you went back to school. All of the conversations that would

happen amongst your peers and the social fears that you

would have could be quieted. But now those

conversations continue in Snapchat conversations

and DMs and comments on different TikTok

videos and things like that that are happening. And so a lot of our kids,

especially our girls, they come home and they don't really get

to turn off. They continuously manage their friendships and

monitor the group chats, and that just takes a massive toll

on their time and their energy. And so when your teenager doesn't have

access to their phone, just notice their social anxiety kind of goes up because they

feel scared that they're not able to know what's going on. Just an

unfortunate reality of having a kid,

having raising a kid in a generation where phones are

24-hour life. The other thing that's different about it, not only is

the conversations continue, but the memory can continue.

So when I was in high school, or maybe most of you were in high

school, you would have something happen, but there wasn't a

way to document everything that happened. There wasn't a way to take video and

pictures and screenshots and all of these things that have—

that kids can access to now. And so your mistakes have

a digital life that lives long past the moment

nowadays. So it just creates more anxiety for our

teenagers, more social anxiety, thinking that their

mistakes can live long beyond— like could live

past them, like a lifetime of their own, or that they have to

continuously monitor their social identity even when they're away from their

social peer group. It's a lot for our teenagers. So I just wanted to help

you understand that what's going on for your teenager

is important for them and their life is

so much more about the social life than it is about the

academics, which is hard for us as parents because

we've been really programmed to make sure that our kids do well in

school so that they can get to college. When you go into that digital

grade book and you get to look at what your kids have done and

you're hyper-focused focused on their academics, and you

come to talk to them about their academics, and their biggest thing is their

social life. So there is a tension there. Their

academic life is important, of course, but their social life is more

important, and they want you to know that and see that. Not that they want

you to tell them how to live their lives, but they want you to

know that they are going through something very

important to them that has nothing to do with history

test, that has nothing to do with their algebra

homework, that has nothing to do with some big

essay that's due. There's a lot of other things on their mind that

they're not necessarily gonna tell you because they don't want that

vulnerability, they don't want that judgment, and they're trying to

create an internal life, an identity outside of you and their

family. So your teenager has a lot going on. That's

kind of what I want you to understand. And you also

have a lot going on raising your teenager, and there's a tension

between your priorities and your teenager's priorities. So

what are some best parenting practices? One is that thing that I just

said, understanding that their social life is the most important thing

to them. But I also want you to hold the perspective

That their social— the social intensity

of adolescence is temporary. You don't need to

minimize or dismiss their experience by saying, this

will pass, don't worry about it, you know, who cares? Especially if

you're like, no one will remember tomorrow, which is not true because in the digital

world people remember. They have evidence. They can pull up the receipts,

as they say. We don't want to minimize it. But what I want

for you This is very important as a

parenting practice, is to not get sucked

up into the fear of their

social struggle or even their academic struggle,

that the intensity of this moment is

temporary, that they will work through this

time period where their brain is organizing itself,

where they're getting more and more access to executive functioning. more

access to the future, to what it means to delay

gratification, to control impulses,

to care for their own physical safety. All of those things that they're learning

right now are happening. And you don't have to get

so sucked into the intensity.

You can validate that intensity and

acknowledge that for them, but you don't have to buy into

this is the way they are now, this is who they're gonna be. And

I like to think of adolescence as making a cake. I

think of it like in, you know, the preschool, elementary

school years, like 0 to 13, you are putting all the

ingredients into this cake and you're gathering the baking

soda and you're putting some flour and some sugar. And if you're

making like a lemon cake, you got the lemon oil and you got the

butter and you got the eggs and you're creaming everything, right? You're making a cake.

And then in adolescence, you put that cake in the oven and you

wait for it to bake. 5, 6 years that they're in

adolescence to determine whether they're cooked or not

and like whether they came out good. So you don't want to look at your

15 or 16-year-old and be like, oh, this is who they are now.

I want you to have the perspective that they're in the middle of a

transformation. They started out as goopy, Wet

ingredients, and now they're in the oven, and soon they're going to come out in

a— as a beautiful cake. And I want you to have that perspective that they're

going to work out, it's going to work out. And then when you have your

young adults, that's when you let it cool a little bit and you put on

the frosting, you put some decorations on it, and you make that

cake presentable and ready to launch into the world. So

right now the cake is in the oven. And you do not

need to judge it yet. So in this process,

right, I don't want you to— I want you to understand that everything, their social

life is important, even their academic life is important, but it's

temporary. Don't get wound up in the intensity of it all. Okay.

The next parenting practice is that I want you to be open to listening to

their problems without falling apart, without, like I said,

getting scared or overwhelmed or angry or frustrated or worried or whatever it is.

And not trying to fix their problems either. Don't come in with a

rescue. Don't come in with a solution. Be curious. Be

genuinely curious. Hear what happened. Be like a,

like a friend or even like a plant or

a journal piece of paper, right? As neutral as a piece of paper.

And they're just telling you the story. And maybe you ask a couple guiding questions

and then what did you say? Oh, how'd that make you feel? Oh, that must've

been frustrating. Tell me more about that. Wow, that sounds hard. Oh, it sounds

like you really took that in stride. And maybe you

are validating their feelings and also acknowledging how they did

well in that circumstance. Pick the kernels of the things

that you want them to take away, the learning lessons that you wish

you could tell them and point out what they

have done and how they're growing. That is such a

better conversation than to go, oh, well, you know what you could have done, or

this is what you should have said, or here's what I would have done. Or

any of that isn't useful. So being— it can be helpful

later if you want to come back and say, hey, I was thinking about what

happened. I wondered if you wanted any feedback. I was thinking about what happened and

I was thinking I had an idea. Do you want to hear it? But notice

that there's consent, that I'm asking— I'm asking them if they'd like to

get that input, if they'd like to get that feedback. And if

they say, no, I've got it, you go, yeah, you probably do. I trust you.

I'm sure you can figure it out. Yeah, that makes sense. Come back to me

if you need some guidance. If you are open to listening

to their problems, you're genuinely curious, you're validating,

your child will then feel safer and safer to come talk,

talk through problems with you. The

next practice I want you to think about is

being available but not needy. Okay, so we

want you to be a presence in their life. Like sometimes they

say like be a houseplant with teenagers or

be available for the right 5 minutes. It's like

you wanna be a presence in your home and be available and

in an area where they can access you if they wanna talk to you,

but try not to need them to talk

to you. Try not to use their

behavior as evidence of whether you're still close,

whether they're okay, whether or not they

like you still. That if you're looking at your

teenager's behavior to prove something about yourself

to you or to others, you're going to be in a

lot of pain because your teenager is going to be

taking care of themselves. in their adolescence, they're not going to be taking

care of you and they're going to be self-centered and they're going to be focused

on their own needs and wants and desires and

short-term comfort and avoiding pain and all of those

very difficult teenage behaviors. Those are going to be

present. And that means that your needs and

your desires and your world and your life aren't going to be that

important to your teenager. So don't make that mean anything. Don't

look for them to give you the

validation that you are looking for. Also, your

relationship to them is changing where they are going to need you less,

and that's a good thing. We want to have adults that

grow up that aren't needy for their parents. That's what we want.

So watching adolescents and being okay with the fact that they're

solving their own problems, that they're working through their own issues, that they're relying

on their friends, that they are maybe even have a mentor or

someone at school or a coach that they feel really good about talking to,

or their aunt or somebody else, or maybe an older sibling.

Allow that relationship to change and evolve.

Now you're going to maybe have some grief about that. So

when you acknowledge that the nature of your relationship with

your teenager is changing, You might feel sad and

allow for that, for those feelings. What sometimes I

see is that parents will try to go back and like recapture

childhood and pull the child back into

some dynamic because the parent needs that relationship.

I would love for you to recognize that the child,

that your child's childhood is over. You did it. You

did a great job. You have a good relationship with them. They had a good

childhood. Sure, whatever. Or they didn't. It doesn't matter. That part of them is no

longer accessible. What we want to be doing is looking at the future,

who they're becoming. So instead of focusing on who they were and what

we used to have, focus on who they're becoming and

what's next. Your job now is to become the person

that your young adult child will choose to be in a relationship.

Right now, your child has to be in a relationship with you because they have—

they depend on you for their survival. But as they get

older and they depend on themselves, we want them to wanna have a

relationship with us. So we start to become that person in

adolescence where we're good, we're not needy for you, but we're

available for you. So we're available, we're open, we're listening,

but we're not needy. One thing that happens when you're raising teenagers is that their

behavior, all those behaviors I said, like self-centered and

impulse control issues and not delaying gratification

and choosing pleasure and avoiding pain and all these behaviors, right?

Pushing us away, shutting us out, shutting us down.

All of this stuff that happens with teenagers can create

a lot of anxiety within us. So it creates sadness, but it also

creates anxiety. We start to get scared that this is who our kid is now,

right? We start to judge that cake. We want to pull it out of the

oven and, you know, try to like re— and re-fix it and like

change the ingredients and stuff like that. You'll ruin the cake if you take it

out of the oven too early. So instead of trying to get back control

and over-managing them, excessively criticizing them,

doing a lot of overcorrection, a lot of consequences, if you,

if you are managing your stress and your anxiety and your fear and

your sadness by trying to control your teenager's behavior,

you will push your teen away at a time when they really

do need your guidance and advice. Even though your child

is naturally pulling away from you, you don't want to do anything that

actively pushes them away. Remember, they are hardwired

to treat social rejection as a genuine threat, and so in their

self-protective mode, they may stop caring about your opinion, or

they may not want to be vulnerable in front of you because they

feel that you are going to be critical and reject them. If your

teenager hears from you primarily when something is wrong, then

your voice becomes associated with criticism and the

anticipation of being told that they're not doing good enough. And

when a person's nervous system consistently predicts

that an interaction is going to feel bad, it does the very logical

thing of trying to avoid that interaction. So it starts to try to

avoid you because they are afraid that you're going to be critical of

them. So we want to be very careful that we aren't

overly correcting and overly criticizing our children

because of our own fear and anxiety that they are

gonna mess up their lives. Now, of course, I do want you

to have rules and boundaries and be very clear about your

rules. So you do need to think about what your curfew is and where they

can sleep over and what parties they can go to and what your

expectations are for grades and what privileges they can have when

those expectations are met. So what happens if they don't get home in time

for curfew? If your boundary is that you're welcome to go out

on Saturday night as long as you're home on time on Friday night. If they're

not home on time on Friday night, then you have them not go

out on Saturday. If your rule is that they can have their phone in their

room from after school to through the night as long as they

have a C average or B average or an A average or whatever your

rules are, then if they don't meet that standard, you say,

look, I'm not going to let you have your phone in the afternoon because it

seems to be a big distraction. I'm going to hold on to it until these

grades get back up. Or same with video games or use of the

car or allowance or anything that you decide

you have, your boundaries are clearly communicated. And

then when your child experiences the consequence of

their lack of respecting that boundary or keeping that limit,

you'll follow through with your consequence and expect tension.

Expect your kids to be upset, expect your teen to be annoyed with you

and Frustrated and express that frustration with

protest and things like that. Instead of monologuing and

starting to go into a lecture and saying, don't be disrespectful, you know that these

grades are really important and your junior year is the most important year and you're

over here not even showing respect and you don't care about our rules and you

don't care about our boundaries. None of that is important. The best

thing to do is be neutral, to communicate, hey, this is the boundary in

this family. You didn't keep it. Here's the consequence, and then let them

have their feelings about it. Validate those feelings without being

permissive. You want your kids to experience the consequences

of their actions as much as possible because that's where learning

responsibility happens. So don't be afraid about having

rules in the teenage years. Don't worry about their frustration

with you and their pushback or any of that. That's all

normal and valid. One way to avoid being

overly critical is by choosing a generous and positive

perspective on your child. We don't know what the future

holds, so we can pick either a negative future or a positive

future. You don't know how that cake is going to taste while it's in

the oven, so you get to decide, I have done a great

job, my kid is great, they're going to figure this out, they're going to overcome

adolescence, they're going to become a responsible,

caring, loving, not super self-centered person,

they're going to thrive and overcome all of these

hard parts in their lives. Your child is

also worried that they're not good enough, that they're not going to be successful, that

they're not going to figure it all out. And if they look at you and

then that's your perspective and your fears, that's going to be contagious.

Your negative thoughts might be contagious. And your child might

sense your negative emotion. And so instead of having that

negative emotion, try to be as neutral as possible or even move to

hope and have an idea of, yes, this is hard now.

Our relationship is tense, but we're going to be okay. You're

having academic troubles, but you're going to figure them out. You're having

social problems, but you're going to figure this out. It's normal and natural

to pull away from your family and to spend time separate from us. That

makes sense. You're going to figure all of this out. You get to have

a positive perspective on your child's future

and on yourself and your relationship with them and on the job you

did. I would rather you look at raising your kids

and being like, yeah, I put in some really good ingredients and I can

trust that this is a good kid and they're going to figure themselves

out. And it might be ugly and it might not look good as it As

it— as the process goes through, as we go through this process, but we're going

to get to the other side and we're going to be stronger for it. And

my kid is going to be a resilient and responsible

young adult. That's the goal. As someone who has been

through this and is on the other side of it, I can say

that raising teens is really challenging. For sure, one of my

most challenging years of my life was when the boys were

a junior and senior in high school and just dealing with so many

different shenanigans and teenage issues

and frustrations that I experienced. And as I

would feel that frustration come on, I'd get centered. I'd

spend that time by myself because they were out and about or in their rooms.

I would make sure I was neutral, that I could get to that positive vision,

that when I approached them, I would not come at them with

criticism first. I would come with curiosity, ask them how

they were doing, find out what was going on in their day, what was on

their mind, what kind of YouTube videos they'd been watching recently,

what kind of shenanigans were going on with other kids at school. I tried

to be as curious as possible before I went into any

sort of conversation about whether they were doing their

schoolwork or whether they were, you know, doing their chores or cleaning

their room or any of those other kind of correction types

of conversations that I would want to have with them, I'd be

careful to pause, regulate

myself, recognize my goal was to have a good relationship with

them, to not make them feel criticized, and

also hold them accountable to the boundaries in our family. And I would

approach them from that calm place, and then I

would practice connection before I would talk about limits and correction.

So I wanted you to know that it does get better.

They are hard years. Teenagers are challenging. I'm really glad I'm

not raising teenagers anymore. I really like having young adults, even

though it has its own types of tensions, which I'll talk about

in next week's episode. I do want to give you encouragement if you're

raising teens and let you know all the feelings you have are normal. All the

frustrations you have are normal. Your teenager is normal. You're normal. No

one's a sociopath. Everyone's going to be okay. and you're gonna get to the other

side and all of this hard work will be worth it. So I hope you

enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned some new things. If you wanna talk

to me about raising teens, you're welcome to book a consultation with me on my

website, calmmamacoaching.com. I'd love to

talk with you. And otherwise, I hope you have a great week and I will

talk to you next time.