I remember the first time I let my oldest child drive the car alone. He had just passed his driver’s test a few days earlier, and I was in a jam. I had stuff I needed to get done, and my kids needed to get to and from swim team. Since it wasn’t very close, it would have eaten up an hour and a half or more of my afternoon. So, I decided to let him take himself and all the kids in the car. I reminded him of all the safety precautions and sent him off with every single one of my children inside that car. And then the fear hit me. What if he gets in a crash and I lose my entire family? Why did I let him go? He isn’t ready for this. What if the little kids are too loud and they distract him and he runs into someone? I checked the GPS to track his phone the whole way to swim team and again the whole way home just to make sure everything was ok. And yet, here I was, in the safety of my house, with no indication that anything would or had gone wrong. He had completed Drivers’ Ed and done all of his hours, he was a responsible driver and not the kind of kid to get distracted or over-confident or be reckless. I was stressed and filled with fear for no good reason. I have never felt so relieved as I did when I heard the car pull in the driveway without a scratch and saw those 6 children come walking through my door completely unharmed. Fear is an important emotion for us as humans, and one of the main reasons we still exist today as a species. Fear keeps us safe when there is imminent danger. Fear happens in our lower brain – our amygdala – and kicks our body into fight, flight or freeze mode. It causes us to take action to protect ourselves without having to reason or debate what we should do. But the reality of life for most of us living in 2022, is that we don’t experience a whole lot of imminent danger, at least not physical danger. Brains don’t differentiate though, between physical danger and emotional danger. Your brain sees the threat of someone spreading rumors about you the same way it sees the threat of a lion looking to eat you for a mid-day snack. Fear often stems from feeling like we don’t know what will happen or that it is out of our control. The less control we have of a situation, the more fear we experience, which is why parenting teens can be such a scary thing for so many parents. Your teen is establishing more independence. They are away from home more than they ever have been before. They are exposed to influences and friends and ideas that they have never had access to before. They are out and about in the world where there are so many variables and the number of things that could go wrong and result in physical or emotional harm for them are innumerable. I want you to imagine you are the passenger in a car. My mind goes right to a sporty convertible with the top down like you see in the movies even though convertibles are not all that practical and your hair usually ends up being a knotted disaster after driving in one. But anyway, you are driving along when you look over and realize who the driver is: it is FEAR. How do imagine fear drives? Does it go fast or slow? Is it a smooth ride or is it kind of jerky? Is fear aware of the surroundings or hyper-focused on certain things? So many parents are letting fear drive when it comes to their parenting. It looks different depending on what it is you are afraid of, but I want to share three ways you may be letting fear drive your parenting. 1. Fear of Something Bad Happening These parents are often called “helicopter” or “snowplow” parents. They are so worried that something bad will happen to their child that they intervene and try to control the child’s life in an attempt to prevent the possibility that anything bad could happen. They solve their children’s problems for them and micromanage their grades, friends and activities. They have strict rules in place to prevent their kids from encountering the evils of the world and they go full mama-bear on anyone who threatens to pop the bubble of emotional and physical safety they have constructed to keep their child safe. I think just about every parent falls in this category at some point or another. When this type of fear is in the driver’s seat, the ride is slow, overly cautious and not very exciting. This kind of fear is so panicked about avoiding potential danger that they may not notice problems right in front of them because they are so anxious about everything going on around them. This type of fear straps you in a 5-point harness to drive less than the speed limit and slow down any time they see a traffic light just in case it happens to turn red while you are in the vicinity. It won’t turn down a road it hasn’t driven before or take a chance on a left hand turn even if the oncoming car is far-off in the distance. 2. Fear of Missed Potential Psychologist Peter Gray calls these parents “Fuel-Injector Parents” or the even more aggressive “Tiger Parents.” These parents push their children to become high-achieving because they are afraid of what may happen if they don’t. They are afraid that their child will just be mediocre or unprepared to survive in the real world. They are driven by fear to make sure their child internalizes skills like winning, performing under pressure, responsibility and motivation. When we are operating under this kind of fear we get frustrated with our teen when they seem lazy or unmotivated or when they just don’t seem to be living up to their full potential. Again, most parents probably experience this at some point. With this kind of fear in the driver’s seat, you better strap in and hold on because the ride is going to be fast. Any road that looks promising is one this driver is sure to check out with a last minute, wheel-squealing turn. And if it isn’t as good as it seems, they will quickly turn the car around and speed back out of there. This ride is jerky and sporadic, ignoring warning lights on the dash about empty gas tanks and oil changes needed because they don’t want to miss out on any opportunity to get ahead. Think Lightning McQueen, pre-Radiator Springs. 3. Fear of Judgment Parents with this kind of fear are constantly trying new strategies and ideas so that they can never be accused of not being a good parent. They are constantly on the defensive trying to minimize ways others might judge them or their parenting. They may be over-protective because that is what they think people expect them to do…or push their child to be high achieving because that is what they think people expect them to do. This kind of parenting looks like setting a curfew for your child because everyone else has one and people might think you are a delinquent parent if you don’t. Or forcing your kid to join the clubs their friends are doing at school, even when they really don’t care about it, because you don’t want other people to think you are a delinquent parent who doesn’t care about having enough extracurriculars on their child’s future college application. We all fall into this trap sometimes and allow it to influence our parenting decisions. This kind of fear is a distracted driver. Sometimes driving slow, sometimes driving fast and more concerned with what the other cars are doing than what it wants to do. Every turn is stressful because it has to determine what the other cars are doing and what they will think if you do something different. This driver pays attention to every sign and signal, but isn’t sure which ones they should follow and which ones they should ignore. Did you relate to one or more of those? Of course, these are extreme examples so you may be experiencing this on a smaller scale. You have probably experienced different types of fear in the drivers’ seat of your parenting at different times in your life. So why is this such a big deal? If it is such a common thing to parent from fear, why is it a problem? The truth is that fear-based parenting has some pretty ugly side-effects… - It can prevent our children from learning from their own mistakes. They aren’t ever given an opportunity to try things that bring their parents fear, so they never learn the skill of try, try again. - Because they don’t have the opportunity to try and fail and try again, fear-based parenting can damage our kids self-esteem and confidence. They pick up on the fact that we don’t let them fight their own battles or make their own mistakes and they think it is because we don’t think they can handle it. If you don’t believe in your teen, they will have a much more difficult time believing in themselves. - It can prevent our children from developing the necessary skills for decision-making. When we make all the decisions for them, our teens don’t learn how to listen to or trust their own instinct and inner voice. They may reach adulthood not knowing what they really like or think and feel lost and purposeless in the world. - Our children fail to learn resilience. If we intercept our children’s opportunities to experience failure or physical or emotional pain, we teach them that negative emotion is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. As a result our teens don’t learn how to handle negative emotions (which will inevitably come up in their life) and may turn to addictions, repressing their emotions or becoming highly reactive and unable to cope. - Fear based parenting leads to higher anxiety and depression in our teens. Because you are being driven by fear, they are picking up on that and allowing it to create fear for them as well. They learn that the world is a scary place that they can’t handle on their own. - It can lead to our teens acting out or rebelling. When you have allowed fear to be more important than your teen’s developmental needs, interests and desires for long enough, they may just get fed up and exercise their independence by doing all the things you worked so hard to protect them from. Whether you put them in a bubble or pushed them to achieve, they might decide to do the exact opposite of everything you want them to do, and your relationship with them will be severely damaged in the process. Are you afraid this might happen so you avoid parenting your teen at all and just try to be their friend? Still fear-based parenting. So how do we parent if not from fear? LOVE What would it look like if love was the driver of the car? I imagine it would be a smooth ride. Sometimes speeding up and sometimes slowing down. Exploring the world with curiosity and excitement. It would be a safe ride, because love cares about the people in the car, the people in the other cars and the pedestrians along the way. Love takes input from the passenger and cares about where they want to go and what they want to do…even if it isn’t the route they were originally planning on. Love is more interested in connecting than controlling. In real life this looks like teaching and guiding while allowing your teen to learn and explore. It is helping them develop skills by practice through trial and error. It is helping them identify their own goals and interests and then encouraging them as they pursue them in a way that feels authentic and true to themselves. It is teaching them how to navigate negative emotions and showing them that it isn’t something to be afraid of. We are going to experience fear as parents. We are going to worry about our kids because that is part of the process having less and less control as we practice letting go. BUT instead of allowing fear to drive, let fear sit in the back seat. It can be along for the ride, but it can’t be the driver. Next month in my Enjoy coaching community we are learning all about fear and other negative emotions that aren’t really as scary as they may seem. I will be teaching you how fear is actually one of our most important emotions for growth and how to stop letting the fear of negative emotions hold you back from the life you want. In order to teach this skill to your teen, you have to learn and practice it for yourself, so I will be supporting you through that process all month long. Enjoy is only open for a few days, so make sure you go to the link in the show notes so you don’t miss your chance to join me inside and learn how to face your fears. https://client.jenbelltate.com/membership
