70. The Manual for Your Teenager === I have been on a serious organizing kick lately. I just want to organize everything in my life. It is like spring cleaning to the max and the other day I was organizing some things in my kitchen and I came across the shelf in my kitchen where I keep all of my recipe books and I decided this shelf was getting cleaned off and reorganized. So I pulled everything out and to my surprise, I found a whole stack of manuals for the small appliances in my kitchen. I found manuals for my alligator chopper and all the varieties of mini dash waffle makers that I love to buy. I found the manual for my KitchenAid noodle making attachment and even a manual for my enameled cast iron pot. Why would I need any of these manuals? I don't know. I know how to use all of these appliances. They've been in my kitchen for years and I have never once referred back to the manual. But just because I haven't referred back to it, doesn't mean the manual didn't exist. Today I want to tell you a little bit about a different kind of manual that might be sitting on a shelf somewhere back in the back of your brain, that you don't even realize exists. But this manual is impacting the things you do and say and feel every single day. Just like my kitchen shelf that was full of manuals for all the different small appliances in my kitchen, you have a manual for all the different relationships that you have in your life. You have a manual for how husbands should behave. You have a manual for how your children should act. You have a manual for how to be a great mom, and a manual for how to be a great mother in law. You have a manual for how to be a good friend, and how to be a good neighbor. You have manuals for all these different relationships in your life. And these manuals are simply a set of rules that we have for how ourselves and other people should behave to be a good whatever. And the biggest problem with these manuals is that we attach our own happiness to whether or not people are behaving the way it is outlined in that manual. But, spoiler alert, we can't control other people, even our own children. And when we have attached our happiness to whether or not people behave the way that is outlined in our manual, we end up frustrated and annoyed and offended all the time. To illustrate this, I want to tell you a story. I happen to love chick flicks. I love a good romantic comedy, and this stems back to my days as a teenager when I used to watch chick flicks with my mom. We had a long list of favorites, and of course Meg Ryan was in most of them. It was a favorite thing that we used to love to do together was to watch chick flicks and quote them with each other. Well, I was so excited when my oldest daughter started to get to the age where I thought, okay, she's ready for a good chick flick. And so one day she stayed home sick from school and it was just the two of us. And I thought, this is my opportunity to introduce her to the golden list of chick flicks that I love. And so I turned on You've Got Mail, which happens to be one of my very favorites. And we watched the whole movie and I was giggling and I kept looking over at her and she was bored and annoyed and rolling her eyes. She hated it. She didn't like the movie at all. And I was so sad and so frustrated because this is what teenage girls and their moms do to connect. This is the thing that connects them during the teen years is watching chick flicks together. I was sure of it. So for the next year, I tried again and again and again to introduce her to all my favorite chick flicks. Maybe it was just you've got mail that she didn't like, right? But she hated all of them. She didn't like any of my favorite chick flicks and I was so frustrated. This is a perfect example of the manual at play somewhere in my manual about how to be a good daughter was a chapter entitled chick flicks. And it explicitly described that moms and daughters should watch chick flicks together and enjoy them and have a long list of chick flicks that they love to quote to one another. Now I know that this is a silly example, but I want you to think about your own manual that you have for your teenager. Is there a chapter in there on what respect looks like? What motivation looks like? What laziness looks like? How your child should behave? What kind of grades they should get? How they should interact with their friends? How much time they should spend on their phone or playing video games? How quickly they should do their chores? And the list could go on and on and on. You have chapters and chapters of these rules and expectations for your teenager, and they are impacting your relationship with that child every single day. But more than that, they are the reason that you get frustrated with your teen. They are the reason that you feel so hurt and upset by certain things that they do or say. You have a manual of unwritten rules that you don't even realize you have. And because I am also a mom, I understand that you have communicated a lot of the things in that manual to your kids. When it comes to respect, you have told them what you think respect looks like and that what they're doing is not respect. But a lot of the things you have not communicated, I never told my daughter, we are going to connect over watching chick flicks. We are going to quote them together and it is going to be fun: that's the rule. I never told her that. And you have a lot of rules in your manual that you have never communicated to your child. And so, of course, they don't know how to live by those rules, but even if they did, the chances that they could follow a rule book written by you for them are slim to none. I want you to think about the last thing in your life that you tried to change. A bad habit you tried to break or a goal you tried to set. You were motivated to do this thing, right? And you set up some guidelines of what it would look like, some rules for yourself of how you were going to do it. For as long as I can remember, I have had the terrible habit of biting my nails. And I have tried to break this habit So many times in my life. I have tried every time I notice that I'm biting my nails I'm gonna flick myself or I've tried getting fake nails on so that I couldn't bite my nails. I've tried the nasty nail polish that when you bite your nails, it tastes super bitter and disgusting. I've tried everything! And even though I really want to stop biting my nails I haven't been able to break this habit. I haven't been able to follow my own rules. If I can't even follow my own rules for something that I want to do, that I am motivated to do, and that I decided to do, How much more difficult would it be for your teenager to follow your rules for them? Some of which they don't even know, and some of which they don't agree with, and most of which they are biologically wired to resist. If we have any hope of enjoying the teen years, we need to drop our manuals that we have for our teenagers because they are making us miserable. They are making us crazy. They are making us controlling and they are having a long lasting damaging effect on our relationship with our teen. Now, before anyone sends me hate mail, I want to clarify that setting and enforcing expectations with our teenager is vital. It is important. It's actually part of what helps them to feel safe and secure and attached to us. I have an entire course on this inside of my Enjoy Community, because it is a vital part of parenting teenagers. We have to set expectations and we have to enforce them. But what I'm talking about here is that we have to drop this manual that we have for how things should be and how they should behave. And disconnect that from our own happiness or our own feeling of success as a mom. This is exactly the work that we are going to be doing next month in my Enjoy Community. We are going to pull that manual off the back shelf of our brain and we are going to dust it off, open it up, and see what is inside. So much of that manual has been written unintentionally, just from the experiences of our life and the culture we grew up in and the family we grew up in. And so we are going to take a look at the manual and we're going to decide intentionally what we want to keep and what we don't. And I'm going to teach you how to separate your happiness and fulfillment from the things written in that manual. It is going to be such a great month and I just cannot wait to get started and dive deeper into this with you. And if you are not already a member of Enjoy, it is my monthly membership where you will find all the resources and support you need to raise an emotionally healthy teen. It is like a whole different kind of manual for raising teens: the instruction manual that you wish your teenager came with, that's what you'll find inside Enjoy. Plus you also get coaching and support from me directly. As well as live workshops, a private podcast where you can access all of it and a whole library of classes and parenting tools to help you navigate any challenge you might be facing with your teenager. The price of this membership is going up in November, but when you join, you lock in the price that you pay for as long as you keep the membership. So I will drop the link in the show notes and I will see you inside.
