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[00:00:00] today is the 100th episode of Raising Boys, Building Men. That's how many conversations we've had together about raising your teenage son into a good man
So for today's milestone, I'm doing something a little different. After 100 episodes and 32 years of raising our own five sons, as well as coaching moms of teenage boys for years, I've watched the same parenting mistakes show up again and again. And the tricky part is that every single one feels better in the moment.
That's why we make these mistakes. They feel protective, loving. They just feel easier. But if your goal is to raise a good man, these mistakes are going to come back and bite you every single time. So today, I'm walking you through the top 10 mistakes I see most, not out of judgment in any way, because I've made these mistakes more than once But because these mistakes are big enough that
They get in the way when it's time for your son to launch out of your home, and we don't want that. Our goal is to raise a good man. [00:01:00] Today, I'm gonna help you do that by addressing some things that don't work so well. I'm really glad you're here. Let's get started.
Welcome back to [00:02:00] Raising Boys, Building Men. . Thanks for joining me today to celebrate our 100th episode of this podcast. I cannot even believe that I have recorded, produced, edited. I'm a one-lady show, you guys, it's been 100 episodes, and I am so excited about that. I have learned so much through these 100 episodes, and I have just appreciated you so much.
I can't even move forward without thanking you. I wanna thank you for listening every week. I am blown away by the amount of moms who are listening, who are so invested in raising a good man, that they're willing to try something new. Thank you for sharing these episodes with people who need it, other moms that are going through the same experiences that you are.
Thank you for leaving a review so that moms can find this podcast easier. That means so much to me and to this movement of raising better men. Just thank you for [00:03:00] being the mom who's willing to try something different, even when it feels uncomfortable.
When I started 100 episodes ago, I had been coaching moms of sons, and once again, I have spent the last 32 years raising our own sons, done deep dives over and over. I study raising boys every single day. I just knew that I was saying the same things over and over again to the moms that I have been coaching and thought maybe it would be beneficial to start a podcast to say some of those things that I repeat over and over to whoever wants to listen.
That decision has been one of the best decisions I've made in a long time. I love sharing my experience of raising boys. I love bringing guests on and experts to talk about their experience and their knowledge about raising boys, and I love hearing from you the things that you are going through and learning and growing from in your experience raising sons.
So thank you for being here and being part of this experience of Raising Boys Building Men. For this [00:04:00] episode, I wanted to do something a little bit different. Every week I try and give you new ways to think about raising the son of yours. Different things to try, different things to say, conversations to have. I have a whole Connected Mom method that works in strengthening your relationship with your son, I try and give you snippets of that every week, things that work.
And I thought today I would do something a little bit different. So today I'm giving you the top 10 parenting mistakes I see over and over with moms that I coach and mistakes that I have made. So there's no judgment here. This doesn't make you a bad mom. But these are things that just don't work in the long run.
They feel good in the moment because they smooth out the problems, but in the long run they just don't work
If I thought they work, I'd give you better, more efficient ways to do them. But they don't work in the long run. I have the luxury of perspective because my kids are getting older, and having gone through this experience and being right in the middle of it, I can see how [00:05:00] these parenting mistakes really bring a disservice to your relationship over the course of time.
So I'm gonna tell you about them today. Some of them I'm going to pull out and create full episodes on, but today we're just gonna run through the top 10 parenting mistakes that I'm seeing over and over again. The first mistake - in all honesty, I've made this mistake many times over the years, but it is that we manage our teenager rather than mentoring him.
This looks like managing his schedule, managing his school, his homework, his tests, managing his social calendar, constantly reminding him about chores and homework, and we're just on that boy all the time, managing all of the aspects of his life.
When we manage rather than mentor, we are always looking for what he's not doing well. Think about it. When we're managing his school or his social experience or his calendar, we're looking for how he's not measuring up. And guess what? He starts to feel that from you. [00:06:00] That becomes the lens with which we see him, and it becomes the way that he understands that he's being seen.
He feels it, and he often will begin to avoid or retreat. Those are his two options. The other thing when you manage instead of mentor is that you're teaching him that you're better at managing his life than he is And guess what he's gonna do at 14 or 15? He's gonna sit back and let you manage his life because it's a lot easier than him learning how to do it himself.
This does not work in the long run, and I have a lot of compassion for this one. This is one that I have struggled with many times over the years. I also spend hours and hours and hours every week coaching moms on this exact thing because it feels a lot like love. Managing them feels a lot like keeping them from falling or failing, but it's giving them a message
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that we don't think they can do it.
A mentor connects instead of controls, it's much more effective and more efficient in the long run. It's hard to [00:07:00] see when you're in it because you think that you're just loving him and helping him and taking care of him so that he doesn't feel the ramifications of not learning it. But guess what?
That kid's gonna leave your house someday, and if he's never had to learn to manage his own life, and then we send him off into the wild at 18 or 19 years old, he struggles. right now in society, many of those young adult boys are coming back home because they just can't do it. They've never strengthened those muscles, and so we have to be very careful not to make this mistake.
Once again, it's one that's very hard to see when you're in it, if you're not sure if you're managing or mentoring, come and talk to me. This is what I help moms figure out all the time You wanna figure it out sooner rather than later because it's a big one, and it's one that really gets in the way of your relationship and really gets in the way of him launching as he gets older.
Mistake number two is making sure that that boy of yours is always comfortable. I see this all the time. Once again, I've fallen into [00:08:00] this trap as well, but it looks like what many people call lawnmower parenting, and that's mowing down every obstacle before your son has a chance to maneuver through that obstacle.
It's making the phone calls for him. It's talking to the teacher for him or the coach or panicking inside whenever he gets uncomfortable. We don't always want this boy to be comfortable. It's once again about strengthening muscles. If we plow the way for him, if we take away all of the discomfort, we're sending him this message that, "I don't think you can handle discomfort, buddy, so I'll take care of it before you feel it.
I'll save you from it." that feels great when he's 14, and it feels nice for you because you feel so needed, but when that boy starts to become a man, it's disabling. It's stripping him of the one thing that he needs to build over adolescence, which is self-confidence. Self-confidence comes from doing hard things, and if we've gone through his whole adolescence really trying to take the hard things away from him, he [00:09:00] doesn't have the strength
and the mental muscles to maneuver that on his own, and he's really gonna struggle. And let me tell you, the discomfort at 13 or 14 is much easier to maneuver than the discomfort that comes at 18 or 24 or 30. That discomfort becomes big and starts affecting other people. We want him to be uncomfortable at 14 and 15 in moments so that he can learn and grow and develop those muscles.
So this mistake of making sure that he's always comfortable, it will come back to get you every single time. Mistake number three, not articulating your family values. I already know I'm gonna get some flack for this one. I'm not gonna tell you what family values are important. That's for you
to decide, but never articulating them, never naming them, never standing for something, and just assuming that your son will pick up the values that are your family values is so sad.
Like, we don't want that. It's interesting because research backs this up. There's a study that was done on family functioning and [00:10:00] identity, and it showed that teenagers who feel a strong, clear, communicated sense of family identity tend to do better emotionally and academically than teens whose identity and family values were fuzzy or unspoken
Clearly held family values, my friend, gives your son a scaffolding to build his own identity. It's interesting that we are so concerned with letting him have his own journey, which I agree with. Every kid is going to be different. Every kid is going to have a different experience. And expressing and articulating your family values helps your boy know that he's part of something bigger than himself.
He's his own person, yes, but he's also part of something bigger, and that's really comforting for a teenage boy. He wants to know that he belongs somewhere. And if we don't help him understand the family values that we have and the ways that he already belongs simply because he's part of the family, he's going to look elsewhere for where he [00:11:00] belongs.
- You want to teach, articulate, and set clear expectations around your family values. Those will be different for everyone. That's great. You wanna help him feel like he belongs. Often in our home, as our kids grew up, we would say to them, "Listen, what you do affects you, but it also affects your brothers.
It also affects your family. It also affects your extended family. You are not a lone person in this world. You belong to our family, and what you do affects everybody." That's equally great news, and I kinda hoped it did give him a little pressure to behave well, because it did affect his brothers and his family and his extended family.
I like that. I want my boys to feel like that they are part of something bigger than just themselves. And I've seen it over and over and over again in the past 32 years and when I'm coaching moms, that articulating and expressing your family values [00:12:00] shape and mold a good man. He doesn't always go into the world holding onto your family values.
Okay, that's fine, but I know I did my job to teach them Don't fall into the trap or the mistake that we don't articulate our family values because we want him to have his own journey. We want him to have his own experience, but we also want him to know that he belongs to something bigger than himself Mistake number four, blaming other people.
This is such a rub when I hear it, when I'm at games or different social situations when I hear parents allow their teenage son to blame everyone else. It does not serve that boy in any way, and it looks like blaming the ref every time we lose a game, or the teacher every time he gets a bad grade, or his friend for not getting him home
on time.
Some things are actually his to own, and when we allow him to blame other people for what belongs to him, we do our son a great disservice. Because unless he owns it, he can't change it. He's always at the [00:13:00] effect of everything around him. Nothing's in his control. That's very disempowering. We want our son to learn and understand that he owns his life, he owns things that happen in his life, because then if he can own it, he can change it.
What a great gift that you're giving him by expecting that he owns his life and things that happen in it. If I want my son to be home at midnight, it's never his friend's fault if he's late for curfew. I want him to own that because I want him to know that he's responsible for that
A boy who never owns his part in his life is gonna spend his whole life looking for other people to blame, or believing that life is just simply unfair for him. He's becomes the victim of his own life because he gave away all of his empowerment in it. There's two things, you can take these or leave these, but they really became mantras in our house, and they have served our boys very well.
The one thing is we did a lot of sports in our family, is that you never let the referee decide a [00:14:00] game. Like, I don't want you to come to me after and say, "That call at the end, it was the ref's fault that we lost the game." You could be far enough ahead in the game that the game doesn't depend on one call.
just don't blame someone else for the loss. It's okay to lose. You're gonna lose lots of games in your life, but don't blame anyone else for it. And the other one, when they would come to us and say, "It's just not fair. It's just not fair," I always loved it when they would say that because my response would be, "Listen, son, if life were fair, we would have a lot less."
And they kind of think about that for just a minute, and then rarely after that did they ever come to us and say, "It's just not fair. Life's just not fair." Because life isn't fair. They're right. If life were fair, we would have a lot less.
Life is not fair, but you don't wanna be a victim in your own life. Let him own his life. Let him, even when it's hard. Because if he owns it and understands that it belongs to him, then [00:15:00] he can gain control over it. He's the one that can change it for the better
That is just such a gift that you can give your son. Mistake number five is skipping age-appropriate responsibilities and chores. Doing everything for that boy at home so he never has to carry any real weight of responsibility is not gonna serve him now, it's not gonna help you now either, and it's not gonna serve him in his life.
Because what happens is He doesn't really have much responsibility at home, and then he leaves your home, and life is full of responsibility, but he never practiced it growing up. I love this study that was done by Marty Rossmann at the University of Minnesota,
She did a long-running study and followed people from childhood into their 20s, she found that people who started doing regular chores as young as three or four were more likely as young adults to be self-sufficient, to have good relationships, and to feel successful in their careers compared to those who started chores later or not at all.[00:16:00]
I love that study, and I could not agree with it more.
There are plenty of age-appropriate chores that your son can do. That doesn't mean that he's always doing chores and that he's always just doing your dirty work, but that he's actually learning responsibility. And so when he goes out into the world, it's just part of life. He understands that there are things that he's responsible for because he's been practicing it his whole life I just feel like studies like this don't lie, and if I can give my son a leg up in self-sufficiency and good relationships when he becomes an adult, I'll do that all day long.
I'll trade a little bit of an argument. No 14-year-old is dying to do chores. It's okay. You want to be the mom that has him do it anyway. Don't take the opportunity to learn responsibility away from him. Mistake number six, giving him free reign of his phone or media
I was talking to a colleague this morning, and I said it's really true that our parents didn't have some of the same issues that we have when we're raising our kids today. This phone and this media [00:17:00] is hard to navigate. I get it. I talk to moms about it every day. One of the things that moms come to me the very most about is, "I just feel like I'm losing him to media, and I feel bad 'cause I'm the one that gave him the phone."
It's a navigation, I get it. But if you think about it this way, a 14 or a 15-year-old having free reign of his phone anytime day or night, or the video games, is not helping his brain development. It's not helping him learn how to navigate relationships. It's not helping him learn how to navigate life.
If you think of it this way, there are many adults with fully developed brains that still struggle to manage their own media use. It's just not fair to expect your teenager to override his still-developing brain when us, as adults, are struggling to override ours I loved the episode that I did with Dr.
Matt Bellace. It's episode 78 if you wanna go back and listen to it, but one thing he said really [00:18:00] stuck with me, and he said, "I have a lot of compassion for these teenagers because they are not little adults." oftentimes we treat them like little adults because they're, they have the body of a man, right?
You have a 14 or a 15-year-old that's taller than you and has a deep voice, but he's still closer to childhood in terms of brain development than he is adulthood. And to expect that he should know automatically how to navigate phone and media usage, don't do that to your teenage boy. The kindest thing you can do is to create real restrictions and boundaries around that phone, around that media.
And listen, he'll push back. It's okay.
We're not scared of our teenager. He'll push back, and that's okay. You can adjust them over time so that when he leaves your home, he actually has learned how to regulate that usage. But don't expect him to get there on his own or without a fight. The most loving thing you can do is set some boundaries with it, is to put some restrictions on there. Help him learn how to help himself. Mistake number seven is [00:19:00] taking parenting advice from your 14-year-old. I just love this one so much because I've been there.
I have been told, "You are ruining my life, Mom. I hate you. This is terrible. You're a terrible mom.", I've heard it all, as you can imagine, and I know you're hearing it, too. It's okay, because guess what? You don't wanna take parenting advice from a 14-year-old or a 15-year-old or a 17-year-old or an 18-year-old.
Letting his opinion in the moment of your parenting change how you parent or make you take it personally is not gonna benefit you, and it's certainly not gonna benefit him in the long run. He's supposed to think you're not doing a good job. He's the kid. That's part of your job. Now, we wanna stay very in tune with the relationship.
You wanna pay very close attention to how's the relationship going. Is he still staying in the room when I walk in the room? Will he still sit on the couch if I come and sit on the couch? But my friend, do not take it personal when he tells you [00:20:00] that you're a bad mom. Don't. This is what I would tell my kids,
it's become a joke in our house because when they're 14 or 15 or 17 and telling me that I'm doing a terrible job as a mom, I'll say to him, "Listen, son, I'm really not taking your parenting advice right now. But when you're 26 or 27 and your frontal lobe is developed and you're an adult, I'm gonna take you to lunch
you can give me all of your grievances. You can give me all the parenting advice you want when you're an adult. Let's plan the date. I'm in." They would get frustrated and mad and walk away. let me tell you, I have three of my five sons who are 26, and I always say to them, "Do you wanna go to lunch?
Do you wanna give me some parenting advice?" And they laugh, and they think it's hilarious, and they say, "Mom, thank you so much. Thank you for staying the course and not taking my parenting advice when I was mad at 14." You guys, don't take parenting advice from your 14-year-old. It's never gonna be good.
And that's okay. Mistake number eight, avoiding boundaries because you're scared of the [00:21:00] backlash. That looks like not giving your teenager boundaries because you don't want the blow up or the silent treatment or the anger outburst. One thing that I see often , is that moms are becoming more and more scared of their teenager But the kindest thing you can do is give that boy, that teenager who already feels out of control, the sense that one of you knows what you're doing the truth is, is that real life is full of boundaries.
Dating, jobs, society in general, adults live by societal boundaries. It's how societies work. If this boy, this teenager never has to abide by boundaries, two things happen. He doesn't think that the rules ever apply to him, and the second thing is, is that he continues to feel out of control.
He continues to do risky behavior or push against any kind of authority. The most loving thing you can do for your teenage boy is provide the safety of rules and boundaries. We don't have to do it in an unkind, controlling, mean, [00:22:00] unfeeling way. We can set boundaries that still give him some freedom,
Yet we are expressing to him where that boundary ends and what will happen if he crosses that boundary. It's like the most loving, kind thing we do. He's already feeling out of control inside, so if we let him know that one of us knows what we're doing, it provides safety to him. Now, he's gonna never come to you and say, "Thank you, Mother, for providing safety and creating boundaries."
He's not. But listen, you're the mom, and it's part of your job, and the more that we create that safety for him, the better our relationship becomes and the more our influence increases. that's what we really want is that influence so that when he needs somebody, he will listen to us.
Don't avoid boundaries because you're scared of your teenager. Don't do it. Mistake number nine, not allowing natural consequences. This is another one that I see feels good at the moment, but over time, it will come back to bite you.
This looks like stepping in to [00:23:00] soften or prevent a natural consequence of his choice. Sometimes it's that he procrastinated a school project,, so you stay up all night doing it for him so he won't get a bad grade. Not allowing the natural consequence to occur.
The natural consequence for these teenage boys is oftentimes their best teacher. It's hard to watch as a mom, I know. I'm right there with you. But it's oftentimes the best teacher for them. If you think about your own life, some of your greatest lessons are going to be those lessons you learned from doing it wrong the first time
But if he never has to learn that lesson because you take that natural consequence away or you soften it for him, guess what he learns? That if he does something wrong, someone else is gonna save him He never feels the consequence of struggling or making a poor decision.
He never has to learn the lesson because he never felt the natural consequence. Now, we wanna stay aware. We wanna stay involved. We don't wanna just discount him and let him fail and fail and fail and fail. We want to walk beside him and help him learn the lesson [00:24:00] from it when the natural consequence shows up.
We wanna support him through it, but we don't wanna take it from him. Because oftentimes that natural consequence is the best teacher he's going to have. Hold his hand through it, walk him through it, but don't take it away from him. Mistake number 10 is jumping in the pit with him. I love this analogy
that came from Leah Davidson.
She came on the podcast episode number 92 if you wanna go back and listen. She's an expert in all things nervous system, but she gave this analogy that when our son is struggling with maybe anxiety or overwhelm or just life in general, and he falls into the pit Oftentimes as a mom, our instinct is to jump in that pit with him.
She explained it in such a beautiful way, but she said, "Then what we have are two people in the pit trying to get out. Once you've jumped in, now you're both in there, and you're both trying to find a way out, where the more helpful thing to do is , to secure where you are, your own footing, then you reach in [00:25:00] and help him climb out.
But you're on solid ground the whole time
And I see this a lot with anxiety. Our son feels anxious, and so then we start getting anxiety about his anxiety. Now we just have two people with anxiety. Where if we stay calm, if we help him through it, and realize this is part of life, it looks like this is gonna be part of this boy's experience, let me help him through it, instead of jumping in with him, now we have two people that are anxious.
Nobody knows how to get out. This is a lot of the work that I do with clients, is helping moms find that solid ground so that you can actually have something steady to offer him to pull him out. I love helping moms find that solid ground because once they do, their ability to reach in and pull their son out of that pit increases exponentially.
They benefit because of their own growth, and then their son benefits because of their growth as well. The fastest way to get your son to change, to improve his behavior, is to [00:26:00] change how you're showing up, is to get on that solid ground. It helps every single time. Those are 10 things. The 10 things. I'm gonna recap them for you.
Managing instead of mentoring. Don't wanna do that. We don't wanna keep him too comfortable. We wanna let him do hard things. We want to express a name and articulate our family values. We don't want to allow him to blame others for the things that are going wrong in his life. We want to give him chores and responsibilities, and expect him to follow through with those.
We don't want to hand over the phone and media to our 14-year-old with no guardrails. That's just a recipe for disaster. We don't want to take parenting advice from our 14-year-old. It's never gonna be good advice, my friend. We don't want to avoid setting boundaries We don't want to block the natural consequences that come from our son's own decisions.
We wanna let him learn from those, and we don't wanna jump in the pit. We wanna get onto solid ground, and then we reach down and we help him out of whatever [00:27:00] situation we're in. Now, none of these mistakes, my friend, make you a bad mom. I've done all of them, and you probably have, too.
It doesn't make you a bad mom, but you wanna be aware that it's not gonna serve you in the long run. It feels like love right now. It feels like nurturing and caring. It feels like love in the moment, but in the long run, if the goal that you have is to raise a good man, these things are not helping you.
They just don't work in the long run. We want him to be able to grow into a man that can stand on his own two feet, that can contribute to society. Addressing your own parenting mistakes through this and changing them, adjusting them, is gonna help you help him. It's the best news ever
You have got this. You are doing a great job. Thank you for staying with Raising Boys, Building Men. Thank you for celebrating this 100th podcast with me and letting me give you a little bit of what I'm seeing not work rather than the things that I want to see you do that work better, right? Sometimes noticing what we're doing that's not serving us is the best thing we can hear, 'cause then we can own it, we can adjust it, we can improve on it.[00:28:00]
You, my friend, are doing better than you think. You really are. If you want community more moms to talk to about this, please come join our free Facebook group, Raising Boys, Building Men. If this is helpful but you feel like you're ready for more one-on-one guidance, that's what I do. Please come to a reconnection strategy call.
I'm gonna help you figure out what's standing in the way of the connection that you want with your teenage son, and we get you the next step. It's super easy come and talk to me. You've got this. You're doing great, and I'll see you on the next episode [00:29:00]