Parenting Post-Wilderness: Parenting a Struggling Teen Before, During and After Treatment

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the constant battle to manage your children's screen time? Maybe you worry that it’s too late? Today’s guest, Emily Jones, is the brain behind Family Tech University and shares her insights with us today on how to approach this modern parenting dilemma.  She emphasized that while it's crucial for parents to set effective boundaries around technology use and...

How can you shift your parenting focus from your children's behaviors to understanding the emotions and needs driving those behaviors? We know how easy it can be to fall into the trap of focusing solely on your child’s behavior. It’s what you see, what’s on the forefront, and it’s so easy to notice: whether they wake up in time, their grades, etc.  Combine this with the fear and uncertainty t...

How can I not rescue, and not enable, and at the same time not leave my kid completely in the dark when they’re struggling? This is the question we’re going to dive into in today’s episode. As a parent, it’s SO hard to see your kid struggling and not knowing how to help. I’ve been there, and I know it’s beyond a nightmare.  You’re fearful of doing the wrong thing. Fearful of doing nothing. You’re...

How can you support your teen with their college applications without writing every single essay for them? If you have a graduating senior in the house, this question has probably crossed your mind.  Are they actually writing their essays?  Are they putting in enough effort?  How much should you bug them about it? Today’s guest, Maggie Kang, MD, found that the more she bugged her son about it, the...

Are you choosing to suffer? Pain is part of life – we can’t avoid it. Today’s guest, Maggie Kang, experienced this first-hand when her 9-year-old daughter got diagnosed with a rare disease. The pain this brought was inevitable. But there’s a difference between pain and suffering. Suffering happens when we resist the pain. By resisting to accept what was going on and that this was their new reality...

How do you respond when your kid is feeling sad? Will you try to fix things for them? Help them out? It might feel like the right thing to do but you’re sending out a different message than you likely intended. Seeing your kid struggle with their emotions is hard for many reasons. You want to make them feel better. Sometimes, you might even be running out of empathy because you feel like they ‘sho...

How do you live with your teen who’s using? And how do you know whether your behavior as a parent is supportive or enabling? There’s a fine line between the two…  As if that isn’t hard enough to figure out already, additionally, many parents are afraid of losing the relationship they have with their teen by having hard conversations or sticking to their boundaries.  It’s a difficult subject, and a...

School and academics can cause a lot of tension in your household. No matter your good intentions or whether or not you have the skills and knowledge to help your teen with their school work, getting guidance and encouragement from you can be triggering for them. On the other hand, it can also cause a lot of frustration for you as the parent when you see your child’s behavior around schoolwork. It...

What would it feel like if you just got to love your child at the dinner table instead of having conflicts over due dates or presentations? To be able to take that completely out of the equation? An Executive Function coach might be exactly what your family needs. Chrissy Nichols is an Executive Function coach who specializes in helping teens reintegrate into traditional learning environments. So...

The journey your teen is on isn’t an easy one. They’re trying to make healthier choices, also when it comes to the people they hang out with. As a parent, you might feel relief when your child decides to cut ties with a ‘bad influence’, making it hard for you to empathize with them. But remember that it’s a completely different experience for them. Even if your teen realizes that this person they’...

Christmas is around the corner and brings along a certain level of stress and anxiety in parents and teens alike. We want the holidays to be fun and merry and have a lot of expectations about what it will or should be like. But when not everything turns out the way we expected, it’s those expectations that bring frustration and disappointment. Join Seth and me today in our conversation about expec...

Backburner issues: those little things we’re annoyed about but feel too small or irrelevant to discuss. So we put them on the backburner where they keep growing and growing until they become this big issue in our relationship. Sounds familiar?  In this second part of my interview with Tanya Hale, who’s an incredible mid-life relationship coach, she shares her formula for talking about backburner i...

Are you parenting your kid as a team or does it feel more like you’re in the boxing ring with the other parent, trying to prove that you’re right and they’re wrong? When emotions run high, it’s sometimes hard to acknowledge that you’re on the same team as the other parent. Instead of sitting down and listening to each other, we automatically shift towards an ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ mindset. ...

How much support is too much? There’s a therapist, a tutor, an EF coach, maybe a mentor, and a basketball coach, and sometimes our kids are just like: ‘That’s enough!’. We must figure out how to listen to them and still give them the support they need.  At a certain point, we need to give our kids the time and space to implement what they've learned, make mistakes and learn from them, and pra...

Wilderness isn’t bad, nor good. Hard, nor easy. A blessing, nor a curse. These are the thoughts we might have, but they’re not the facts.  In this episode, I’m (re)introducing the concept of facts versus thoughts (in other words, the stories we make up in our minds) in the concept of our wilderness experiences.  The experience of wilderness is made up of a lot of facts: whether your kid was transp...

Sending your kid away to treatment often comes with a lot of shame. The shame of not being a good enough parent, not being the person that can help them, and so on. This inner critic shows up in your head and can be incredibly loud, right? I’m continuing my conversation with David Bedrick and we invite you to have a different look at this inner critic and the blame and shame we put on the decision...

As a parent, one of the hard things is living with regrets. We’re trying our best to make the right decisions for our children and always do the right thing but none of us is perfect. When I took David Bedrick ’s Unshaming course, it completely changed the way I see myself and some of my past actions as a parent. It truly changed my life. So without him knowing, he became a mentor to me.  So it go...

But Beth, how can I de-escalate my teen when they’re blaming me for something I’ve actually done? It was one of my clients asking me this the other day. And I know she’s not alone, hearing things like: “My basketball career is ruined because you sent me to treatment” “I’m losing my friends because you don’t allow me to use my phone” And yes, you DID send them to treatment. And you DID take their p...

Let’s continue our conversation on how to de-escalate ourselves and take the conversation a bit deeper. Inspired by a Brene Brown interview, Seth and I explore the importance of communicating our levels of regulation to our partners. What do each of us, at this exact moment, have the bandwidth for? We only have so much energy in the day, and knowing our own energy levels and communicating it with...

When emotions run high, it’s not just our teens that need de-escalation. We do too. Learning how to de-escalate yourself and regulate your emotions can be revolutionary in your life and relationship with your teen. It sure was for me.  It might seem unattainable right now (I’ve been there), but you can do it too. Believe me, you can! Let me guide you through it in today’s episode. In this episode...

We’re not just responsible for our kids, we’re also responsible for teaching them how to be responsible for themselves. We want to teach our kids how to solve their own problems and be self-reliant and self-governing. I get it. It’s SO hard not to intervene when you see your teen trying to figure something out by themselves, taking the long route, and making mistakes as they go. But if you’re cons...

The tension is building and the situation is starting to escalate from bad to worse. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? As easy as it is to join our teens in this escalation, they need us to be regulated and available in order to de-escalate. Opening up the conversation helps us create a deeper connection and enables both sides to open up a bit more about what’s going on and their perspective on th...

Sometimes it’s hard to trust our teen’s journey. We might not be able to visibly see the progress our teen is going through, even though it surely is happening. At the same time, we have our own ideas of what our teen’s progress should look like. When you hold on to your ideas of what progress should look like, and where your teen should be, the progress can seem slow. We’re inviting you to look a...

Ready to start creating your very own Parent Home Plan? Don’t worry, you don’t have to start from scratch, because I’m sharing my Parent Home Plan Template with you for free!  Click here for your free copy of my Parent Home Plan template! In this episode on creating your parent home plan, we discuss: The ins and outs of my Parent Home Plan template [Get yours for free on www.bethhillmancoaching.co...

We’re a few episodes into our mini-series on boundaries and creating a Parent Home Plan to be consistent and follow through on your boundaries. Now, we’re getting closer to the actualization of your own home plan! In today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through the three phases of building your Home Plan: Phase 1: Preparation Phase 2: Structure Phase 3: Follow through Have a listen to prepare yo...