In this episode we discuss the idea of being a friend to your child in addition to their parent. Is it possible? What does being a parent mean to you? Is it wrong to be their friend? Listen in where I give real examples of how this thought has showed up in my life and in my parenting
In this episode we discuss the idea of being a friend to your child in addition to their parent. Is it possible? What does being a parent mean to you? Is it wrong to be their friend? Listen in where I give real examples of how this thought has showed up in my life and in my parenting
You're listening to the modern Mormon, Episode 26. Hey there, I'm kami Satterlee. And I'm the modern Mormon. I'm an Advanced Certified Life coach who's dropped the all or nothing approach to life. And religion. I can't wait to show you how. I've got you, girl. Let's go. Hello, Hello, beautiful souls How we doing today? So real quick before I start, if you haven't already, I would really appreciate if you would go and leave me a review. I haven't asked for a whole lot of these. And I'm starting to think maybe I should. So if you haven't done it, please do it. I would really appreciate it. So interesting topic for today. I'm not your friend. I'm your mother. How many of you have felt that one? Did you feel that deep in your soul? Were you told that as a kid? And are you now repeating that to your kids? This one has been on my mind a lot lately. I've had a lot of conversations with my friends, my sister about this. And so I want to talk about it today, parenting our teens. So I have a lot of parents that reach out to me wanting to get coaching for their teen. And after a console, what usually happens is we end up signing the parent up for coaching. Why is that? Because once we get down to the actual problem, it's usually the parents expectations, their thought about their behaviors or actions that are getting them the result that they are not happy with. It is not exactly their teenager, sometimes I'll coach the teen as well. But typically, I end up just coaching the parent, and I get it parents, you want your kid to just make good choices. Because deep down you know it will bring them the true happiness inside. Maybe so but a life without mistakes is a life with zero growth. If you are a member of my faith, and you know that we were brought to this earth to experience agency, and our ability to choose, well agency to basically choose right and wrong to experience failures, and to use the atonement to get us back on track, right. So we want our kids to experience that we truly do. I think intellectually, we understand that. But what gets in the way of allowing our kids to experience all the struggles and overcoming those struggles is us. Our emotions, our thoughts, our expectations of them. I think in the back of our mind, we're like, yes, go experience the world. But then we also have these fears of, well, don't do too much. Don't go too far over the line of Right, right, don't really let go of the iron rod per se. But is that really how it's supposed to be? So I recently had this exact experience with my own daughter. And I got her permission, she told me I could talk about this. So she's pretty chill, no shame in her game. But she decided basically to make an impulse decision. That was something that I completely disagreed with. And it led to more and more kind of compounding decisions that were not in line with her true self. The layered consequence really sucked for her. But in all of this, I realized that the list of expectations I was carrying around and unconsciously pulling out and parenting from when we would have like these deep discussions. We're not serving her or myself, I cannot control my daughter's choices. Those are hers. Those are for her to experience and work through. But I realized that the layered negative emotions that I was experiencing, on top of my already sad and disappointed emotions I had just from watching her be hurt. It was my judgments and my expectations. I realized that I knew intellectually that teens will make mistakes. I was 100% okay with that. But I didn't realize I had a list of what's an appropriate mistake and a not so appropriate mistake that I decided like we're okay, we're not right. So the ones I considered not okay, of course happened to be the one that she of course decided to make, therefore, resulting in my added pain. Looking back on it, I realized all the conversations that we had had growing up, and up until that point, the ones where I thought I was showing up as my best self, I was, in fact not showing up as my best self. What I was doing was parenting out of fear. I was teaching her from a place of kind of my own insecurities about looking to the future, my worries about what if and what it would lead to. And then it was showing up in the way that I would have these conversations with her. So instead of trusting my child to make decisions I was trying to coach her or kind of guide her into the right decision, or else right you'll ruin everything. I was showing up desperate in my teaching instead of confident in my parenting and in her. The hardest part for me as a parent is stepping back and deciding to trust the incredible human that I've raised. We want to control their every move because we know the lasting consequences if they don't right. But do we? We know our experience. We know other's experiences from what we've seen. But do we know that We want to assume as if it's just powerful to worry, like, I know what's best for you, because I've seen what's going to happen. It feels like we're doing something to prevent all of that and how we communicate with him. But what we're doing is taking those emotions and those mistakes and then parenting, having hard conversations, setting boundaries and consequences, all through the emotion of fear. It's not attractive, which comes across as very salesy and then interpreted as, I can't trust you Mom, is screams mom scared. Mom doesn't believe in me, I'm not strong enough to make my own decisions. when mistakes happen, it also quietly whispers Don't tell mom, she was right, you're weak, you didn't exactly do what she said not to do. You are your choices, hide shame yourself, you aren't enough. Now with this whole scenario with my daughter, and I, I, you know, have coached long enough to not tie, you know, whether I'm a great mom or not to my daughter's behaviors. However, I can see that the way that I showed up and the way that I taught her about this particular, you know, thing, circumstance was not my best self. It's not my fault that my daughter chose to go do what she did. However, I can look and see how the way I showed up triggered thoughts in her. So I sort of contributed to that, in a way. Parenting is tough, you guys, the balance of tightening and loosening the leash that we've kind of kept on them ever since they learned across the street, it's even more difficult when the decisions they're making doesn't align with my expectation of what their life should look like, in my eyes. Sometimes the biggest challenge that a team can overcome is you, the parent, in times where I feel negative emotion with my team, I like to stop and put myself back in those teen years. My thoughts, my desires, my emotions. Do you guys remember how it was how badly you wanted your parents to not talk just to tell you they love you. Don't teach just hold, you don't make you feel worse than you already do just tell you that you're doing a great job, and that you're going to fail, and it's absolutely fine. And you're supposed to and that they 100% believe in you. I remember hearing my mom say, I'm not your friend, I'm your parent during those hard times. And now I know what my mom was experiencing, I get it because I'm experiencing it as well. She was afraid. She wanted to get me to change my ways, because she loved me. She had an idea that if I thought we were tight friends, I would think you know what I did was totally fine. If she didn't show up upset and punish that it meant she was being a friend and not a parent. I remember seeing moms who were the kids friends and being so jealous, they could tell their mom anything. They look so carefree. Well, I felt like I was carrying the weight of the world. It's almost like I took on my parents emotions is what it was. My mom would even use these moms as kind of examples of what she was not and didn't want to be. They care more about their kid liking them than they do about being a parent. Maybe I thought about this now that I'm a parent, and I've looked back at the behaviors of both me and my parents and kind of examined it. I'm not your friend, I'm your parent, the statement feels like ass. It feels as if there's no other option but to feel terrible. that parenting is supposed to suck for everybody involved. Just like everything else I teach. If it's not fun, why are we doing it? Why did you become a parent, I wanted to become a parent. So I could have one more thing to love. The same reason that I wanted to get married not to control my husband, not to control my child to perform in a way so that I had a great feeling, but simply to just love them. Easier said than done. I get that. But to say I'm not your friend, I'm your parent. This statement is basically saying fear me, listen to me or else make the choices that I would make. If you make a choice I wouldn't be proud of don't come to me, You better stay hidden. You are not capable of deciding and making choices on your own. Listen to everything I'm telling you to do. And be that is it possible to be a friend and a parent? What is a friend? So somebody that's a friend to me is somebody that I can trust. Someone that gives me advice based off of their experiences but out of love, and non judgmental, right? They don't care. They're just your friend, someone who will tell you the truth, someone who also makes mistakes themself and knows how to ask for forgiveness. Somebody who will always be there for you, someone who will show up when you need help, or if you're in danger. Okay, does that sound like somebody I want to be? Yeah, absolutely. So what is a parent then? To me, a parent is somebody who loves unconditionally, someone who teaches someone who protects who sets boundaries and follows through with consequences. But somehow we have this idea that if we have an open and honest relationship with our children, we're doing it wrong. that if they aren't shaking in fear, and terrified of the punishment that will follow. So they're acting out of obligation and a mindset of I'm not smart enough capable of not enough of making my own decisions. Mother knows best, then something's off. Does that sound familiar? So think of Rapunzel, the new Disney movie where she I think that she even sings a song mother knows best, right? She's locked up in a tower shielded from the world did mother know best? When she leaves the tower, she goes against mother's will, she makes mistakes, as we could say, as we would kind of label it. But what happened with her in her life, she ended up learning the lesson that she needed to learn to get to the place that she needed. So what would have happened? Had her mother have been her friend, instead of this, you know, all knowing and punishing parent? Well, she probably would have been more safe in the entire movie. I know, she got put in a lot of scenes that could have been, you know, detrimental, she probably wouldn't have wandered the forest with some random dude, her mom would have the least known where she was, she might have still made the same choices, but wouldn't have needed to go to a therapist later on, because she has mommy issues now. And all of that is everything that went on with Rapunzel. But what about Mom, if mom would have showed up as her friend, she probably wouldn't have been a neurotic mess. She wouldn't have had fear and anxiety and went psycho at the end, she would have just been chill, and she wouldn't have tied her emotions to Rapunzel behaviors. So when I had first met Steve, my dad did not like the idea of me dating him. I was 18. And I was still living at home, he was a little bit older. But the first time I hung out with Steve, I actually ended up not coming home and stayed at a giant mansion in Park City where his family were kind of the caretakers there. So I knew that my parents wouldn't allow it. And I knew that they would freak out. So I didn't even call them to tell them I wouldn't, you know, be coming home that I was staying there. I'm sure they were worried sick. I just turned my phone off, because I didn't want to handle the stress of them calling me and telling me not to do it, right. So I didn't sleep with Steve or any of that. But I just stayed the night in this giant mansion. So the next day, my dad had a huge talk with me about how dangerous that was and warned me of what he called Super dates, where they they kind of move too fast, right? And he told me basically, you're just going to lead to pregnancy. And at that time, I was what you would consider in quotes. A good Mormon, a virgin, all the things, I felt like I was pretty good my teen years and I was able to avoid that temptation of not having sex with so many boyfriends that it wouldn't be any different with Steve. But what I didn't like was that my parents didn't believe in me. So when it did go down that I did end up, you know, obviously sleeping with Steve, I wasn't prepared for it. And I felt like the fact that I was so anxious, and not just calm, it was a constant fight against I'm doing something wrong. Not being in line with my true self. It was just this back and forth of I love him, but I can't be with him thing. I wasn't prepared, I didn't feel confident. So when it happened, I wasn't ready for it. This is in no way shape, or form my parents fault by any means. But I did learn a lot from this experience about instead of saying don't do something, because you're not strong enough and capable enough to resist temptation, I can't help but think of a different scenario of I believe in you, you're an adult, you're confident to make your own decisions, I know you're gonna make the right decisions for you. I know the type of person you want to be, I know what your goals are. So you're good. You know, I build me up in that sort of way helped me, you know, have that self love and have that self confidence that I'm ready. But that stems from having conversations as parents not out of fear, and not out of don't do this or else or a worry behind it. It's more of this is 100% your life. I'm just here to teach you and protect you. And I'll be here no matter what. You've got this. And at the time, I'm sure my parents thought this was the worst thing that could have ever happened. biggest mistake of my life. But even today, they would probably say that was the best thing that could have happened and it was supposed to happen. But how would they have known that when having sex getting pregnant was the worst thing imaginable. It was something they were trying to shield me from protect me from. But it was exactly what I needed in my life. And I truly feel like Malia was supposed to be here is how Steve and I were able to, you know come together in any other scenario we would have not been together because I was LDS and he wasn't but in the way that our family is now I can look back on it and say it was exactly what needed to happen. So the idea for parenting is to let your child make the Best decision out of the knowledge and confidence for who they are and who they are becoming. When we say I'm not your friend to them, it becomes then why would I take advice from you. If you say you're not my friend, but then claim to love me, then you ultimately don't care about my thoughts and feelings and my experience, you only care about yours. You claim it's to keep me safe and protected. But you really don't know what would come from that choice. You just want to feel an emotion and you don't want to feel things like humiliation, or you don't want to feel sadness or anger. You don't want to tie whether you're a good parent or not to my behavior as a child, right? You don't want to have to pick up those pieces from a potential long lasting consequence from a choice that I have made. When we can fully disconnect our worth, as a parent, our worth as a human being from our child's behavior and their decisions and choices in life, then we get to just relax, then we get to be our child's friend, then we get to show up as the parent we want to. And that does not mean, you don't actually lay down consequences and rules you do, but you do it out of love. So you're not showing up angry and yelling and fighting, you just simply get to say, I'm so sorry, you made that choice. This is the consequence, and I love you anyways, you know, my husband, I have very different parenting ways and ways that we show up. And I mean, he really likes to enforce, and he really likes to kind of show up angry, like, I want you to know that I'm disappointed in you. And I'm completely opposite, there's no right way. But when we parent, a lot of times, he will kind of get angry at me and say, you know, you're too easy on her or something like that. And especially in this scenario where she made this, you know, certain choice. I think one of his comments where she totally had you fooled, you know, lying to you, or whatever it is. And I think in that moment, he wanted me to maybe change the way that I thought about, you know her or change the way that I showed up as a parent. And I simply said, and I would do nothing different. And tomorrow, I'm still going to decide to trust her. And not because I'm an idiot, but because I feel that trust, she doesn't. If I decide I'm not going to trust her, then my brain has to worry and fear and spin all day wondering things. But when I just decide to trust her, then I just completely get to give her all of her life, all of her power, all of her control. And I don't have to attach to it. And it doesn't make me a bad mom. And it doesn't make me a good mom. It doesn't make me anything. It just is only I feel the emotion from my thoughts. Only I feel the emotion from deciding I am my daughter's friend. She doesn't even feel that she feels her own emotion based off of her thoughts. I can't control that. But I do know that saying I'm not her friend feels terrible. To me, it feels like I am demanding respect and demanding her perform in a certain way. Or else. Like I want this authority of power and control so badly that I'm willing to feel like crap in order to get it. And the worst thing about it is even if I get it, even if she does everything I want her to do. And even if she says all the right things, I actually don't know if it's sincere. So basically, I want you to act in a certain way, even if it's fake for my benefit, just so I can feel like I'm doing something that I'm actually making a difference in my parenting. So as long as you don't do these things, and you keep doing these things, it's a win. No matter what, I know you're not gonna learn anything. And you're not actually growing. But I don't have to worry about that. Because only I have to feel the emotion of Oh, good. She She listened to me. Don't you think that's crazy. That's not actually what we want in order for our kids to have the characteristics. You know, when they're older have honesty, loyalty, integrity, grit, perseverance, hard work, the ability to express themselves and be confident and you know, feel their emotions, all of those things. They don't come from being perfect. They come from their mistakes, mistakes that we are so badly trying to get our kids not to make. Or like me, you just have a list of mistakes that are okay and a list that aren't okay. And even that list is based off of my experience, my failures, my you know, hard times where I felt like oh, this was the worst thing I did. But this was okay. It's okay if you dabble a little bit in this because that didn't lead to anything too traumatic, I guess. So parents, be confident in the way that you parent be confident in the way that you show up. Don't tie. Whether you are a great parent or not to your child's emotions and to their behaviors, you will always be left unsatisfied. and disappointed. Tell your kids, we're best friends. And there's nothing that you can do about it. Say I love you more than anything. And I'm also disappointed in this choice. Thank you so much for coming to me. And for trusting me with his information, I also have to stick to my boundary that I set for you. So I can show up as that mom that you can trust. But I love you. And we're going to get through this. And then keep sending them back out into the world. And every time you do remind them, that they are confident they are capable, they are able to overcome anything, that it's okay to make mistakes. And then as much time as you spend teaching them, spend just as much time if not more, listening to them, validating them, hearing them, this will form that connection that you truly desire. And it will also heighten that friendship that you are really after. And through that through that love that trust that friendship is where you get the respect. It's where you get the loyalty and the trustworthiness and the honesty and the updates of where they're at. And if they're protected. And if they're going to make the right choices, they're more likely to do that, when you have created that environment and that safe place for them. And don't forget, they're still going to make mistakes. But they're not going to add on the shame that keeps them continually making those mistakes, continually not telling you the truth and showing up as a liar and then beating themselves up about it. Create the environment that you're there, no matter what that you will always have their back. And that you know that they are fully capable of having their own back as well. The idea of parenting is that we are preparing these cute little angels, these little blessings, these naughty little teens for the big world. In order to do that they've got to trip a few times, they've got to fall, and they've got to get back up. And they can do that with your help for those first 18 years. And that is where you show up every time and you show up as the mom and the person you want to be. So starting today, I want you to say I'm your best friend, and I'm also your parents. If you're ready to drop the all or nothing in your life, then I would be honored to be your life coach. Head over to the modern mormon.com To start your journey in becoming the confident authentic and best version of you