The Power of Mindful Parenting: A Guide to More Connection and Less Conflict with Your Teen

Introduction

During the mindfulness process, you do not judge, compare, or try to fix your emotions or mind states. Instead you learn to be fully present to whatever you are experiencing, with a calm, nonjudgmental mind and an open heart.

—Phillip Moffitt, Emotional Chaos to Clarity

Welcome, mindful parent! Yes, I mean you. Chances are that if you picked up this book, you’re already the mindful parent of a tween or teen. You’re no doubt doing your best to raise your child or children with wisdom and good intentions. And yet, despite the fact that you’re a thoughtful, caring parent, you’re still the recipient of a disturbing amount of adolescent eye-rolling and attitude. It’s perplexing to realize that your sweet, loving child has been body-snatched by a surly teenager. You may be asking yourself if it’s ever going to be fun again, while wondering if you’ll even survive the next several years. It will be, and you will. I promise. But first you’ll need some mindful parenting tools at the ready.

Seven years ago, my business partner, Ann Arora, and I developed a workshop called How to Tame Your Teen by Taming Yourself First: A Mindfulness-Based Approach to Parenting, which we’ve been teaching in schools and in our communities around the San Francisco Bay Area ever since. The idea for the class came from our own challenges as parents of teenagers. Ann is a professional psychotherapist with a successful clinical practice in San Francisco where she treats adults who struggle with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, and I’m an executive coach and leadership consultant with close to twenty years under my belt working with professionals to create happier, more productive, more meaningful lives and business cultures. We’re highly trained in the field of emotional intelligence, and yet all too often, we found ourselves reacting to our teens in ways that brought out the worst in us (and in our families).

It became clear to us then that raising adolescents required a trip back to the parenting drawing board. Tweens and teens pose a particular challenge for all parents: when our children were younger, we could exert some influence over them, but as they grow up, we have a lot less control over their actions and reactions. In fact, though we might sometimes wish otherwise, in this phase of parenthood all we really have control over is ourselves. What Ann and I came to see, and what inspired our workshops, was that when we could be less reactive and more emotionally centered with our teens, we had a positive impact on our relationships with them and the health of our whole families.

Our personal parenting difficulties inspired a deeper dive into what we each had been doing in other parts of our lives, just not consistently applying (yet) to our mothering. Ann and I had both meditated for years, and in our professional practices, we shared mindfulness skills and tools with our patients and clients. We wondered if we might adapt some of these mindfulness practices to help us deal with our kids better. As we started to deliberately bring mindfulness skills to our parenting, we both quickly saw that they worked—not always, not perfectly, but when we could be calmer and less reactive with our teens, they were calmer and less reactive with us. This led to the creation of a curriculum that we now share with other parents facing the same struggles.

Over the many years that we’ve taught this class, parents show up for a variety of reasons. Most come wanting to understand this new landscape of parenting teenagers. Often what has worked for them in the past isn’t effective anymore. They want less conflict and more connection during this difficult phase. They want to know when to step in and when to step back. They’re looking for ways to stay calm when their buttons are being pushed. They want to be more present, avoid saying hurtful things, and repeat themselves less. They want to help their teens stay safe while encouraging growth and allowing for those all-important mistakes. They want less distress and more warmhearted moments. Many want their households to be calmer and more fun. When it comes down to it, they want to parent with compassion and kindness and to create and maintain relationships with their kids for the long term. When they leave the workshops, many say they feel like they have the tools to reach these goals—now they just need to remember to use them and be intentional in how they parent.

But not everyone can come to our workshops, so I wanted to write a book to help more parents feel empowered to make changes in their relationships with their teens and hopefully create more joyful, peaceful homes. In our classes we’ve tried to avoid abstract concepts about mindfulness, and I’ve tried to do the same in the pages of this book. Here I offer mindfulness and meditative exercises and techniques that are concrete and directly related to parenting teens. This book is meant to be experiential. There are questions to ponder, skills to try, and meditations to practice. No background in Buddhism or meditation is required, just a willingness to explore some powerful new tools at your disposal.

So why mindfulness? Mindfulness helps us stay present, patient, and openhearted during these intense teenage years. As a parent of a teen, you will inevitably deal with situations and feelings that are unanticipated and unpleasant. Mindfulness doesn’t change what’s going on with our teens, but it can change how we are with them. Mindfulness helps us stay calm and tap into our instinctive wisdom, compassion, and resourcefulness.

This book is written to help mindful parents like you navigate the tricky adolescent years. As parents ourselves and through our work with our parent communities, we’ve seen the benefits of these tools and practices firsthand. We’re not perfect parents—not by a long shot. We’ve each had our bumps in the road and made our share of mistakes. This book is not about controlling your teen; it’s about staying calmer and controlling your reactivity to your teen. Mindful parenting can help you have less conflict and more moments of love and connection in your family.

Chapter 1

The Challenge of Adolescence: Why Parenting a Teen Is So Hard

The dawn of puberty is a stormy period of great agitation when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for its possession.

—G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, 1904

Ponder This

List five words or phrases that describe how you’re parenting your teen.

1. ____________________

2. ____________________

3. ____________________

4. ____________________

5. ____________________

Now list five words or phrases that describe how you want to parent your teen.

1. ____________________

2. ____________________

3. ____________________

4. ____________________

5. ____________________

As psychologist G. Stanley Hall observed in 1904, teenagers have been vexing to adults for a long time. And even if today we better understand the physical and psychological changes of adolescence, it doesn’t make living with our children any less frustrating than it was a century ago. On one hand, they’re still completely dependent on us, and on the other, they’re doing everything in their power to drive us away. This duality can be extremely difficult to navigate gracefully, and it’s often compounded by the loneliness of doing so without a lot of support. Unlike in the baby and toddler years—where parent groups, extended family support, and mommy-and-me classes might have been more readily available—we often face the teen years alone. Some of this isolation is self-imposed. Many of us are more reluctant now to share what’s really going on in our families, because the ways our teens act can feel demeaning and dismissive, if not downright dangerous. And most of us worry that their offensive behavior is a reflection of us as parents. Plus, as our kids get older, we’re less likely to talk about the struggles we face because the stakes are higher. We don’t want our kids’ teachers or other parents to know that our teens are engaging in defiant, risky, or even illegal behaviors. Probably more than at any other stage, we as parents doubt ourselves and may feel judged by others—ironically, at the same time that our kids are feeling more judged too. This perception isolates us exactly at a point when we should be coming together as adults and sharing thoughts, emotions, and strategies for dealing with teens.

The transition from childhood to adulthood is a dramatic one, and for teenagers today, the stressors and expectations are unprecedented. The ever-present access to and influence of social media, which feeds insecurity and creates pressure to present a perfect life, coupled with demanding academic expectations (and the ever-more-competitive college-application process), can leave our kids feeling overwhelmed and inadequate. In the past ten years, rates of anxiety and clinical depression among teens have reached an all-time high. In fact, in 2017 the National Institute of Mental Health estimated that 3.2 million adolescents (13.3 percent of the US population aged twelve to seventeen) had had at least one major depressive episode in the previous year.¹

But there’s no need for despair—parenting mindfully can help you navigate these challenges with more optimism, compassion, and courage.

Adolescence:

What Is Going On?!

One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity—not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification of the range of what we