Back to School With Teens: Connection, Confidence, & Motivation Starts Here

It's 7:00 PM, backpack's by the door. You've packed the lunches, or you remember, I've gotta do that at 6:00 AM, or they've gotta get up at 6:00 AM to pack their lunch. 'Cause now you're thinking about the lunch schedule again. You've gone through your to-do list. You've done the final loads of laundry, or they have. Everyone's in go mode. And the dust settles and you finally get a quiet moment and you start to think a thought that you're not necessarily saying out loud. Will this year be the year that things are different? Or will I grind through another year or watch them grind through another year with more anxiety? And I feel like I'm losing them. I feel like I don't have influence. I feel like I'm depending on the school to show up in ways that's not happening. And we're going to quietly suffer at home or not so quietly. If you have had thoughts like this, if you are about to be running through this scenario or you already are, Welcome. This episode is for you.

Hey, I'm Ashley Chandler, The Teenage Guide. And for nearly 2 decades, I've worked inside middle schools and high schools and with college-age students and family living rooms, helping hundreds of families go from daily conflict and closed doors to real connection with with their teenager. I speak parent and I speak teen, and I create a bridge between you that a lot of other methods can't and won't. If you're navigating adolescence in your home and a version of yourself you're still becoming, you're exactly where you need to be. Let's reimagine the teenage years with science and soul at the forefront. This is the Teenage Guide Podcast.

Here's what I know after 18 years in education and coaching and doing this work. It's never the parents with the least on their plate who get unstuck with their teen, who live with more confidence during the teenage years. Never. You'd think it would be, right? Less stress, more bandwidth, more patience, more time at 7:00 PM. That would make a lot of sense, but that's not what I see. What I see for the parents and the teens who get unstuck from patterns and cycles in their relationships that are toxic, that are draining, that feel like the most stress that they could ever experience, whether it be in their relationships with lying or hiding or secrecy or lack of trust or not doing what they need to do with school or not knowing how to do what they need to do with school, the parents and teens who actually change something, are the ones who make a decision for change. They did not wait for things to lighten up. They didn't wait for their schedule to be less busy. They stopped waiting and they made a decision. So that version of you that's too busy for these big challenges in your life, that version of you doesn't get less busy in October, November, December, you know, The invisible load that moms carry, you know, I know that dads do too in many ways, specifically moms, the invisible intangible load that we carry, especially through the school year, through the holidays, is palpable. That busyness that you're going through right now, it doesn't go away. It just changes. It changes into the seasons. It changes into the expectations, the calendar, the deadlines. Just changes, but it's constant. I'm just so busy right now is a phrase that I now loathe. Being busy is oftentimes a subconscious excuse. We're not necessarily even aware we're using it. And this isn't to make you feel bad if you're busy and you say that. The invitation is to become aware, what are you busy with? Are you busy, focused on experiences, things, people, expectations that are distracting you from the biggest problems or challenges that you face as a parent or that your teen is facing? Because oftentimes being busy is a distraction. I've spoken about this before. I think it's worth bringing up again. It's oftentimes a reflection of us saying yes to things, even unconsciously, that suck up our time and energy and divert our attention away from the things that genuinely would help us. Because us moving towards something like more confidence or more peace or more connection with our teen, we've been convinced that it's too far off. It's not possible. There's also a narrative of when so many clients find me that they've been sold or told of, That's just the way the teenage years are. And I'm here to change that. So the real question isn't, when will I have the time? It's, what am I willing to focus my time and energy on? And stop waiting. What am I willing to focus my time and energy on exactly where I am right now in this busy season? Where am I willing to say yes? And where am I willing to say no? So that's kind of A tangent I just felt compelled to go on because I think it's worth repeating. Oftentimes parents come to me, especially around the back-to-school season. And although I have an education background, everything I do is not just around school, right? But the season of back-to-school presents a lot of challenges inside the home and in your relationship and in your teen's confidence and in their motivation. So in this episode, I want to save you some Wasted time and effort to get you focused on what actually matters this back-to-school season. I know this might be challenging, but here's what not to focus on first. Not the grades, not necessarily the schedule or the consequence for the thing that goes wrong right now. There are 2 things to focus on this back-to-school season: relationships and skills. In that order, 100% of the time. The relationship you have with yourself and the one that you're building with your teenager is what everything else is built on top of. When you work with me, when you're inside my world, you get the upgraded neuroscience to systems to soul toolkit. I call it my Soul to Systems Toolkit. To thrive as an individual midlife adult human and to be the teenage guide that your teen genuinely needs through these years in order to be able to dream big, know themselves, and make their dreams real. That's not poetry. That is legitimately what we do together. And so your relationship comes down to some core elements that I coach you through inside what I call The RELATE method. So I'm going to walk you through it really quickly here. RELATE is an acronym. It helps all different kinds of differently wired brains distill and process and remember information. I heard someone say today, and I thought this was genius, it's so true because working memory is an executive function skill and we only have so much capacity in our brains to hold onto information. And your brain, this person said, your brain is a deletion machine. It is constantly scanning, looking for things that it can delete that it doesn't doesn't need to remember. An acronym or a story or something that rhymes is a great tool to help us remember. Side note. So come back to the Relate Method. R stands for reveal the real you. Authenticity and vulnerability are the gateways to connection. Without emotional dumping, parents. But when we are not authentic, when the way that we are at home is different from how we are Outside of the home, our teenager notices, they are ready to call us on it, and they also lose trust in us. E in Relate is to engage with high-quality presence. What does this mean in this world where we're always on, our phones are always there, we're always distracted? To engage with our teenagers means to practice really seeing the world and understanding their world through their eyes. Without judging it, without declaring it's wrong, without trying to fix it, just trying to understand their perspective. The skill is to listen actively without an agenda. So often, again, we are distracted and we are just waiting to talk. And our teenagers are also, they need to build this skill, right? It's been said that when we become parents of teens, we have to do the majority of listening and they will do the majority of talking. This is really an important skill for us to build, and it's a key part to having a great relationship with them. A in Relate is Attune. I like to think of attunement as like the dials of an old-school radio, and so you're constantly tuning into the frequency of that radio station, and once you get it, the signal is loud and clear, right? This is what is happening on an energetic level. With everyone in our life, including ourselves. And in particular, as it relates to our relationship with our teenager, what they need and what will help us have the most impact is when we attune to them, we tune into their state, we tune into their energy without absorbing their emotion. So they're angry, we sense that, and we can be there without taking on their anger. T is to build trust. Trust is the foundation of any healthy relationship. And I like to say that trust is like a bank account. We want more deposits than withdrawals. Trust cannot be built in a day. It happens in micro moments. It happens in very subtle, small ways all day, every single day in every relationship, particularly the one that we have with our kids. And E in Relate is what I call Elevate. Elevate is to think and act beyond the status quo. We are fed messages all day long that drain our power and our energy as individuals. When we come from a place of elevation in our relationships with our kids, we are able to hold a vision That maybe they can't see. And that's the energy that we adopt when we show up, when we connect, when we listen, when we attune. We don't subscribe to the narrative that there's something wrong with them that needs to be fixed, that this generation is doomed. We come from a place of authenticity and we can be honest, but we also can hold a vision as a parent and as a guide that maybe they can't see. see, and we reflect that vision in the things that we believe, in the things that we say, in the media we consume, in the messages we send about our bodies. We have lots of ways that we can elevate the relationship with our teenagers. So that's R-E-L-A-T-E. Relate is the method that I use to coach parents in how to have the best relationship with their teens. And then skills, Theirs and yours boil down— I like to think about skill building. You can run it through the filter of, where are my challenges? Where are my challenges for myself? Where are their challenges? And instead of looking at those challenges as bad or they shouldn't be happening, we can start to filter them and see that it's a gap in skills. Skill building happens intentionally. It's something that once you become aware of, oh, wow, yeah, I think they're having this social challenge because they need to build some emotional intelligence and communication skills, or they need to work on their boundaries. Or I think I, you know, could really use some support and skill building and awareness because I'm yelling way more than I want to yell. Instead of feeling ashamed or bad, we start to see this is a skill that I want to build intentionally. And it removes the fear and the judgment. It allows us to neutralize the negativity around the challenge. I have a method for skill building. It's very simple and it changes parents' and teens' lives every single day. Maybe you know exactly what I'm talking about. Maybe it's the yelling match that happened 20 minutes ago. Maybe the door slammed when you got home 'cause you asked them about homework and they're like, I just need a break. And then You retreat to your own space and your thought process might be, I'm a terrible parent. When am I gonna learn? Or why can't they just get it together? Like, I'm trying, I'm walking on eggshells inside my own home. I'm lost and I don't know what to do. Maybe it's around school. Maybe it's around perfectionism, procrastination, motivation, losing stuff all the time. You can see how smart they are. Their teachers do not. And so you're wondering, what's my role? How do I help them? feel smart and be successful at school. You don't know how to bridge that gap. Or maybe it's the fine line you're walking with them. You want to be a part of their inner life to some degree. You'd love to have their friends over to your house more. You wanna know what's happening. Do they have a boyfriend? Do they have a girlfriend? What are people doing, you know, in their free time? What are they experimenting with? What is the tea? What is the lore, as the teens tell me? But you catch yourself almost feeling like nagging about it or like feeling like really awkward bringing it up. You wanna approach it right. Sometimes your partner makes it harder and you feel like time is kind of slipping through your hands. Like you've got a short window and you wanna do what is actually gonna be paying off, right? You wanna be able to have that close connection with them where they do share their inner world with you. If you've heard yourself in any one of these, there's nothing weird or wrong with you. When you are in my world, you learn this is a judgment and shame-free space. When we look at any challenge that we're facing through relationships and through skills, we remove the judgment. Again, we neutralize the negativity. We can start to see ourselves as detectives, being curious about our world, being curious about our teen's world, and noticing the gaps that we need to work on, that we need to focus on and pay attention to and dedicate Our time and energy to building. The challenge that you're facing is not a sign that you're a failure. The challenge they're facing is not a sign that they're a failure. It's a sign that you've probably been focusing your time and attention and energy on the wrong level of the problem. And nobody's ever given you an updated version of the relationship and the skills guide that you and your kid both need. And not everyone needs the same amount of support. What you need is classes led by me so that you have the blueprint to be able to start this year and feel really strong and confident and connected. Maybe you and your team need ongoing support to keep it going. Maybe you need that on a short-term basis. This is what all of my offers do. I call it Thrive 3 Ways. There is no wrong path to choose, but the entry point is the same for all of them. It's the relationships and it's the skills. If you want insight into what it actually looks like to build an amazing, confident, connected relationship and build those skills that you're needing with your teen, I'd love to have you join me for my 3-part miniseries, Confident and Connected: The Blueprint for Parents of Teens.

You can sign up at theteenageguide.com/blueprint.

It's simple, it's fast, it's life-changing, and it's cup-filling. Because as I like to say, no more Fs to give and no more time to waste. We are not wasting any more time. We are ready to live the life that we deserve. We are ready to not feel so stressed out, busy on a hamster wheel all the time. We can hit unsubscribe to that right now. I can't wait to see you there. The link is also in the show notes. Remember, never underestimate the power that you have Thank you so much for being here today.

If this episode resonated with you, or if you heard yourself somewhere in it, that is not an accident. You are meant to be here. Come discover more about me and my work at theteenageguide.com, or follow along wherever you are. And if this episode helped you, share it with one parent you know who could use it.

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