Eps 675: When Teen Grades Start Slipping

Joyful Courage is continuing to decide what I want my emotional experience to mean about any given event or experience I am having. Joyful Courage is deciding that I a going to create the meaning that serves me about the way life is unfolding.

Resources:

• Episode 673 with Dr. Stuart Slavin
• The Self-Driven Child by Bill Stixrud and Ned Johnson, plus Ned’s episode
• The Gift of Failure by Jessica Lahey, plus her episode
• The mistaken goals miniseries
• Living Joyful Courage Inner Circle: besproutable.com/ljc, code PODCAST30 for 30% off the year through October 13
• Positive Discipline for Parents of Teens: starts Tuesday, October 13, six weeks, Tuesdays 5:00 to 7:00 PM Pacific, inside the membership

Transcription

[00:00:00] Casey O'Roarty: Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the Joyful Courage Podcast. This is a place where parents of tweens and teens come to find inspiration, information, and encouragement in the messy terrain of adolescence. This season of parenting is no joke, and while the details of what we're all moving through might be slightly different, we are indeed having a very collective experience.
[00:00:30] This is a space where we center building relationship, nurturing life skills, and leaning into our own personal growth, and man, the opportunities abound, right? My name is Casey O'Rourty. I am a parent coach, positive discipline lead trainer, and captain of the adolescent ship over at Sproutable. I'm also a speaker and a published author.
[00:00:53] I've been working with parents and families for over 20 years and continue to navigate my own experience of being a mom with my two young adult kids. I'm so honored that you're here and listening. Please give back to the podcast by sharing it with friends or on social media. Rate and review us on Apple or Spotify.
[00:01:13] Word of mouth is how we grow. Thank you so, so much. Enjoy the show.
[00:01:23] Hello. Hi. Welcome back. Solo show, you and me today. You and me today. There've been a couple really good interviews the last few weeks, but today it's just you and me. And we are a few weeks, if not more, into the school year now. And I don't know about how things are going at your house, but this is definitely the time of year where my coaching clients start to bring things that have a common theme, right?
[00:01:58] The newness of the school year has worn off, progress reports might be coming out, or you've been checking the grade portal where there is absolutely way too much information, and there's perhaps a lot of missing assignments staring back at you, bad grades. Maybe you got an email from a teacher, maybe your kiddo has been telling you that everything's fine, and you find out very much is not fine.
[00:02:27] So to start, I just want you to notice or think about what happens when you see that, when you go into the portal, when you get the email, when you hear the news. Because for a lot of us, the very next thought after seeing that can be, "All right, that's it. Electronics, phone, gone." Right? "No gaming until the grades come up.
[00:02:52] No friends this weekend. We're gonna fix this. We have to fix this. If we don't fix this, you know, it'll only get worse." I totally understand this impulse. We're scared, right? We see the future, we see the snowball effect, and taking things away feels like doing something. It feels like the responsible move.
[00:03:14] It feels like leverage, right? So, that's where we're gonna start today, right there in that moment with a teen who is already behind in school. We'll start in that moment, and then we're gonna zoom out through the intentional ecosystem layer by layer and look at everything that's holding that moment up, and then we're gonna come back to it at the end.
[00:03:36] This is similar to what I did during immersion week last week. I think it's gonna look really different by the time we get back. Before we dive in, I wanna say something out loud, which is immersion week ended. It was so amazing. Oh my God. I loved the parents that came through immersion week this year, and we had a couple returning people, we had a couple people from my membership join, and so much of what I'm gonna share today comes out of the work that we did together last week.
[00:04:07] And then in two weeks, well, in next week, once this show comes out, I will be teaching the six-week Positive Discipline for Parents of Teens class inside the Living Joyful Courage membership program. So you're gonna hear me talk about that today, and I'm wondering how you feel about that. Maybe, you know, I say this, you've been listening for a long time, and we've never actually worked together.
[00:04:33] Just know my mission is to create experiences that are helpful, right? That help you. So let's talk about the phone. The phone. The fucking phone. Such a nightmare. I am totally in agreement about that, and I was actually just in my email today and was pitched a guest who wrote a book about rules for all of us having to do with the phone and screens.
[00:05:00] We are all misusing our screens. We are all misusing our screens. They're getting in the way of our life, of our health and wellbeing, of the way that we connect in person with people. So I just wanna be clear and honest about that first and foremost, right? This is not just a teen problem. And let's take a look at our teens.
[00:05:23] When we take screens away because grades are slipping, what are we hoping for, right? What are we hoping for? Honestly, it feels like this is the only leverage that I have, and we're hoping that the discomfort of not having this thing that they care so much about will motivate them. And honestly, if we're really thinking about what we're doing, we are taking away their connection to their friends, right?
[00:05:52] We're also taking away the endless scrolling, the algorithm addiction. It's messy, right? But we're hoping that they'll miss their phone enough to just comply and do the work, and sometimes that is what happens, right? The assignments might get turned in for a week or two. They might catch up. Until things slide again.
[00:06:12] And now you're back in this dance and this fight about the phone and the grades, and you wanting your teen to care, and them working really hard to basically throw their middle finger up at you and show us, "You can't make me care," right? And in positive discipline, one of the questions that we ask about any tool or strategy, is this effective in the long term?
[00:06:39] Does this move teach skills? Does it invite our kids to develop and discover how capable they are? And stopping behavior for a week doesn't, is a no to those questions, right? And punishment, you know, even the gentle consequence version of it, keeps that whole problem of motivation and follow through with school, caring about school, it keeps that problem sitting in our hands, keeps it being our problem.
[00:07:16] So this is the frame that I've been using. Our parenting, and you've heard me say this over the last few months, our parenting lives inside what I've been calling the intentional ecosystem, right? There's the in the moment, in the moment tools, communication, encouragement, and then there's the systems and routines that live outside of that.
[00:07:39] And then there's the relationship that we're nurturing, that outer layer. And then finally, there's our personal growth and development, our beliefs, our conditioning All of these layers sit nested inside of each other, right? What you can keep in your back pocket around this is thinking about, "Am I okay?
[00:08:00] Are we okay? Does our house work? What do I do right now," right? That's the ecosystem in a nutshell, right? That last question that I just said, that's the in the moment, right? That's where we all wanna start, right? Okay, great, yeah, relationship, systems, I get it, and just tell me what to do right now. And yeah, that moment matters.
[00:08:21] Grades matter. How our kids are intersecting with their education, it matters. And that moment is being held by everything else. It's being held by all the layers of the ecosystem. You and your wellbeing holds the relationship, right? The relationship that you're nurturing with your kiddos holds the way the house runs, and those systems and routines, how the house runs, really influences the moments, right?
[00:08:52] So when the outer layers are shaky, the moment has to do all the work on its own, and honestly, it just can't, and it's why so many parents say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you talk about curiosity," or, "I get it," you know, "I'm supposed to encourage them" or, you know, "I try to communicate, but it doesn't work." It doesn't work, right?
[00:09:13] And that's, again, because those outer layers aren't being tended to, okay? I also want you to hear this. That teen who's behind in school today, they're showing us a moment, and what's underneath the grades, the performance, what we can see on paper, it can look a lot of different ways. It might be a lack of skills.
[00:09:39] It might be them truly not understanding what's happening in the class. It might be them not knowing how to plan, get started, keep track. Those executive functioning skills might be underdeveloped or in development. Actually, they're all in development during the teen years, okay? Nobody is a master at executive functioning at 15.
[00:09:59] It might be a dynamic that looks like you always caring so much about school, so much more than they do, that you've settled into this dynamic where they do as little as possible while you push them along. It might be that their need for belonging and significance has gone sideways, and not doing the work becomes how they get that sense of belonging and significance.
[00:10:26] Or there's no rhythm in the household. They're overscheduled. They're exhausted. There's no room to breathe, right? Or there's no limits around electronics and screen use. Very often, it's a couple of these things at once, so let's go looking for what's going on.
[00:10:52] We've started in the moment. Now let's take a look at how does your house actually run? We're gonna continue to work our way out. So taking a step out from the moment, what is the routine, the rhythm, the flow of your house look like? So a couple of weeks ago, in episode 673, I talked with Dr. Stuart Slavin.
[00:11:12] Hopefully you listened. It was such a great conversation. I loved talking to him. He's a pediatrician and a researcher who has studied the pressure that young people are under, and he shared a story that I think is really important. When he was curriculum dean at St. Louis University School of Medicine, he learned that his first-year medical students had high rates of depression and anxiety, even though from the outside looking in, they looked fine.
[00:11:39] So he proposed they change the system, and the school cut class time by 10%, moved to pass/fail grading, and gave students time for things they cared about, like research, service, mentoring. Depression and anxiety dropped by 80%. And even though those students were spending an hour and a half to two hours less per day in class or studying, their scores on the National Board Exam went up, and failure rate was cut in half.
[00:12:12] It's crazy, right? And I get it. You can't walk into your teen's high school and say, "I demand that all the grading systems become pass or fail." That's not what I'm suggesting. What I want you to notice is what happened in one system when they took the pressure down. Students got healthier. They did better.
[00:12:31] And your house is a system as well, and you have more say in it than you think, right? So let's take a look. Is your child overscheduled? Do you have one of those, like, super crazy overachieving kiddos that wanna do all the things? Is there breathing room in the week? In Dr. Slavin's research, an average high schooler was getting about six and a half hours of sleep on a school night, which is less than the medical students were getting, by the way, and the adolescent brain needs eight to 10 hours of sleep to function optimally.
[00:13:07] A tired brain has a really hard time planning and focusing and remembering what's due. Right? Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do for grades is to really protect their sleep. And yes, I also wanna honor and acknowledge that in some of your homes, there isn't so much too many activities that are getting in the way.
[00:13:29] Perhaps it's that your teen has totally withdrawn, maybe has too much access to screens and technology, and that's what's taken over during the time that they're not in school, and that's getting in the way of good sleep and good study habits, right? We're gonna put a pin in that for a minute. Is there a rhythm to the week?
[00:13:49] Is there a time when homework happens, right? Is there a place where it happens? Is there a check-in that you both know is coming, a neutral check-in, not a gotcha check-in? And did your teen help create those things, those systems? Agreements that we make together during a calm time hold so much better than rules and demands that the parents hand down in a hot moment, right?
[00:14:18] We wanna create a trellis for them to grow with, not a cage, right? Teenagers do not wanna be caged. Power is a major thing, and autonomy, individuation, that pushing away is how they're wired, right? So we wanna create a container that supports their growth and still leaves room for them to grow, right? We want there to be freedom and autonomy within structure.
[00:14:49] So back to that pin. Screens absolutely could factor into this conversation. An agreement that you make and create together about when phones go away for homework and sleep is a part of how your house works, when you normalize conversations around screen use, around everyone's screen use, not just theirs, that Is a powerful invitation for all of us to get a handle on the grip that electronics has on us, right?
[00:15:22] Taking the phone away because of a grade lands as punishment, and our teens can feel the difference right away. This is what we do inside the membership. We talk about building agreements, we talk about running family meetings, we break down and discuss what kind and firm looks like with your actual teenagers.
[00:15:41] It's a big part of what we'll practice during the positive discipline class. Again, I'm gonna tell you more about that before we wrap up. So let's level out now a little bit further. So we talked about systems, routines, the importance of a rhythm. Now let's talk about relationship. Are we okay? Am I understanding my kiddo and their experience, and are they feeling understood by me?
[00:16:06] That's... Those are two very different things, right? Outside of school, how connected do you feel with your teenager right now? Because if every conversation has been about missing assignments, and the way that they're showing up to school, grades, then school performance has become the relationship, and that's a lot for any relationship to hold, right?
[00:16:33] That's not necessarily something our teens are gonna wanna step into, right? So let's talk about a dynamic that I see so often. Parents care so much about school, more even often than their teen does, and that pattern, which can be something that has developed for years, has been that the teen does as little as possible or just kind of rolls with it, and the parents push them along.
[00:17:02] Like I said earlier, we reach for rewards and consequences to keep them moving forward, right? If you get a B, we'll do this. If you don't turn it in, you lose that. And it makes sense that we do this, right? Especially if we're coming from a place where this is only a, quote, motivation problem, right? Like, how can we leverage what they want to increase the motivation?
[00:17:30] And we're so frustrated when it doesn't seem to, quote, work, right? And it makes sense that it's not useful because we've been carrying all the caring about school for them, right? I think about Ned Johnson, who co-wrote The Self-Driven Child with Bill Stixrud, and he's been on the podcast. A big idea in the book that he wrote is that kids need a real sense of control over their own lives.
[00:18:03] Teenagers need a real sense of control over their own lives, and that we can shift from being the boss of their school experience to be in more of a consultation role, right? Dr. Slavin talked about this as well. He pointed out how little choice kids have over their days, over what they learn and how they learn it.
[00:18:26] And I said to him, "When kids don't get autonomy, they tend to go one of two ways: either, 'Fine, then I'm not gonna do anything,' or, 'I'm gonna fight you for the power and take it wherever I can get it.'" Right? And this brings us to the concept of mistaken goals or beliefs behind behavior, and this is one of my favorite pieces of positive discipline.
[00:18:50] I did a whole miniseries here on the podcast around the mistaken goals. I can link it in the show notes. Remember, Alfred Adler is what positive discipline is based on, his work, Adlerian theory. Adler taught us that all of us, our kids included, are looking for a sense of belonging and significance. That's what motivates us, and when a teen isn't feeling that sense of belonging, of connection, and significance, which is mattering and personal responsibility, they come up with a belief about how to get it, and the behavior grows out of that belief.
[00:19:27] With school, the four mistaken goals can sound like this. The first one is undue attention, right? Undue attention. I counter belong when I keep you busy with me, right? And if you're on me about school, at least you're paying attention to me. Look at me. Look at me, right? The second mistaken goal is misguided power, and in the context of school, it can sound like, you make me go to school.
[00:19:53] You make me sit at a desk all day. You tell me what I have to learn, but you can't make me do the work. You can't make me. You can't tell me how I'm gonna do the work. The next mistaken goal is revenge. I don't feel belonging, and that hurts, so I'm gonna hurt. I'm gonna lash out, right? So it could sound like, all you care about is my performance, so I'm gonna hurt you right where it counts, by not performing, right?
[00:20:21] Maybe even offering up some choice words or hand gestures about, you know, telling the story about what I think about you. And then finally, the fourth mistaken goal is assumed inadequacy, right? And this can sound like, I can't be perfect, so I'm just gonna stop trying. That last one connects to something that Dr.
[00:20:38] Slavin is seeing in his research, which is a rise in what he calls maladaptive perfectionism, where kids set the bar so high for themselves that they're constantly disappointed over time could end with why bother? Why bother trying? I can't be who you want me to be, so I'm just gonna withdraw, it's a very low energy, and not care.
[00:21:02] Right? So which of those four things did you have one of those moments of, "Ooh, that could be a dynamic that I'm in"? One of the best clues about which goal you're dealing with is your own feelings, right? If you're feeling annoyed and irritated a lot of times, look at that undue attention, right? And look for ways to connect with your kiddo to really see them outside of their school performance.
[00:21:27] If you're angry all the time, if you feel like you have to win, if that power struggle is what feels like is constantly happening, look at that misguided power place, right? And think about what can you hand over. You know, what can you acknowledge that you don't have control over? We're gonna talk more about that in a moment.
[00:21:49] If you're in disbelief, if it feels like a punch to the gut when your kiddo is, you know, engaging with you about school, or when you're trying to engage about school, look at that revenge place, right? Are they hurting? Do they feel like all you care about is their grades? Own that, and then get curious about what their experience is.
[00:22:13] Start working on relationship. And if you're feeling truly helpless, you know, like all your energy is spent, like you wanna give up, too, that's assumed inadequacy, right? That's where you get to come in, acknowledge the dynamic, really see your kiddo, and come in quietly and lovingly and build some small steps.
[00:22:37] Now, here's the piece I want you to catch. When we take the phone away, we're feeding every single one of these mistaken goals. It gives attention, it's a power move, it adds to the hurt, and it confirms for the discouraged teen that they really can't do it So, what does working on this relationship layer really look like?
[00:22:56] What does paying attention to that sense of belonging and connection really look like, right? Well, it doesn't have anything to do with school, right? It's about time together where you're not correcting anything, time together where you're getting to know the teenager that you have, and what they care about, and what they want.
[00:23:20] It looks like repair, if that's what's needed, right? And owning your own behavior, owning your own influence on the dynamic, if there's been a lot of yelling and/or just quiet aggression around grades. And it looks like handing some of that caring back to them. So I may have told this story on the podcast before.
[00:23:41] I know I tell it a lot, 'cause I think it's useful. When Ian was a sophomore in high school, we took a trip down to Southern California, that's where my family lives, and we toured a couple college campuses, just casually. And we were with my parents. We went up to LA, and we walked the UCLA campus, right? We just walked around.
[00:24:01] He looked around, and he said, "You know what? This is cool. I could really see myself here at UCLA." And I said, "Oh, yeah, you like it? You like it down here at UCLA?" He said, "Yeah." And with a lot of lightness, and a lot of love, and a smile on my face, I said, "Oh, buddy, the store is already closed." And I told him, "You know, there are plenty of other doors to different colleges that are still open, and what you do from now until you graduate, how you get after school from here on out, that really is what decides how many of those doors stay open."
[00:24:42] I didn't lecture him. I didn't, you know, come down on him. I didn't judge him. I just simply stated the facts. Like, "Here's how it works, babe." And I also handed that energetic responsibility to him. I made sure that he could feel, this is about you. This is about what you're creating, and it's about what you want to create.
[00:25:03] That's the energy I want you to feel your way into with your kids. I see you, I believe in you, and you actually are the one that gets to decide what you create here. I love you so much. Underneath all of this, I think what so many of us really want is for our kiddos to care enough. We want them to see a future for themselves, and to know that they can get there.
[00:25:28] We can't stuff that into them. What we can do is keep letting them know that we see it in them, and give them room to find and speak into what actually matters to them. Dr. Slavin said it so well. We don't get to decide what fills our kids up, but we can support them in finding it. And I talk with parents about this all the time.
[00:25:49] Get curious about what your teen wants. What doors do they want to stay open? What is the future they are wanting to create? What do they need to get there? What are the steps they need to take? Break it down with them, and keep sending that message. This is yours to create. I believe in you. You're capable.
[00:26:06] I'm here to support. And then let go. Let them be in the consideration of these questions, and give them space to shift into taking responsibility for their experience, into trying that on. That's how we nurture relationship. That's a piece of it. What about that outermost layer, that outermost layer of the ecosystem?
[00:26:29] You, your growth, right? Am I okay? When you open the portal and you see the missing assignments, what do you make it mean about your teen, about you? Because I know what my brain can do with that. It sounded like, oh, he's never gonna get into college, or she's throwing her future away. Everyone else's kids have it together.
[00:26:50] What am I doing wrong? What if you find out your teen is cheating or lying? What do you make that mean? What's wrong with them? Life of crime, you know? No future. It just must be rotten. They're bad kids. Our kids feel that. Our kids feel our beliefs in them. Dr. Slavin surveyed students in 18 high schools and asked them to rank their stressors.
[00:27:18] Pressure from parents showed up usually around sixth or seventh on the list. Ranked even higher was the pressure not to disappoint their parents. So even when we aren't saying a word, they know what we value. They feel the drop in our belly on some level
[00:27:45] He and I also talked about a phrase that so many of us use. Like, we say, "We just want you to try your best. Oh, we don't care about grades. We just want you to try your best." And we mean that when we say that. We also mean, and what our kids often hear is, your best looks like really good grades. So sit with that for a minute.
[00:28:05] The work in this layer, the personal growth of the parent layer, it's big work. It's getting honest about the stories that we're telling ourselves, our conditioning. So I have questions for you. Can you be with who your kiddo is right now? Can you love and celebrate a mediocre student? Maybe. Maybe you know that they're so smart, and you know they could do better, and watching them not live up to that potential is painful.
[00:28:34] That's yours. That's not theirs, right? And it hurts. It's hard. I wanna honor that, I know. Grades are a reflection, yeah. They reflect the effort that went in. They reflect how much that particular class mattered to your kiddo. They might also reflect the learner they are, their style of learning, their relationship with their teacher.
[00:28:58] You know, grades don't tell you who your kid is. So let's tease that apart. Let's untangle that. And honestly, I was a mediocre student. I went to a college prep high school. My parents told me, "Okay, you better get at least a 3.0 to drive that car." So guess what I got? A 3.0. Just enough. And that feeling of doing just enough stayed with me for a very long time.
[00:29:22] I'll do just enough, right? This external, extrinsic motivation kind of haunted me. I knew they wanted me to do better. This was the bare minimum. That's how I performed. It wasn't ever about what I was learning or any intrinsic motivation for what was gonna come next, what I could create, what I could accomplish, right?
[00:29:44] And there's also in this layer where, you know, our experience with failure and witnessing our kids fail. So Jessica Lahey, right, she wrote The Gift of Failure, um, and other books. She's been on the podcast, and her work is all about how much our kids learn when we let them struggle and feel the natural consequences of their choices.
[00:30:06] Being the witness to that is one of the hardest things that we're asked to do as parents. I know. Watching your teen turn in a half-done/half-assed project or get a grade you know they could have avoided, and not swooping in to save the day, that takes a lot from us, right? We have to take care of our own nervous system while we sit on our hands and keep our mouth closed And there's lots of learning that happens in that tension.
[00:30:37] When our kids are living in that tension and feeling the weight of the missing work or the grade they didn't want, and we don't rush in to make it go away or stay up all night with them, they're finding out what it feels like when they don't show up for themselves, right? And what it takes to climb back No lecture from us can teach them that.
[00:30:58] It only works when we're willing to hold our own energy back while they experience their experience, right? Letting them fail doesn't mean leaving them out in the cold. We don't want our kids so discouraged that they give up entirely. That's where assumed inadequacy can also show up, right, that I talked about a few minutes ago.
[00:31:20] A teen who's already behind can slide... Yeah, there is a snowball effect. Yes, and this is also a place for fierce commitment and loving unattachment. I think the fiercely committed part is the scaffolding, right? We're fiercely committed to our kiddos, so we are creating routines. We are talking about screen limits, right?
[00:31:43] We're getting them the tutors if they need it. We're asking questions and moving through the process of discovering how capable they are in how we relate with them, right? We stay close, we keep encouraging, and we keep the door to help and support wide open. And then we're lovingly unattached to the grade and to the story of how this is supposed to go, but we stay curious.
[00:32:09] Wow. You know? How do you feel about that? That's tough. Yeah. What do you wish would've happened? What would you do differently? Not, well, what are you gonna do differently next time, right? It's not a... We're not coming down on them. We're staying really neutral and truly curious because this is theirs, my friend.
[00:32:27] Their schoolwork, their grades, they belong to your kiddo, as does the growth that comes from, you know, them being with it. When we hover, when we're constantly checking the portal, when we're managing every assignment, we take that away from them. We take that growth away from them. Blaming and shaming and being pissed off, you know, and coming at it as, you know, you've done something wrong and now you're gonna be punished, that also takes growth away from our kids, 'cause they shift from, what can I do differently to, God, my parents are fucking psychopaths, right?
[00:33:05] That's not useful. We don't want them in that head space. We want them in the head space of, like, yeah, what do I want, and what is making this so hard, and what can I do to get there? What is the support I need? We want them to be thinking critically about their experience, right? So our job is to hand the experience back to them and trust them to pick it up, even if they fumble for a while, even if it's messy.
[00:33:28] So here's a couple questions to sit with from this layer of the ecosystem. What do you want your teens to remember about this time in their life? What do you want them to remember about how you showed up for them, right? 20 years from now, they probably won't remember their grade in sophomore chemistry, but they'll remember how it felt to walk into the kitchen with their report card and how you responded to them.
[00:33:56] Depending on how their grades showed up, right? So let's come back to where we started. What do we do right now? Notice how different the question feels after we've explored all the layers of the ecosystem. When there's a rhythm in the house, when some care is going into the relationship, when you've done a little bit of work on yourself around letting go, the moment finally has something holding it.
[00:34:21] So the portal pings again, there's more missing assignments. First, pause Breathe. Make sure that exhale is longer than the inhale, and notice what you're making that portal ping mean, and then go find your kids, and see them before you say anything about the grade. Really look at them. This is the person that you love, and they're having a hard time.
[00:34:46] So lead with connection, something like, "Hey, you know, I saw the portal. I'm guessing school feels heavy right now." And then get curious. "Tell me about that." Validation and curiosity comes first before any talk of solutions. And yeah, your teen might look at you like you've lost it. It might feel weird for both of you.
[00:35:04] Keep showing up that way. Connection, connection, connection before any correction. This is where you get to be curious about what they wanna create, their beliefs about how to get there. Is graduating with their class important to them? What about summer school? Do they want to avoid that? What matters to them?
[00:35:23] This question is big. You know what matters to you. Yeah, you have perspective, and it's easy to believe that you know what's best for your kiddos, and yes, in a lot of ways, you know more, but you wanna raise a teen that moves into adulthood having practiced thinking for themself, right? Having practiced self-drive, having practiced resilience.
[00:35:47] This challenge, this school challenge, is a goldmine for all those skills to be developed and practiced right here. What matters to them? What do they wanna create? How does this... How does it feel to have to take a class that you hate, but it's required? What does it look like to make it work for you? Note, for you, teenager, not for you, parent.
[00:36:10] Then you get to follow up. It might not be the same day. This is where skills come in, right? And you're leaning into a lot of patience and a lot of neutrality. So you can ask them, "Do you know what executive functioning skills are?" They may not. Let them know. A lot of teens who get behind are really just ultimately still working on these skills: planning, getting started, keeping track of things, estimating how long things will take.
[00:36:36] These skills, you know, they're... This teen years, this is where you're developing them and practicing them, and not really good at them. And some teens find it really helpful to create some scaffolding around this. So you might ask, "What's getting in the way for you? Is it knowing where to start? Is it keeping track of everything?
[00:36:54] What would help?" And then offer support without taking over, sitting nearby while they work, if that's useful, helping them break bigger projects into smaller pieces, setting up a weekly check-in. Don't take over Right? But offer these things up. Do you think this will be helpful? What's your plan? That's the consul- the consultant role.
[00:37:14] And a good question to keep asking yourself is, am I solving this for my teen, or am I solving this with my teen? As well as, what am I attached to that would be useful to let go of? That's a major question. Encourage what's real, too. In Positive Discipline, we talk about empowering encouragement, where you name a quality and see your kiddo, that you see in your kiddo, and back it up with evidence.
[00:37:37] When you see them start something hard or stick with something frustrating, tell them that you notice. That persistence belongs to them, and they get to bring it to the math homework or the chemistry project. And I want to say this really clearly. If your kiddo stays behind, even when a lot of support is in place, or they seem stuck in a way that feels bigger than motivation, please reach out for help.
[00:37:59] Talk to the school counselor. Ask about an evaluation for learning differences or attention. Check in with your pediatrician. Dr. Slavin actually talked about this. He shared that parents tend to wait too long before getting their kids support, and things like anxiety and depression can look a lot like not caring.
[00:38:15] Bringing in outside support is part of tending to your ecosystem as well. So I'm gonna bring it home now. Bringing it home. The next time those grades show up, before you reach for taking the phone away, I want you to pause. I want you to see your teen. Lead with connection and love, even if it's awkward and they look at you like you have three heads.
[00:38:33] Let them feel it in your words and in your energy. I see you, I believe in you, and you get to decide what you create here.
[00:38:47] And if you'd like more support with this, now is a great time to come into the Living Joyful Courage Inner Circle. Like I said, the Positive Discipline for Teens class starts Tuesday, October 13th. It runs six weeks inside the membership, Tuesdays from 5:00 to 7:00 PM Pacific. It only happens inside the membership.
[00:39:03] I teach it so that new members can get fluent in the principles of positive discipline, and members who've been around can fine-tune their practice. This is a year-long membership, and it's really where the podcast comes to life. The conversations you've been listening to here become animated and activated in community with real support and with your real teens and your real questions on the table.
[00:39:25] This time of year, as we move into another season of parenting and adolescence, is such a good time to have that kind of support around you. And I'm only sharing this deal here on the podcast, okay? So right now, for the next couple of weeks, you can use the code PODCAST30, and you'll get 30% off of a year of the membership.
[00:39:46] Go to Sproutible. No, sorry. Go to besproutible.com/ljc, all one word, .com/ljc, and enroll in the membership, and use the code PODCAST30 at checkout to get 30% off the entire year. This discount is available through October 13th, when the six-week class starts. All right. That's it. Okay, friend. Breathe. I've got you.
[00:40:15] I see you. You get to trust the process and I'll be back again next week. Thanks again for being here. I appreciate you. Bye
[00:40:28] Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to my Sproutable partners, Julietta and Alana. Thank you, Danielle, for supporting with the show notes, as well as Chris Mann and the team at Podshaper for all the support with getting this show out there and making it sound good. As I mentioned, sharing is caring.
[00:40:45] If you're willing to pass on this episode to others or take a few minutes to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it helps other parents find this useful content. Be sure to check out what we have going on for parents of kids of all ages, and sign up for our newsletter to stay connected at besproutable.com.
[00:41:05] I see you doing all the things. I believe in you. See you next time.