Do You Care And Do You Want Me To Continue?

From Our Mailbag:

Hi Ben,

Love love your newsletters and writing because I feel terribly helpless right now. I feel like I’m losing my daughter and she just turned 14. I’ve been encouraged by some of your posts and have read Dr. Shefali’s books on your recommendation but I can’t figure out how to fix our relationship.

My husband thinks it’s just a phase but I worry it’s more than a temporary flash because the truth is that I have never been close to my own mother and I’m afraid history is repeating itself.

Yesterday we got into a screaming argument over her phone time that left me in tears. I feel like I’ve lost my daughter to her phone and she despises me. I used to be angry about her mouthiness and lack of gratitude for everything we do for her but now I’m just defeated and don’t know what to do.

I know you don’t have a daughter but hoping you have a word of advice for a fellow parent?

Thank you so much Ben.

Cindy in Somerville

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Hi Cindy - thank you for thinking to write to me.

The first thought I’d like to share is that you are definitely not alone in feeling like there is a large emotional gulf between you and your teenage child. A good friend of mine has been struggling with a similar circumstance, and conversations with clients and colleagues also lead me to believe that it’s relatively common to experience such conflict and emotional distance with family members of all ages.

It’s wonderful that you are familiar with Dr. Shefali’s work on conscious parenting. I would encourage you to treat her books as you would a daily devotional where you consider a passage or two each morning or evening. I’m not aware of better resources than her books to help us parents keep our focus on becoming more whole ourselves, which ultimately gives us the best chance we can have of being the parents that our children need us to be.

These days, whenever one of our boys begins to share a thought with me, I aim to tell myself that above all else, what he is really saying is: do you care and do you want me to continue? I actually try to visualize this as a caption that sits in an imaginary bubble over his head.

My answers are yes, I care very much, and yes, I want nothing more than for you to want to share all the ups and downs of your life with me for as long as we are on this planet.

I’m pretty sure that most parents feel the same. The vast majority of us care deeply for the well-being of our children and we want to be as close to them as possible, to share a bond of unbreakable mutual love and trust.

The challenge as I see it is that we can unknowingly weaken and eventually destroy any such bond with our children and other family members despite having the best of intentions and exerting tremendous effort to show how much we care for them.

This past summer, one of our boys shared with me a thought on a specific aspect of his appearance and a goal he had for it. In that moment as I took in his thoughts, I remember immediate concern setting in - my stream of consciousness went something like: but you are so strong and healthy and wonderful as you are and what if you develop an eating disorder or an unhealthy obsession with your appearance and how will this affect your whole life from this point on?

Thankfully, I was able to keep these thoughts to myself. I even remember thinking that I had to restrain myself in that moment because if I were to offer all of my well intentioned advice and reasoning, this would teach my son that sharing his concerns with me is likely to bring on unnecessary strife and unsolicited counsel.

By the grace of a power greater than me, in that moment, I was able to remember that my son felt safe enough to share a real concern with me. I recall feeling deeply thankful that he was sharing this with me, and also thinking that I really hope he’ll always share with me in this way because if he can’t, then maybe he won’t be able to share such things with anyone else, which would be heartbreaking.

So I remained silent, and after a solid pause, I believe I took a deeper than normal breath and said something like “Ah, yes, son, I understand.” We left it at that and eventually moved on to a lighter topic. A few days later, I was able to find an opportunity to nonchalantly show our son some photos of a few of his favourite athletes in positions that I thought would help alleviate his concern about his own appearance - I tried to do it in a subtle way where it wasn’t obvious that I was referencing his concern from a few days back. He immediately started cracking up, and through his amusement, asked me how much time I took to find those specific photos. He then said “don’t worry, Appa, I love eating.” And just like that, my initial concern disappeared in a poof and our father-son bond was no less.

I share this example not to praise my restraint but rather to highlight what I am understanding to be essential to developing and maintaining a bond of mutual care and trust with our loved ones: above all else, we must put our perspectives and values to the side and solely aim to understand what the other is feeling. Ironically, it’s only after we have offered this level of empathy to our loved ones when we actually have any potential opportunity to provide useful feedback or counsel. Any unsolicited feedback or counsel that is given before we have offered heartfelt empathy may be registered intellectually, but likely won’t be well absorbed by the heart. My experience has been that often, once we strive to understand without our own views cluttering the landscape, if our loved ones feel truly understood, they will actually ask for our thoughts on the matter at hand.

This is what the late Stephen Covey called seeking first to understand, then to be understood. But it isn’t very effective if it’s done mechanically as a technique, as a means of getting the other person to feel that we understand despite our hearts being partially truncated from the matter. It must be done from the heart with full intention to really try to understand - this is by definition what deeply caring is, right? Head-based techniques like mirroring what our loved ones say can actually leave them feeling like they are being manipulated, a feeling that will rapidly erode any bit of trust that is left in the relationship.

Take a moment to think about people in your life who really care enough and have the maturity needed to give you this level of empathy. If you have even one such person in your life, what a blessing this is, as to offer such empathy almost goes against our nature - as Anais Nin once said: we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

When it comes to parenting specifically, Dr. Shefali has said that whenever we reprimand and discipline, we inevitably diminish honest communication - my life experiences have led me to believe that this is a timeless principle that holds true across all cultures. Personally, I shy away from sharing any real concerns or even significant upcoming decisions with my parents because experience tells me that doing so will only bring on heaps of unsolicited advice and warnings based on their own worries and fears. It’s not that my parents have bad intentions; rather, they just don’t understand the value of offering heartfelt empathy.

So Cindy, beyond all that Dr. Shefali Tsabary has to offer on how to parent and live consciously, those are my thoughts in this moment. I am hopeful that some of our readers will share other thoughts and experiences that may be helpful to you and your family.

With best wishes,

Ben

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If you have experience getting through the years of parenting teenage children and can share any thoughts with Cindy,  please consider doing so in the comments section below. Thoughts on how to help growing children manage their screen time in a healthy manner are highly welcome. Many thanks.