“What was it about parenting teens that drew us to create this place and thing called Plan P?”
A parent asked
I was at a party recently and was asked how we came to coaching parents of teens, pre-teens and young adults. This question is often asked by, parents and non-parents alike, so I thought I’d answer it here as well.
Although the particulars are complex and more nuanced, the simple answer is that Plan P grew from our personal experience and our recognition that parents are struggling. We became everyone’s “Having trouble with your teen? You should call Quinn and Sarah.” and were fielding calls from parents looking for an answer.
What we had learned, as a result of our experience, was that there is not “an” answer. Our children grow and change, there is no flip from “troubled teen” to “untroubled teen”. In fact, what led us to this work was our recognition that our own teenagers’ “problems” were not just his problems but were family problems. Part of the answer to “How did we get here?!?” and “What can we do?!?” was recognizing our part. Our child was struggling, our whole family was in pain.
It takes a great deal of courage just to start to consider what your options are as parents of teens, young adults (who are not always that young) and pre-teens. Without ongoing support from a professional who understands where you are, often parents stall out and do nothing because there simply are not a lot of one on one, or even small group support and resources, where parents feel safe and supported to make changes. We were lucky. We got to the point where we accepted that sending him to the wilderness was our best option. And, in truth, it took sending him to the wilderness to see our part fully.
In a nutshell our part was that we could see he was struggling, we didn’t know how to help him, and in our fear, we stopped seeing or listening to him.
By “stopped listening” I mean more than the words he was saying. He was not actually saying much to us, and when he was, we were often arguing, or we didn’t believe anything that he was saying. He was hiding much of his life from us, which with hindsight makes sense because we were, at that point, so reactive. We were very consistent in our “helpful” piling on “Why don’t you?” and “You should…” even to small issues.
In our fear we stopped seeing him, although he did spend time at home and we saw him regularly. We got to the point where we only saw what was not happening (schoolwork and on and on) and what was going wrong (smoking, not going to school, yelling).
This is the point in the party conversation when people say “Well, of course you don’t want them to make mistakes.” To which I now reply “These years are the best time to let them make mistakes; while they are still young-ish and they are in a place where you can support them while they learn from those mistakes.” When they are out on their own, the consequences of their mistakes are bigger, because they are responsible for more things.
The mistake that we made was that in not wanting him to make mistakes that would affect the rest of his life, we stopped paying attention to him-to listening to what his life was like now. Additionally, as parents we were afraid for him, and afraid of what it said about our parenting that he was struggling. We wanted him to not struggle -without really understanding what his struggle was about.
In our defense, he wasn’t really able to articulate what his struggle was. We did try to get appropriate help, therapists, mindfulness, ADD meds etc. Then we got to the point where we realized we were not helping him with all our efforts. Thankfully we recognized that what we could give him was the space to figure out who he was without our input -although I don’t think we would have articulated it that way at the time. He deserved time away from us.
He seems to have learned a lot about himself there. We learned a lot about ourselves. A lot. We learned that by being concerned about his every move we had not given him safe space to learn for himself. We learned that although we thought we just wanted what was best for him, what we wanted was based on a bunch of expectations for his future, not all of which fit for him. We learned that as much as we tried to shield our kids from our discord with their other parent, that was an impossible unrealistic goal and all we had done was make it unmentionable. We learned that our family system was loving, but not as supportive of the kids as emerging individual adults. We learned that being open about our own struggles and taking responsibility for our behavior was the best answer for all of us. We learned that we as parents need to understand where our responsibility begins and ends, we need to understand ourselves and our expectations; otherwise it is easy to slip into being the victim or the director, it is too easy to look for what needs to change outside ourselves (“If they would just. . .”) to “fix it”. We also learned that our family’s love for each other was much stronger than any of our struggles.
How to do that is not easy. That learning took time.
In a nutshell we came to do this work because we know that this work is subtle, ongoing, and such a relief. Every family deserves to feel that.
