IMPACT: Parenting with Perspective
IMPACT: Parenting with Perspective
Stop Shielding Your Teen from Failure
In this eye-opening episode, Ben, an experienced parenting coach, challenges the common parental instinct to shield teens from failure. Discover why allowing your teen to experience setbacks is crucial for their personal growth and future success.
Learn about:
- The societal pressures driving parents to protect teens from failure
- Why failure is a vital component in developing resilience and life skills
- The unintended consequences of constantly "fixing" things for your teen
- Real-life examples of how overprotection can backfire, including a local sexting scandal
- Strategies for empowering your teen to face and learn from their mistakes
- The concept of an "un-ruinable life" and how it can transform your teen's perspective
Ben shares insights on how to shift from being a "fixer" to becoming a supportive guide for your teen. He offers practical advice on how to respond to your teen's failures in ways that build confidence and resilience.
If you're tired of constantly intervening in your teen's challenges and ready to help them develop true independence and resilience, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in to learn how embracing failure can be the key to your teen's long-term success and emotional well-being.
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By identifying your Parent Trap, you gain the tools to have better communication, resolve conflicts, and build greater confidence in your parenting decisions.
This self-awareness ultimately strengthens your relationship with your teen, which leads to a more open and harmonious connection.
This quiz is your gateway to becoming the parent of your dreams and paving the way for a happier and healthier family life.
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I'm Ben Pugh, and you're listening to Impact Parenting with Perspective, episode 225. This podcast is all about helping parents manage the mental and emotional drama that comes with parenting teens. So they can focus on what's most important, building rock solid relationships and having a powerful impact on their teen's life. Join me each week as I dive into real tools to help you and your teen turn struggles into strengths.
ben_2_09-25-2024_085554:Hello, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for being here with me today. I appreciate that you are here listening. This tells me a lot about you. This tells me that you want to improve your parenting, that you want a better relationship with your teenager. And I'm just glad that I get to be a part of that. I thank you for being here and listening and letting me help you today. We are talking about the problem with shielding your teen from failure. And I would tell you, if you catch yourself doing this, stop shielding your teen from failure. It's okay for teens to fail. In fact, I believe that today's teens actually don't fail enough. And. If you're like me, you probably are starting to see some of the consequences of our teens not being faced with challenges that are hard enough that failure is a real option. I don't know if you've noticed this, but There's a lot of teens in the world who aren't allowed to fail. I can think about one client in particular, his mother would do his homework for him. He was not allowed to fail. She was not going to let that happen. I know other parents who do their teens homework for them, or they let them drop classes when they get too hard so that they don't fail. Or they make up excuses for their teen so that they don't get in trouble or they don't have to pay the consequence for their actions. And there's a million other ways that parents tried to protect their teen from either experiencing failure or facing the consequences of failure. And. A lot of parents believe that this is their job to keep their teen safe from failing, to ensure that their teen is successful. And if you're like a lot of today's parents, you might believe that if your teen's not successful, Then that means that you've failed as a parent. And I'm here to tell you that is not the truth. There is a better way. Now let's talk about why we are afraid to let teens fail. It actually makes a lot of sense that you might be afraid to let your teen fail because there is a lot of societal pressure for teens to succeed. Teens are expected to succeed in the classroom, on the court, or on the field if you're into sports. They're supposed to succeed in the workforce, and at college, in relationships. And not only do you feel, as a parent, That man is my job to make sure they succeed. But your teen also is very much aware of this pressure to succeed. And often it's this effort that parents make to push their teens to succeed and to shield them from failure and which, by the way, This is made with the best of intentions. Like parents are trying to be the best that they can be. They're trying to help their teenager, but this effort to shield them and protect them from failure and really push them and drive them to success. This actually disempowers your teen and believe it or not, it makes your teen feel. Even more pressure to succeed and even more pressure to avoid failure. So I just want to say an unpopular truth, but failure is okay. And failure is actually important. The problem is. When you protect your teenager from failure, it actually deprives your teen of a valuable lesson and the discomfort that comes with failing and dealing with failure, that's an emotion that really reinforces the lesson that is taught. And if you are protecting your teen from failure, you're depriving them of that lesson and of the emotional reinforcement that goes along with that lesson. It's this process of trial and error and the risk of failure that teens need to learn and develop. In fact, there is a ton of research right now that indicates that failure is an important part of developing resilience and future success. And One of the biggest problems I see is that we are bending over backwards to try and protect our teens from that failure, which we're starting to find out. No, no, actually, that's really important. Another thing that I think is important to consider is that when you bail your teen out and you don't let them fail, you communicate to your teen that, Hey, you can't handle this. I better do it for you. And that's not the message that we want to send our teenagers. A few years ago, there was a sexting scandal in my local town where teens were sending nudes and provocative pictures to each other, and a lot of parents tried to hide their teen's involvement because they didn't want it to ruin their teen's life. Well, that attitude makes it even scarier for the teen. The thing that I thought kind of made it even worse is that they brought an expert out from, I can't even remember where, but she was an expert, come to our small town, and the main premise of her message is that sexting ruins kids lives. And here we have, I don't know, probably a hundred ish kids that were involved in this that we're telling them, hey, because you sexted, because you were involved in this, you have now ruined your life. And that is not the message. We need to be sending our teens. Instead, I want to invite you to be teaching your teen that their life is unruinable. We need to teach our teens that you can be responsible for mistakes, for making wrong choices. For failures, but you're also responsible for how to turn those around, how to overcome those. So let's talk about empowering your teen by letting them fail. The truth is your teen needs the autonomy to fail and to struggle to help them grow. To help them develop resilience and to help them learn and to manage their personal independence. Like I said earlier, your teen's life is unruinable. They can make mistakes. They can fail. They can struggle and they can still be okay. I know a handful of grownups who did not graduate from high school. They had to go back and Get their GED. I know some people that had babies before they were married and their parents were like, Oh, no, this is the end of the world. You'll never recover from this. They're fine. In fact, one of the guys that I know that didn't graduate from high school, he's now a doctor. Our teens need the message. That, you know, mistakes, failure, struggles, they're okay. In fact, our teens need more mistakes in their lives, more failure, more struggles, struggles so that they can actively discover who they are, what they value, and to truly develop discipline and resilience. And you can help your teen by showing them you truly believe in their ability to fix any problem, any failure. You can show them that you believe that their life is indeed unruinable. You can show them you can have confidence, even though you're not perfect. You can show them that you have confidence in them, even though they're not perfect. You are confident. In them, who they are and their ability to figure things out and to recover from failures. And the best way to show them this as a parent is by not freaking out. When your teen fails, you can show your teen that, Hey, it's okay to fail by you actually being okay with them failing by you being okay with them paying the consequence of failing and being okay with them making corrections and adjustments. Now I do want to be super clear. Like I'm not just giving all you teens, if there's teens listening to this, I'm not giving you a free pass to just fail all of your classes. I think you should do some work in school. I think you should work to pass your classes. I have met parents who think that their teen is failing in life because they have B's and C's in school. I know parents, I've fallen into this trap, who think that their teenager is failing because they don't have a starting position on their teen. Now, the thing is, I want you to help your teen develop resilience by teaching them that, hey, yeah, You really want to start on that teen. I know you do. And maybe if you don't earn a starting job, that might look like a failure. You might chalk that down, chalk that up to like, this is one of the biggest failures of my life. But the truth is that is an experience. That will help you be the best version of who you want to be. And as parents, we need to help our teens be okay with life not happening the way that they think it should, or the way that we think it should. So do you want to help your teen develop more resilience? If you do, let them fail, turn some of the things over to them that you've been managing for them so that they wouldn't fail and let them experience that on their own. Um, I am starting, I have a 17 year old, he's turning 18 really quick. We're turning things over to him. And if he misses a payment, if he, I, there's all sorts of things that he can do wrong as an adult that he can mess up. I'd much rather he experienced that now in the safety of my home than wait till he's out away and in college and doesn't have any support. So do you want to keep bending over backwards to protect your teen from failing? Or do you want to give your teen the opportunity to learn and grow from their own failures? Learn more at www. plastics car. com And from their own experience, do you want to be the kind of parent who constantly fixes everything for their teen? Or do you want to be the type of parent who has confidence? That your teen's life is unruinable and that they can completely figure out any problems that come their way. I can tell you in the hundreds of parents that I've worked with, it is easier to be the parent who trusts that your teen can figure it out. It is easier to be the parent that. Has confidence that, man, my teen's life is unruinable. They'll learn from this. They'll grow. They will be okay. Everything will work for my teen's good and benefit. That's much easier than spending every day of your life. And I find it's more active at night when you're trying to go to sleep and you're all stressed out and you're like, well, what if they never get into college? Or what if they. Are a terrible spouse and they get divorced or what if, what? I mean, that's catastrophizing. And I want to invite you start placing more confidence in your teen and stop shielding them from failure. Okay. I also want to tell you about my parent trap quiz. A lot of you guys have already taken this and that is awesome. If you need a refresher, go ahead, go take it again. The parent trap quiz. Not only will it tell you what parent trap that you. Gotten stuck in or what parent trap you're most likely to get stuck in. It will also give you access to a free course, parenting from the inside out, and it will help you get out of your traps. It will walk you step by step through a process to get you out of the lost and confused parent trap, or maybe you're in the controlling parent trap or the doormat parent trap, the parent trap quiz. It will help you understand what trap you most commonly get stuck in, and it will help you identify a step by step process to help get you out of your most common parent traps. And you can go take that. It's completely free. You can go to www. benpughcoaching. com slash parent trap It's a quiz. It'll take you less than three minutes. Like I said, it's completely free. And the best part is you're going to get access to this amazing course. It's super short. You can listen to it while you walk, while you drive, while you work, whatever. You can listen to it and you can start getting out of your parent traps today. And I want to invite you go get access to that because right now I'm working on a new thing that I want to give you for free. And when I'm done with the new thing, that's what it's going to be available. And the parent trap quiz isn't, going to be available. So go take it now before it's gone. All right. With that, I will talk to you next week. Thank you for being here. I'll see you soon.