How to Be the Parent Your Teen Actually Learns From

Identity is your hidden superpower as a parent.

In this episode, Ben shares a powerful story from the football field about getting out of the victim mindset, redefining his identity, and modeling the exact behavior he wanted to see in his players — and how the same principle can transform your parenting.

You'll learn why your teen doesn’t need a perfect parent… just one who leads with connection, clarity, and consistency.

If you’ve been feeling stuck or unsure how to help your teen, this episode will help you redefine who YOU want to be so you can show up as the parent your teen actually learns from.

Are You Caught in the Parent Trap?

Discover the hidden patterns that are keeping you stuck—and how to break free.

Take this quick (and eye-opening) quiz to uncover which common parenting trap you’re falling into with your teen.
Get a personalized roadmap to help you parent with more clarity, confidence, and connection—starting today.

https://benpughcoaching.com/parenttrapquiz

Transcript

Ben: 0:00

I'm Ben Pugh and you're listening to IMPACT! Parenting with Perspective. 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_1_11-19-2025_124618: 0:33

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I, I'm just excited for Thanksgiving. I am excited for what's going on in my life in parenting, what's going on in my life in coaching, and I just want to thank you for being here to support me. And today we are going to talk about. A really good topic. We're going to talk about identity and how important that is. To you as a parent, and I'm gonna loop in an experience that I had recently with football, even though the football season is over. So before we get started, I just wanted to thank you for being here. I can't tell you how much it means to me that you show up and listen to the podcast week after week, and you share it with your friends. So thank you for being here. Thank you for your support and. We're gonna have an episode, we'll have an episode next week on Thanksgiving. Courtney will possibly be on that episode, or she might not make it back until first part of December. basically we both have crazy schedules and we are navigating that, but she'll be back. She's not gone forever. It's just hard to always make our schedules line up. So. Without any further ado, let's go ahead and let's dive in to this week's episode where we are talking about identity and also the power of review. So, as you know, I coach high school football, or maybe if this is your first episode, welcome to the podcast. I'm Ben Pugh. I do coach high school football and. I recently did my football review. I enjoy reviewing things and like things I've been a part of. What do I wanna make sure that I do again? What would I do differently? What are some of the lessons that I learned here? And this past season was a very impactful season. And this season we hired a new varsity head coach and, those of us who were on staff last season, we had to interview with the new head coach to see if he wanted to keep us around. Now, luckily, I knew this person from a previous coaching experience. I was his freshman football coach way back when he was a freshman, and so I had coached him before, which makes me feel old, but that's okay. Anyways, in this interview, I told him. Word for word. I want nothing to do with the freshmen. I don't like coaching freshmen. I would rather coach the older kids. I feel like I have more to bring to the table and he is like, all right, thanks. I'll keep that in consideration. Now, when he came back to me, he is like, I actually want you to coach the freshman. And I was like, what? I told you I don't wanna coach the freshman. And he is like, no. You were my favorite coach when I was a freshman. We need to build our numbers and I need you at the freshman level to love those kids, to help them love football, and that's where I need you. And first, like he's playing to my ego, tells me I was his favorite coach back then. I'm like, okay, yeah, I can be the freshman coach. But I wasn't excited about it. I was a little begrudging. I was like, gosh, I guess if that's the only place I can coach football, that's where I'll be. Well, we get into the season and we ended up with only 17 freshmen in the beginning. I think we ended with 19, maybe 20. Like this is a group of kids. We should have had 30, 35 football players and we only ended up with 17 and we just didn't have the numbers. Some of the kids who decided not to play were some of the best kids from the previous team, and so in our first game we just got destroyed. It was ugly. We were playing, they were a smaller school, so they had some older kids playing too, but we just got destroyed. And there was a point where some of the other coaches and the athletic director were talking and they're like, man, we might need to move your stud freshman up to the JV level so they don't get discouraged from losing every week and just sucking. And I remember being so frustrated with that first loss was upset that I had to be the freshman coach. And I remember talking to my wife and I'm like. We don't have enough talent. We don't have. Good football players. We don't have enough good football players. We are going to suck all season long. Now. One of the things that I love about my wife is she is not afraid to use my own coaching stuff against me and to just tell me how it is. And there is a point where I'm like, man, I think we're gonna be terrible. We don't have enough good players. And my wife didn't skip a beat. She's like, well. Isn't it your job as a coach to turn average football players into great football players? And it caught me by surprise. I was like, dang, yeah, that is my job. And in the moment I felt like. I was stuck like, man, we are going to suck, and I'm stuck being a freshman coach. And to be honest, I was in one of the biggest traps that I talk to all the time, to my teen clients, my parent clients. I was in the victim mentality. That is one of the. Most damaging traps that you can be in. And when my wife asked like, well, isn't it your job as a coach to turn average football players into great football players? It really helped me pause and think about, well, yeah, what is my role as a coach? And this is an important question for you as a parent. Like, what is your job as a parent? As a parent of a tough teenager, as a parent of a struggling teenager, as a parent of a high achieving teenager, like whatever it is. Really explore what is your role, and if you are like me from time to time, you might get stuck in the victim mentality where you are just looking at the world as happening to you or against you. You're seeing obstacles instead of opportunities and that victim mentality. We'll become a part of your identity and it will hold you back. Now, fortunately, my wife helped me understand this wasn't about the players. This was about me. Who do I want to be as a coach? I can't control what players. Decide to play football and which players don't. It's not my job to manage that. It's my job to develop whatever players come and to not complain about them. And this was just super powerful because as I'm redefining my role as a coach, I'm realizing, no, it's not my job to like. Only win if I have the best players. No, I pride myself in being a good coach. I can turn mediocre players into great players and we can still win. So I want to tie this to parenting. I have had a lot of people come to me recently for free consultations, wanting me to help their teen or fix their teen. The thing is. As a parent, like, sure, I'm happy to help your teen. That is part of my job as a life coach for parents and teens, but I want to give you this little secret. Your identity is the leverage point that will start to create change in your teen. Your relationship with your teen is 100% connected to how well you show up and parent in alignment with your identity. Your relationship with your teen is a direct reflection of how well you are doing at being the parent of your dreams. Now, just like I had to redefine my coaching identity, you can redefine your parenting identity. Now I want to help take you through this little internal shift that I had. I realized that I was making excuses. I was blaming the players. I was blaming this lack of talent. I was being very critical. The thing is, if you get caught in blame, complain, making excuses, criticism, those are sure signs that you are stuck in the victim mentality. Now, my wife helped me remember. I have a superpower. I am really good at coaching teens. It doesn't matter if it's life coaching, if it's football coaching, I can coach teens. I can believe in them, and I can help develop these teens. Now. It was my job to show up and be that coach. To coach in alignment with who I wanted to be. Now in my parenting, I have a 10 word vision statement. In my football coaching, I don't necessarily have a 10 word vision statement, but I know that I am a fun coach. I build connection with my players and I help build leaders. I help them establish an identity that will help them be great football players and great leaders in our community. So me and the other coaches, we had a talk. I'm like, guys, we do not have the cream of the crop. Like there's half of the this class that would've been really good at playing football that they chose not to play. Whatever. We can't control that. Here we build great players. That's who we are. And we don't need the biggest studs to come out and play so that we can win. We can turn the kids that we have into the biggest studs. And we don't do this like, yeah, anyone can win. If you have studs, that's awesome. That's easy. We go the harder route. I complain all the time that our community, we pick our studs way too early. We pick the kid who's the biggest in little league, and guess what? By the time he is in high school, he is not the biggest or the best anymore, and yet we're still riding that same pony. For us, we take the harder route, we develop all of our players. It's not because we wanna win, it's because this is who we choose to be. Now, I wanna be honest, just because I changed my focus and redefined my coaching identity didn't mean that we suddenly won all of our games. We did go on a winning streak. We beat our rival quite handily, and all of a sudden we had two or three kids that wanted to come join our team and they wanted to play because they saw that we were getting better. The more important thing is we competed. We were in every game. I think we only won, I think we only lost two, maybe three games after that first one. But we improved every week. We won more. Most of our remaining games, even against really good schools. And some of the best compliments that I've ever gotten in my coaching was when parents and other coaches who thought we were going to be terrible. They're like, man, I can't believe what you guys did with this team. I can't believe some of the teams that you were able to beat. I can't believe how well you guys played. We were able to turn around because we quit wallowing in the victim mentality. We redefined who it was that we wanted to be as coaches, and we invited our players to redefine who they want to be as players and to show up and practice and be that. Now the winning record, that's not what's important here. That was awesome. I love winning. That was really cool. But that's not the most important thing. The most important thing in my opinion, was the culture that we were able to build and the individual growth and changes that we were able to make individually as coaches and that we were able to see in our individual players. And the cool thing is when you grow as an in individual, people around, you will start to grow. And this is the important part that sometimes parents don't understand. If you want your teen to change, your teen isn't listening to you. You can nag them all day long. They're not gonna change, but your teen is watching your ever every move. If you can be the change that you wanna see, this will help to inspire change in your teen. So here's the lesson. When it comes to parenting. Your job isn't to have a good teen that gets the best grades and they are starting on whatever sport or instrument or band or whatever. Your job as a parent is to be the best parent you can be so that you can have a connection with your teen. It is this connection with your teen that will help you develop your teen and it will help your teen trust you so that they can allow you to help them to develop. It's this identity that will help you lead through example, rather than trying to lead through word alone, like from lecturing or arguing. Be the change you want to see lead with example. When you do this, you will have power and influence in your teen's life. You'll be able to believe in your teen even when they don't believe in themselves because you believe in you and you know, Hey, I turned out okay. I'm doing the best I can do. You're doing the best you can do. You will also turn out okay, and if you can hold this vision and remind yourself. This is who I want to be. That way you can be consistent. You can show up in easy top of the wheel parenting moments or hard, tough, bottom of the wheel parenting moments, and you can be the parent that you want to be. Just like I didn't get to choose my football roster. You don't really get to choose your teens. It's kind of your job to meet your teen where they are and make the best. Of that experience. Parents, you can't choose your teen's personality. You can't choose their emotional wiring. You can't choose their challenges, but you always have the power to choose who you want to be as their parent. So part of the reason this. He's so powerful and so important to me is that I remember as a teenager accidentally lighting my school bus on fire with rubber cement. I remember getting in trouble and feeling like I was on the outside looking in at church, at school, in certain social settings. And I really felt like I wasn't good enough. And I know there were times where my parents wished that they had a son who made better decisions and was way smarter at school. And I know I had church leaders that wished I was a better influence on the other kids, whatever the thing is, no one was willing to meet me where I was and make the best of that with me. I kind of feel like that's what me and these coaches had to do. We had to really check in and realize we're, we are not meeting our teen where they are. We're sitting here wishing we got the other players to come out. We didn't. We can't control that. We're sitting here wishing that the players that we have are better. We weren't connecting with the players that we had. We're trying to connect with the players that we wish we had. And when we took the time to get out of the victim mentality, out of that trap and be the coaches that we knew we could be, that's when things started turning around. So for you as a parent, are you stuck in the victim mentality? That is a powerful trap. It's hard to get out of. Are you stuck in the lost and confused parent trap? If you feel like you don't know what to do as a parent, that's a trap You're stuck in. I'm lost, I'm confused. I don't know what to do. Are you stuck in the controlling parent trap? This is where you think your teen's a problem and you gotta fix'em. Or are you stuck in the doormat parent trap where you hate conflict and you avoid conflict, and you just let your teen walk all over you? The goal is for you to get out of whatever trap you are currently stuck in. By taking the time to redefine your role as a parent, this will get you out of the victim trap, which isn't one of my official parenting traps, but it is a huge trap that. It's a part of all three of the other traps. So I want to ask you, I want to invite you to take action. this is a difference in the people that just listen to this podcast and they feel good and a little hopeful that they can be better parents versus the parents that take action. They feel inspired and they truly turn things around in their family. I want you to decide who you want to be as a parent, especially. When your teen is struggling, and then I want you to practice being that version of yourself. I've given you tools in past podcasts. I don't know if you know this, but my podcast is searchable. You can go to ben puke coaching.com/podcast and you can type in, there's a little magnifying glass that will let you search my whole entire podcast, and you can search 10 word vision statement. That's one of the biggest tools that I give you. You can search identity and hear multiple different podcasts where I just focus on identity and then you can go to work on being the best version of you. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be like movie quality. Like, dang, they're gonna make a movie, movie of me someday. No. Just be the best that you can. And just like football, you get consistent reps, consistent practice, and you get better. Take the time, redefine who you wanna be and then take the time to practice being you. Alright? All right. I just wanna reemphasize you are the catalyst for change. You're more powerful than you realize, and your teen doesn't need a perfect parent. They just need you doing the best that you can and. They need a parent who is willing to lead by example, who's willing to love them and connect with them as they are where they are, and believe that everything is going to be okay because I promise it's you've got this, your teens got this, they're worth connecting with. They want to connect with you except for they don't want to connect with you. They want you to come and connect with them, and that's okay. And I promise you are the right parent now. We will have a podcast next week on Thanksgiving. I'm not sure what we're, we'll talk about. Maybe Courtney will be here. I'm not sure, but I do want to invite you, take the time to. Really redefine who you are as a parent if you go so far as to create your own 10 word vision statement. We've talked about this before. My 10 word vision statement is parenting with love, confidence and curiosity is easy and fun. If you create your own 10 word vision statement, take a minute. On the podcast, go to the fan mail button and. Send me some fan mail, send me what your 10 word vision statement is. I love when I get to see what people are doing in their own parenting lives. yeah. In the podcast, at least in iTunes, there's a little purple spot that says, send Ben a text, shoot me your 10 word vision statement. And if. I get enough, and if we have time, I will share some of those on the podcast. That way as you think about yours, you can hear what other people have done and you can go, oh yeah, I want to add that to mine. Okay. With that, I will let you go. Have a good week leaving up to Thanksgiving, and I'll see you soon.