Inside: How our fears and control issues as parents can really interfere with our ability to be successful parents and to raise happy healthy teens
Coming into this parenting gig, I was filled with so many expectations.
You know, things like expecting to have all the answers, a Mary Poppins demeanor, energizer bunny stamina, and Wonder Woman skills at every age and stage. Somehow, I thought all this was not only attainable but reasonable.
Even when life happened and proved otherwise time and again, I insisted on achieving the unachievable. As a result, regret and guilt became an inevitable mainstay in my emotional diet. It took me 48 years of life and 24 years of parenting to realize how damaging my own fears and control issues were for my well-being and my family’s.
What did it take for me to shift away from fear and control?
It started with my body physically breaking down from stress—the main underlying cause being my fear. Fear around my children’s lived experience and overall well-being ran my life. But there was something even deeper beneath that: my fear of unworthiness, not-enoughness, and powerlessness as their mom.
I was always in this state of either looking backward over what I felt were all the mistakes I was making, or worrying forward about screwing up at every turn. Existing in this never ending fight or flight mode, led to serious health issues including gallstones, ulcers, multiple food allergies, and digestive issues. But I wasn’t just making myself sick, my now grown kids also shared with me how much my fear affected them.
I know I am not alone in this department. So many of you struggle with parenting fears and control issues because, let’s face it, none of us want to do wrong by our kids. We desperately want to be all the things for them and get it right. The gravity of our desire to serve them well and the corresponding regret when we ‘think’ we don’t only increase as they age and gain independence. The pseudo-control we imagine having in the early years slips through our clenched fingers more and more as our kids step into their lives.
But the more I tried to control life and attain perfection, the more fearful I became and the more I made myself sick and my children unhappy. Trying to control our children, and especially our tweens and teens, never works.We can only control ourselves and how we respond to life.
And the lens through which we perceive ourselves and the world around us determines the reality we experience. When we continually regret and feel guilty for our parenting choices and mistakes, it’s difficult to experience the joy that should also be part of parenting.
Maya Angelou reminded us that we can only do our best with what we know until we know better. When we know better, then we do better. But how can we know what we don’t know? That’s the funny thing, when we’re trying to control everything and we’re living in constant fear, we often miss the natural unfolding of things and the lessons that come as we just do the best we can in each moment.
The whole point of life is to teach us – because life happens for us, not to us. When we believe we have more control than we do it is then easy to be tricked into thinking we should have done better by hocus pocus. Instead of being willing to accept that we do the very best we can with what we consciously know at the time and give ourselves the grace to know we will do better next time now that we’re more aware. Of course, we apologize to our children and ask for their forgiveness as we learn. But it is essential to offer forgiveness to ourselves as well.
Here are some ways we can better serve ourselves and our families by flipping the script on parenting fear and control.
How to Let Go Of Fear And Control In Parenting Tweens and Teens
Give yourself and your teens the freedom and permission to live and learn
I think we clamor to control or prevent things and steer our kids in certain directions because we believe it’s our job. This is true in the younger years for sure, as we nurture and keep them safe, but the tides shift as they grow up. It’s scary to let go and trust there’s a force at work beyond anything we have control over that is guiding our children. I believe this force is LOVE. But I didn’t have that mindset for decades in parenting because I thought I was the guiding force.
If you asked me back then how to spell LOVE, I would have answered MOM. While I love my kids like crazy and care about every square inch of their existence, I am not their end-all-be-all. I am not their power supply, intuition, or guidance system. All of that is within them. They have different lessons to learn and different experiences they need to process in order to grow and mature into their own identities.
When I make control a guiding principle, it is me projecting my own personal path onto them. There is no freedom for me or them in the process because I’m steeped in fear of screwing up and then paralyzed with regret when I do. My kids are then suffocated trying to meet my expectations and may struggle to learn how to trust themselves.
As our kids become more independent, our role is to be the cheerleader, encourager, words of wisdom when asked, and helper if needed. When we love ourselves and model how to forgive imperfection, we help our kids accept their humanness. For me, I see my guidance as pointing my kids to find their truth rather than pointing them to mine.
Be intentional with curating a harmonious inner landscape for emotional and mental health
If we think, as moms, it is our responsibility to manage the entirety of the external world spinning around our kids so they never suffer, make a mistake or poor choice, hang with the wrong people, or go down the wrong path; we are setting ourselves up for exhaustion and breakdown. Our mental and emotional health is guaranteed to suffer if we live in fear and wallow in perpetual guilt when life inevitably chooses to teach our kids—especially when said teaching comes through our growing pains as parents.
Our moods and our mindsets create the family dynamic and set the foundation for our tweens and teens expectations of themselves. When we can model self-forgiveness, self-love, and self-acceptance then we teach our kids the power of love and trust instead of fear and control. This is how we foster their healthy growth and development giving them the opportunity to become the best versions of the selves they are meant to become. And it all starts with giving ourselves the permission and opportunity to become the best versions of ourselves.
Shift your perspective and create more opportunities to enjoy life
What happened can’t be unhappened. But we can always change our perception of the past by reframing the meaning we assign to what happened. Allowing for a fresh, more life-giving perspective in motherhood and life, in general, is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves, our children and our family. The most important perception we have is how we define our reality and it so much better if we don’t ground that in fear and control, but If we believe LOVE is really where we find our power as mothers.
Don’t exist in a prison, mommas. Don’t just survive. Life is a delight meant to be experienced. Choose to live life to the fullest. Jump in the river and let the current carry you. Paddling upstream, something I did for decades, is exhausting and steals the present moment.
Shower yourselves with compassion first, mommas. You deserve it.
LOVE. LAUGH. FORGIVE. CREATE. IMAGINE. LIVE.
Rinse, repeat.
When you are in the thick of raising teens and tweens, we recommend Loving Hard When They’re Hard to Love by Whitney Fleming. In Loving Hard When They’re Hard to Love, blogger Whitney Fleming shares her favorite essays about raising three teenagers in today’s chaotic world. Written from the perspective of a fellow parent, each story will leave you with tears in your eyes and hope in your heart because someone else is saying exactly what’s been going through your mind.
Parenting Teens and Tweens Is Hard, But These Popular Posts That Other Parents Found Helpful Just Might Make It A Little Easier.
Parents Make the Best Decisions We Can and Then Hope for the Best
Ending the Power Struggle with My Teen Meant Giving Up Some Control
Heart-Centered Parenting Can Help You Navigate the Tricky Teen Years
This post contains affiliate links where we earn a small commission for sales made from our website.
Leave a Comment