I'm an astronaut, you're the Moon
I stare at you, I sing to you.

Not a dry eye in my car. Granted, I am the only one in my car, but still.

And I keep thinking about this song because now it is showing up everywhere on social media with parents using it as the soundtrack to narrate reels of their kids leaving for college, or starting kindergarten, and every transitional moment in between. So, clearly, the idea of being the moon while our kids go explore feels universal to many of us.

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But, deep in the throes of adolescence, when your kid is thirteen and the car ride home is seven minutes of nothing, it does not feel like you are the person somebody will eventually write a beautiful song about in twenty years. It feels like you're being left, or like you’re doing everything wrong, or it just feels weird and you don’t like it.

So, you do what loving parents do when they feel someone pulling away: you try harder. You get more interested, more available, more concerned. You do more of the things that used to work when they were 8, because doing more of what used to work is what love looks like when you’re scared.

And why wouldn’t you? For a decade, this was a job you could actually see.

When they were learning to walk, you knew exactly what to do, because the progress was visible daily. They wanted to be upright, so you got the Fisher Price push walker, the plastic one we all had with the farm animals on it. They started cruising the furniture, so you padded the coffee table and gave them two fingers to hold. You could see the exact edge of what they could do and what they were reaching for, and you could put the next thing in their hands. It was hard, but it was legible. Every day showed you where they were and what to offer.

In adolescence, the entire process moves underground. The identity work, the social calculations, the sorting out of what they believe and who they want to be near, all of it happens somewhere you cannot see, on a schedule you are not shown, and the only thing that surfaces is mood. So you are still standing there with your two fingers out, offering help with something you can no longer watch them do, and someone who doesn’t want to grab for your help.

Everyone has walked up to a glass door and pushed. Then pushed harder. Then put a shoulder into it before noticing the small sign at eye level that says PULL. In a lobby that costs you four seconds and a little laugh. However, in adolescence, it costs you a lot more because that fumble triggers your parenting panic button.

Because in moments when we’re fumbling with the door, two start to think two things must be true: you have no power in your own house, or you’re bad at this. You’ve probably decided it’s both. Most of the parents I talk to have quietly settled on both.

Fun fact! It’s neither. You’ve just been aiming all your effort at the one variable that was never going to move: your kid’s development.

Your adolescent’s job is to adolescent. To push on you, to try on identities, to reject things they used to love, to become a person separate from you. That’s not a malfunction or a sign that something is wrong. It’s all actually really good news from the development lens, but it’s grumpy, inconsistent, and hard to tolerate in your house.

Which leaves exactly two things you can shift so all your effort actually opens something:

1. How you show up

2. What you decide their behavior means about them and about you.

That’s it. That’s the whole list. Because trying to force their development to speed up isn’t going to get you anything. I was a huge a pain in the ass when I was 14, and I needed every minute of that assholery to become the strong, self-assured, funny weirdo that you are now coming to for advice.

Here’s what pushing looks like in a really common moment, after school. I want you to see it in the wild before I ask you to stop doing it.

You’ve been carrying a piece of them around since about ten in the morning. You thought about them when you walked past their room, or you wondered whether the thing with the friend group got any better, or if they ate real food instead of just hot cheetos. By the time you’re third in the pickup line you don’t have a question, you have a whole reunion planned. Then the bag hits the floor of the car and you say how was your day and they say fine. Aaaaand… that’s it. Another day where you hoped for more, and got just a little, and it made you feel weird and kind of sad. So you push by saying something like, “Well what did you do today?” and they say, “nothing.” And now we’re off to the races, maybe starting a fight, because our weirdo little brains just want connection and if we’re fighting at least we’re talking!!

Meanwhile, here is what is actually happening two feet away from you.

They have been perceived by four hundred people since eight in the morning. Every hallway was a performance. Every group chat was a performance with a permanent transcript. They have spent seven hours running social calculations at an intensity that would flatten most adults, on hardware that did not update overnight because they didn’t get enough sleep. Then they get in the car with nothing left, and you are the one person on earth they don’t have to spend it on.

The “fine” is not a verdict on you. It’s an ask. For a little space, for down time, for trust that you don’t need them to perform for you too at this exact moment.

But it’s hard to hear it that way when you both want after school to be about you and you both need different things to feel loved. Then, accidentally, your kid’s totally normal, developmentally appropriate behavior becomes a referendum on you.

Of course the closed door feels personal. You think it’s addressed to you. Of course ordinary development reads as disaster, because the only story the culture has handed you about this stage is the emergency one, and without accurate language for what’s happening in an adolescent brain, every normal thing looks like evidence that something is going wrong.

There’s research that makes this concrete in a way I find almost rude in its clarity. Eli Lebowitz at Yale built a treatment for childhood anxiety called SPACE. The child does not attend, not one session. The parents come in, and all of the work is on what the parents do. In a randomized trial, kids whose parents did this improved at rates comparable to kids who went to therapy themselves.

Sit with the setup for a second. Those parents got no readout either. They could not see inside their kid’s head, they were not in the room where the change was happening, and there was no daily evidence that any of it was working. They changed what they did, they sat in the discomfort, they waited, and the kid got better.

That is not a metaphor. That is a clinical demonstration that you do not need to be able to see it happening for it to happen.

And I know it from the other side, because I was the kid. I was not easy. I was scheming and defended and sharp-tongued, and there was a long stretch where my parents could not move me one inch, because I had made not-being-moved into my entire personality.

What they did instead was stay findable. They showed up at the IEP meetings. They found the rooms where I was good at something. They held the line on what mattered and let a startling amount of the rest go by. And they left post-its on my mirror. Even when I was being the worst. Especially when I was being the worst.

I have no idea what my face did when I found them, because I was alone in a bathroom being thirteen. What I know is that I read every single one, that I can still tell you what they said, and that my mother had no way of knowing either of those things at the time.

That’s the part nobody warns you about. You are doing the most important work of the whole stage with almost no feedback, with a person who is not currently in a position to tell you it’s landing. It is going in. You just don’t get to watch it go in, which is what makes it hard to trust.

None of it changed me on their timeline. All of it was still there when I was ready.

They did not get through to me. They stayed available to me, and those are two really different projects. It also happens to be the hardest version of loving somebody, doing it at a distance, into what feels like silence, with no confirmation. But you are not standing at that door with no options. You’re standing at a door that opens the other way, and now you know that. Which means every bit of effort you have been spending gets to aim somewhere it actually moves something.

So try to remember, you’re not getting nothing in that car. You’re getting the first ten minutes of that kid’s entire day when they didn’t have to be anybody. That’s not the door closing. That’s the safest they’ve felt since breakfast.

How to Practice This Tonight

1. Give the first ten minutes to nobody. Snack, their music, no questions. Not silence as a strategy they can feel. Actual, boring, unremarkable nothing.

2. Make Guesses That Feel Better. When they slam something or give you a flat “fine,” your brain immediately writes a sentence about what it means. He doesn’t want to be around me. Say the other one. He’s out of gas and he’s home. Both are guesses. You’re allowed to pick the one that makes you feel better.

3. Boring explanation first. Before you land on the interesting one, rule out the four boring ones. Tired. Hungry. Overstimulated. Something happened at school that has nothing to do with you. Say all four out loud first. The interesting explanation is almost never it, but it’s the only one with your name in it, which is exactly why your brain keeps reaching for it.

4. Catch the pronoun swap. Listen for the moment “he’s in a mood” becomes “I can’t do anything right.” That’s the flip from observation to referendum, and it takes about a second and a half. Say something actively kind to yourself instead.

5. Leave the post-it. Whatever your version is. A note, a snack outside the door, the specific way you say goodnight. Then don’t ask about it. Don’t check whether it moved. Just leave the next one. Predictability is the entire mechanism, and it only works if it doesn’t move when they do.

6. Name your narrator. Your brain has a voice doing color commentary on your kid’s every mood, and it is not a neutral reporter. Give it a name. Mine is Deb, and she has strong opinions about what a slammed drawer means and has never once been right. When the drawer slams, say out loud, “Deb, your story sucks.”

One more thing, and then I’ll let you go stand in your own kitchen.

I’ve been building something for exactly this. An audio course for parents that covers the 5 most common questions that show up in my DMs, because the moments when you actually need this are never the moments you can sit down and read something. You need it in the car outside soccer practice. On the dog walk. In the pantry, with the door shut, getting your three minutes.

So it’s me, in your ears, giving you the research, the perspective, and the words to try tonight, without requiring you to get a PhD in adolescent development before dinner. Think of it as an audio hug from someone who knows this stage, genuinely likes these kids, and is great at turning the science into something you can use, TONIGHT.

Because I think adolescents are some of the greatest humans on the planet. And I really, really want you to think so too.

It’s almost ready. Get on the list and you’ll be first to know when it’s live, plus a discount code that’s only going to the people on it.

Get early access here!

I heard some version of that hundreds of times.

That was a job. After fifteen years in middle schools, most of them as a dean, I built the education foundation for one of the largest digital wellness nonprofits in the country, #halfthestory. The whole purpose of my job was building tools that helped kids understand the relationship between their digital habits and their emotional lives, which meant I read this research the way you read something you’re responsible for getting right. But mostly it meant sitting with adolescents, hour after hour, talking about technology and about their feelings.

Two things came up more than anything else.

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The first: they hated how much their parents were on their phones. Not resented. Not rolled their eyes about. Hated. It came up unprompted, constantly, from kids with zero interest in discussing their own screen time and every interest in discussing yours.

The second: they did not believe they could change their own habits if the adults around them wouldn’t. That isn’t defiance and it isn’t an excuse. It’s helplessness. They can describe the mechanism of an app better than most adults can. They want out. They have simply never watched a person over thirty manage it, so they have concluded, reasonably, that it can’t be done.

And now, I’m constantly reading headlines about how we need phone bans because our kids are all addicted and broken. And then I’m at a playground watching a kid get halfway up the slide and yell “watch this” four times while the adult on the bench says “mmhmm” twice without looking up, until the kid stops asking and goes down alone.

I wrote the note in my car. Ninety seconds, one thumb, really mad.

It has 8.9 thousand likes now. Two hundred replies. And here’s what I didn’t expect: a lot of those replies were apologies. From people I’ve never met. Telling me they were the one on the bench.

Which is when I started to feel weird about it. Because that note was true, and it was also, sorry for the pun, half the story. I do not know what was on that phone. I have no idea. It could have been the insurance appeal they’d been fighting for six weeks. It could have been a boss who doesn’t believe in Saturdays. It could have been a sister falling apart in a text thread.

I looked at a bench and wrote a story, and the story was true and completely flat.

Where the fear gets added

Manuela Kouakou, an MD-PhD who writes My Fertile Brain, published something recently about what happens to developmental science on its way to parents. It named the exact thing I had just done.

Somewhere between the developmental study and the parenting advice, something strange happens. “Experience shapes the brain” becomes: Every choice you make is shaping your child’s brain. “Early childhood matters” becomes: Don’t miss the window. “Stress can affect development” becomes: Your bad day may have caused damage. The science is often real. The translation is where the fear gets added. Good science should enlarge what parents understand—not everything they feel responsible for.

Her point is that the study is usually fine. It’s the trip from the journal to the parenting advice where the damage gets done.

I’m not taking the note back. I stand behind every word of it. But a note is a moment of frustration, and most of what I actually know does not fit inside one. I had years of research, years in rooms with these kids, and a real thing I watched happen on a slide, and I compressed all of it into ninety seconds of certainty pointed at strangers. Then it went to nine thousand people, and two hundred of them wrote back to apologize to a woman they have never met.

That’s the translation step. I did it to myself and then I did it to them.

Here’s what didn’t fit.

The research everyone quotes, and the part they skip

Technoference is real and it has a real evidence base. Brandon McDaniel coined the term, and his work with Jenny Radesky found what you’d expect: higher parent technoference is associated with more externalizing and internalizing behavior in kids. That’s the finding that gets screenshotted. That’s the finding I was standing on in my car. ResearchGate

Here’s the part that almost never travels with it. When they tracked it longitudinally, the arrow ran the other way too. Harder child behavior predicted more technology interference, and it did it through parenting stress. The loop they describe: a parent gets worn down by a difficult kid, withdraws into the phone, and the withdrawal feeds the behavior that wore them down to begin with. NatureSemantic Scholar

So the honest version is not “distracted parents damage their children.” It’s this: depleted parents reach for the one thing in the house that asks nothing of them, and it works, and it costs something, and the cost makes them more depleted. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a person running out of gas inside a system that will not let them stop driving.

You are not on your phone because you don’t love your kid. You’re on it because you’ve been reachable since 6am, the school portal wants a form, somebody has to sort out who’s driving Saturday, and for ninety seconds nothing in that rectangle needs anything from you emotionally.

I know because I do it. I have been the parent on the bench, handling something urgent that was not urgent, while a person who loves me said my name three times.

The cheapest villain we have ever had

Here’s the thing about a scapegoat. It isn’t only aimed at kids.

The phone is a very good defendant. It has a face, it fits in your hand, and you can take it away and feel like you did something before dinner. Blaming it lets everyone skip the rest: a work culture that made you answerable at seven on a Saturday night, schools that put the device in the kid’s hand and then hold them responsible for having it, a country where there’s nowhere for a twelve year old to walk to and nothing to do when they arrive.

None of that is a monolith. Some of it is genuinely good. Some of it we chose. But notice who pays. The kid gets blamed for the behavior. The parent gets blamed for the modeling. And the arrangement that exhausted them both goes unnamed.

Somebody said this better than I did

Candice Odgers is a developmental psychologist at UC Irvine who has spent twenty-five years studying adolescent mental health. Her TED talk last month is called What We’re Getting Wrong About Teens and Tech, and her data is not the data you’ve been handed. Teen violence, drinking, and pregnancy are at record lows. Graduation rates are at record highs. Social media use does not show up in her longitudinal work as a major cause of mental health symptoms in teenagers. In her review of The Anxious Generation for Nature, she argued the rewiring claim isn’t supported by the science, and that blaming social media may pull our attention off the real causes. Uci + 2

The line that took the wind out of me was about space. We already pushed teenagers out of physical public space, she said, and now we want to take the place they gather online, because adults broke that one too. I wrote my own post about teens having nowhere to go, to gather, to messy weirdos getting into some healthy trouble.

Which brings me back to the bench, because that parent was alone on it. Nobody to talk to. The other adults weren’t there, or were on their own benches, and that isn’t a personal failure either. Bowling Alone, one of my favorite sociology books, came out in 2000. The leagues emptied, the block parties stopped, the neighbors stopped knowing each other, and every bit of it happened before the iPhone existed. Priya Parker, one of my favorite facilitators and thinkers around community, has built a career on the fact that we forgot how to gather on purpose. The phone didn’t cancel the block party. We stopped throwing it, the hole was already there, and the phone showed up and offered to fill it.

We kicked kids out of public space. We kicked ourselves out too. Then we handed everybody a rectangle and got mad about what they did with it.

The thing I actually want to say

Ban the phones at school. I’m not arguing with you. It’s also the easiest available move and we should be honest about that. You can ban a device. You cannot ban the loneliness that made it useful, and so far we have not done one structural thing to route any of us back toward each other.

If that note stung, sit with the sting instead of arguing with it. Not because it means you’re failing. Because it means you’re paying attention, and paying attention is the whole skill. I didn’t write it from above anybody. I wrote it because I recognized it.

The phone isn’t what’s between you and your kid. It’s what you both reach for when you’re out of gas and don’t know how to be in a room together. That’s fixable. It’s just not fixable by confiscation, and it was never fixable by shame. And I own that I shouldn’t shame to get my point across either.

How to Practice Tonight 💫

Say what you’re doing. Smallest one, changes the most. Your kid can’t see your screen. To them, a work email and a doomscroll look identical. “This is a work thing, four minutes, then I’m yours” costs nothing and tells them they aren’t losing to a mystery.

Answer the fourth “watch this.” Or the first. Gottman called these bids. You’ll miss a hundred this week and that’s fine. Catch one on purpose.

Ask your kid what they wish you’d do differently with your phone. Then don’t defend yourself. They already have an answer. They’ve had it for years. Just say “yeah, that’s fair.” One uncomfortable minute, and better information than any article will give you.

Find the thing that’s actually draining you. The research says the phone use follows the depletion, not the reverse. So pick one thing in that rectangle that could genuinely wait until nine. Let it wait until nine. That’s the intervention.

Throw the block party. Invite one family over on a Tuesday. Don’t clean. Serve something out of a bag. It doesn’t have to be good. It has to happen.

Nobody sold me that experience. It was free, it was mortifying, and it built something.

I keep thinking about these really specific moments from my own childhood because of the pattern I keep seeing in every sphere of adolescent’s lives. We complain, constantly and loudly, that kids today are glued to screens, that they quit sports, that they can’t tolerate boredom, that they won’t take social risks, that they don’t just go outside. And every single one of those complaints corresponds to an experience our generation got for free.

We didn’t lose Saturday morning cartoons and mall roaming and rec-league mediocrity. Somebody bought them. And then those same somebodies turned around and sold them back to our kids at a markup, stripped of the exact ingredient that made them work.

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The rink is where the receipt prints

I have been trying to find a way to write about this, and then this podcast episode made me so fucking mad I could not keep it in, and it also conveniently outlined a case study of what I am seeing, everywhere.

A private-equity-backed company called Black Bear Sports Group has spent the last several years buying up ice rinks across the country. At some of their facilities, parents are not allowed to record their own kid’s games. Instead, they can subscribe to the company’s streaming service for $25 to $50 a month. Read that again. Watching your child play hockey, an activity you are already paying for, is now a subscription product. Local youth hockey nonprofits have testified before Congress about being squeezed by the model. The hearing was literally titled “Field of Fees.” Michigan’s attorney general is investigating. This is not a metaphor I invented for effect. This is Tuesday.

Zoom out and the numbers get worse. Youth sports is now a $40 billion industry, bigger than the entire American box office, and private equity noticed. The average family spends over $1,000 a year per kid on a single sport, up 46 percent in five years. Travel teams, showcases, private coaching, recruiting platforms, video analysis. An entire economy built on one premise.

And the premise is not hockey. The premise is fear.

Roughly two in ten sports parents believe their kid can play Division I. One in ten believes their kid could go pro. The industry knows the real odds, and it prices your hope accordingly. Every tournament fee is an insurance premium against a fear someone installed in you: that if your eleven-year-old isn’t on the travel roster, a door closes forever.

Here is the stat that should end the whole enterprise. Seventy percent of kids quit organized sports by age thirteen. The reasons they give are pressure and lack of fun. Sit with that. The machine monetizes exactly the years before your kid walks away, and the monetization is why they walk away. The product cannibalizes the customer.

Being mediocre on a team used to be free. It was also the point. The bench, the snack bar, the inside jokes, the ride home, the small miraculous discovery that you can be bad at something in public and survive it. That was the product. Now it’s the loss leader.

It’s not just sports

Once you see the transaction, you see it everywhere: take a developmental experience kids used to get for free, rebrand it as a problem, sell the solution.

Tech companies engineered your kid’s attention into a commodity, and then a second industry sprang up to sell you the blocking device, the monitoring app, the phone lockbox. The arsonist also sells extinguishers, and business is booming on both ends.

The mall roam, the unsupervised hours where kids practiced being people without an adult narrating, got replaced by a dot on a map. We bought the dot for safety and told ourselves the trade was free. When in reality, we never interrogated just how many scary Lifetime Original Movies or episodes of Law and Order SVU had convinced us danger lurked around every corner.

And now, the one that makes me genuinely twitchy: AI companies are selling kids digital companions and toys. Frictionless intimacy, always agreeable, always available. It is the crush phone call with the terrifying dad edited out. Except the terrifying dad was the curriculum. The sweating, the rehearsing, the surviving. Strip the friction from a first relationship and you haven’t made connection easier. You’ve made courage unnecessary, which is another way of saying you’ve made it impossible to build.

None of these companies is evil in an interesting way. They are just indifferent, which at scale looks the same. Not one of them is invested in your kid’s actual wellbeing. That’s not their job. It has to be somebody’s, though.

The family who bought everything

A family came to me last year feeling lost. Not in crisis, nothing was really wrong, but they couldn’t remember the last time they’d all been in the same room without a departure time. Their calendar had been swallowed whole by SAT prep and travel baseball. They were doing everything the success economy told them to do, and they felt disconnected from each other and from their kids, and they couldn’t figure out why doing everything right felt so bad.

Here’s why. Decades of research on how kids actually turn out points to something unglamorous: the single most reliable foundation for a kid’s long-term wellbeing isn’t a resume. It’s a secure base. A family that functions as the place you return to, where you’re known, where your worth was never contingent on your batting average. This family had purchased every ingredient of long-term success except the one that actually predicts it. And nobody sold it to them because nobody can. There’s no margin in it.

That’s the tell, by the way. The things that matter most in adolescence: warmth, belonging, an adult who delights in you, are precisely the things no one is advertising. If it can’t be commodified, it doesn’t get a marketing budget. Which means the most important parts of your kid’s childhood are now the quietest voices in the room.

Stop blaming the kids

One more thing before the hopeful part: we do not get to blame kids for behavior produced by systems we built. They are kids. They are doing exactly what we taught them to do, consciously or not. Run a thirteen-year-old’s day through the ledger. Seven hours of school, two more hours of a sport that stopped being fun a season ago, homework, prep for a test that everyone has agreed to pretend determines their entire future, and every remaining sliver of their attention pre-sold to the highest bidder.

I don’t say this to feed the parental blame machine, because there’s no version of this where you’re the villain either. Nobody designed this economy at their kitchen table; most of us are just paying the invoices it sends. But “they’re lazy, they’re addicted, they’re soft” is a story that lets the actual architects off the hook, and our kids are the ones who have to live inside it. They deserve a better story told about them. And they deserve better, lower-stakes, genuinely fun ways to spend their one childhood. Both of those are adult jobs, and neither one can be outsourced.

The hopeful part, and I mean it

Here is what I keep coming back to, and it’s the reason this essay isn’t just a rant. The countermove is embarrassingly cheap.

Your kid doesn’t need a parent who can out-spend the machine. They need a parent willing to call bullshit on it, out loud, where they can hear you. They need you on the couch for hour three of a show you’d never have picked. They need permission to be gloriously mediocre at a sport because the snack bar friendships are the actual goal.

They need an adult who treats their boredom as an incubator instead of an emergency, and who refuses to believe that a door closes forever if an eleven-year-old takes a season off.

Every one of those moves costs nothing, and every one of them is an act of quiet rebellion against an economy that would very much prefer you stay scared. Because your kid doesn’t need a better program. They need an adult who refuses to be part of commodifying their childhood.

I'm aware of the irony of ending an essay about not buying solutions by mentioning that I sell one. So here's my only defense: my whole job is making myself unnecessary, and the machine's whole job is the opposite. If your calendar has quietly swallowed the thing it was supposed to serve, that's exactly what I help parents untangle, one family at a time, with the explicit goal of not being needed for long. It starts with a single conversation. You know where to find me.

How to Practice This Tonight 🩷 💫

1. Institute an official Household Mediocrity Policy. Announce it at dinner with completely unearned ceremony. In this family, we are allowed to be bad at things we enjoy. Watch what your kid does with that permission over the next month.

2. Binge something together and refuse to call it screen time. Four episodes, terrible snacks, phones in another room, no educational value whatsoever. This is not a lapse. This is Saturday morning cartoons, and you’re allowed to bring it back. If you want something to start a conversation, the animated movie Ron’s Gone Wrong is a great start.

3. If your kid floats quitting the travel team, do not flinch. Take them for waffles. Ask what they’d miss and what they wouldn’t. Then believe their answer, even if you already paid the tournament fee.

4. Call bullshit once this week, narrated, in front of your kid. “This app is designed to keep me scrolling and I resent it.” “This tournament costs more than our anniversary trip and I’m not sure who that’s for.” You’re not lecturing them. You’re modeling that the machine can be seen.

5. When they say they’re bored, say “great” and walk away. Boredom is where the weird zines come from. Protect it like the endangered resource it is.

References

• “Lord of the Rinks”: USA Today investigation into Black Bear Sports Group’s acquisition of youth hockey rinks (May 2026). https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2026/05/07/lord-of-the-rinks-black-bear-youth-hockey/89503875007/

• “Youth Sports Are a $40 Billion Business. Private Equity Is Taking Notice.” The New York Times (July 2025). https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/business/youth-sports-private-equity.html

• “Private Equity Targets the $30 Billion Youth Sports Industry.” Bloomberg (August 2024). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-08-29/private-equity-targets-30-billion-youth-sports-industry

• The New York Times on the stress professionalized youth sports places on families (December 2025). https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/business/youth-sports-stress.html

• “Field of Fees: Private Equity’s Role in the Commercialization of American Youth Sports.” Hearing before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education (June 2026), including testimony from the Kalamazoo Optimist Hockey Association. https://www.wmuk.org/wmuk-news/2026-06-30/watch-u-s-house-hearing-on-private-equity-in-youth-sports-with-comments-from-kalamazoo-hockey-association-leader

• WMUK reporting on the Michigan Attorney General’s inquiry into potential anticompetitive practices in youth hockey, and on Black Bear’s streaming and fee practices (December 2025 and April 2026). https://www.wmuk.org/wmuk-news/2026-04-28/blackbearag0427

• Aspen Institute, Project Play / State of Play: average family spending per child’s primary sport ($1,016 in 2024, up 46% since 2019) and survey data on parents’ beliefs about their child’s D1, professional, and Olympic prospects.

• Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness (2024): approximately 70% of children drop out of organized sports by age 13, with pressure and lack of fun cited as driving factors.

Your kid’s fifth grade graduation. Folding chairs, a slideshow set to a song that made every adult in the gym cry on cue, kids in outfits they insisted on picking themselves. And then, at the mic: “Enjoy this moment, parents. In about six months, they’ll stop talking to you entirely.”

Then came the graduation party. The dad with the beer who “barely survived” middle school with his oldest, who apparently became a stranger who lived in their house and hated them. The neighbor who didn’t get a hug for three years and swears she got used to it. (She clearly did not in fact get used to it and made it real weird). And the aunt at the buffet who looked at your kid, your actual kid, who was twenty feet away eating cake, and said the two worst words in American parenting:

“Just wait.”

Here’s what I want you to notice about that afternoon. Nobody was describing your kid. Your kid was eating cake. But they were handing you a mindset and a story and forcing you to participate.

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The story arrives before the behavior

Every culture has a story it tells about adolescence, and ours is a horror movie. The kid you love gets body-snatched somewhere around twelve, replaced by a hormonal stranger who hates you, and if you’re lucky, the original comes back around sixteen. Ish. Your job in the meantime is to survive it. Lock up the good snacks. Count down to college.

You’ve been absorbing this story your whole life, but the summer before sixth grade is when it gets formally installed. It comes at the graduation, at the party, at the pool, at pickup. And it almost never comes from someone cruel. That’s the part that makes it stick. If a jerk said it, you’d dismiss it. Instead it comes from people you like, delivered as wisdom, as camaraderie, as a little hazing ritual for the parents of rising middle schoolers. Welcome to the club, sorry about your kid.

So here’s what happens in October. The first slammed door. The first “I’m fine” that clearly is not fine. The first eye-roll with real velocity behind it. And you don’t respond to what actually happened, which is a twelve-year-old having a Tuesday. You respond to the prophecy you’ve been bracing for since June. Some part of you goes oh no, it’s starting, and you tighten, and you hover, and you read one closed door as the beginning of the end.

The kids are in the room

Christy Buchanan, a researcher at Wake Forest, has spent years studying what parents expect from adolescence. The short version: parents who expect the teen years to be stormy tend to get more storm, and the expectation predicts the conflict over and above how the kid was actually doing beforehand. Expectations leak. Kids are exquisitely tuned to what the adults around them are braced for, and a kid who senses they’re being treated like a countdown starts to wonder what, exactly, everyone is waiting for.

The prophecy doesn’t just describe the next few years, it helps build them.

And here’s the part everyone at that party forgot. The kids can hear you.

The principal made that joke into a microphone, in a gym full of ten and eleven-year-olds.

Your kid was twenty feet from the buffet when the aunt said “just wait.” They heard “monsters at thirteen” over the sound of their own graduation party. What are you supposed to do when you are 12 and some random neighbor slings their arm around your shoulder and says, “You’re going to turn into a monster aren’t you!” And then laughs too loud at their own joke

They heard the adults they love most laughing, together, about what they’re about to become. They heard a lot of adults they care about suddenly distance themselves from THEM. They file it away too.

Quietly, without anyone meaning for it to happen, kids this age piece together that the grown-ups are bracing. That everyone has apparently agreed they’re about to get worse. Imagine standing at the edge of the biggest transformation of your life, new school, new body, new brain, and the collective adult message is we’ve already lowered our expectations of you. Some kids shrink under that. Some kids decide to meet it, because if the verdict is already in, why fight it. Either way, they walk into sixth grade carrying the same script you do. Theirs just says everyone thinks I’m about to suck.

I was BFF with the monsters, by the way

I spent fifteen years in middle and high schools, a lot of them as a dean, which means I have logged more hours with the exact age group everyone at that party was dreading than almost anyone you know. So let me say something that would sound unhinged at the buffet:

Middle schoolers are some of my favorite humans on earth.

They are creative in ways most adults have carefully trained themselves out of. They are funny, actually funny, not kid-funny. They are earnest enough to break your heart, and brilliant and silly, frequently in the same sentence. And they are so malleable. Whoever they are at eleven is a first draft and they know it, which is exactly why they pay such close attention to what the adults around them seem to expect.

And here is what I saw every single September, watching a new class of sixth graders walk through the door: they were so eager for someone to joyfully welcome them in. Not tolerate them. Not brace for them. Welcome them. You could tell, within days, which kids had an adult doing that somewhere in their life, and which kids were carrying the countdown.

The monsters everyone warned you about at that party? They were twenty feet away, eating cake, hoping somebody was excited they came.

Nobody at the party knows what the hell they’re talking about

Which is this: you’re about to watch your kid become a person. And you get a front-row seat. That is AMAZING.

The next years are when real opinions show up, real taste, a real sense of humor that will occasionally be aimed directly at you. It’s the window where identity gets drafted and belonging gets negotiated, one of the most consequential stretches of their whole childhood, and the culture’s best advice is buckle up and hide the snacks.

Ron Dahl, one of the field’s great adolescent brain researchers, calls this stage a window of opportunity, and he does not mean it as a consolation prize. The same renovation that makes a twelve-year-old sensitive and dramatic and occasionally feral is the renovation that builds their capacity for passion, loyalty, humor, and real connection. Their brain is not shutting down the relationship with you. It’s expanding the machinery, making room for a bigger one than the old version could ever possibly hold.

Which means the closeness you have right now, the hand-holding, tell-you-everything version, is not the best it’s ever going to be. It’s the starter model. The relationship that gets built between eleven and fifteen, through the eye-rolls and the repairs and the weird car conversations, is the prototype for the one you’ll have when they’re twenty-five. The daily phone call. The kid who moves back to your neighborhood on purpose. That relationship doesn’t survive adolescence. It gets built there.

This is not the end of being close to your kid. It’s the start of the version of close that carries you both through the rest of your lives.

Maybe you heard this at a graduation party three weeks ago. Maybe you heard it five years ago and the story has been quietly running your house ever since. It doesn’t matter when it got installed. Sixth grade, eighth grade, the middle of a stretch you didn’t see coming. If you want to head into September with a different story installed on purpose, this is exactly what I do with parents one-on-one. Nothing has to be wrong. Something is just shifting, and you’d rather meet it ready than braced.

Book a discovery call. We’ll talk about your actual kid. Not the prophecy.

XO, Meg

How to Practice Tonight 🩷 💫

• Give the prophecy an author. Write down the exact doom line you got this summer and who said it. “They all become monsters at thirteen. Aunt Diane. June 14th.” A prophecy feels like fate. A quote from Aunt Diane is just a quote from Aunt Diane. And Aunt Diane is kind of an asshole.

• Prep your party comeback. You will hear “just wait” again before Labor Day. Have something loaded. “I know, I hear middle schoolers are hilarious” works. So does “I can’t wait, actually.” Watch what it does to the conversation.

• Name the script like an uninvited houseguest. Ours can be Carol. When you feel yourself bracing at a closed door, check: is this my kid, or is this Carol? Carol thinks every eye-roll is the beginning of the end. Carol needs to go home.

• Ask the cake-eater. Sometime this week, ask your kid what they’re actually excited about for sixth grade. Don’t fix, don’t warn, don’t sneak in a lecture about lockers. Just take notes. That’s the story worth installing.

The girls are crankier because they don’t know how to identify how de-stabilizing losing the routine and community has been. They are also fighting more because they don’t know how to manage the shift from being in the same school together all day to not seeing each other all day. My bandwidth is shorter because I end up being everyone’s emotional support animal and have no time for my own brain time. And my husband is working a big project with tight timelines and long hours. SO! It has just been BLISS over here the past few weeks.

My husband went out of town for work and shit just hit the fan last night. Not dramatically. Just the kind of losing it that happens when you’ve been the only adult in the house and dinner is the wrong shape and someone is screaming about socks and you hear your own voice come out louder and sharper than you meant it to and the look on their faces tells you exactly what you already know, which is that you just made it worse. I got it together. I apologized. I said I was tired and I shouldn’t have raised my voice and I was sorry. Standard repair. I’ve gotten reasonably good at repair.

And then my five-year-old looked at me very seriously and said: the chart says when you’re sad you need a few minutes alone. Do you want to go in your room for a minute?

I almost cried. And then I said yes. And I went and sat on my bed for two minutes, and I came back, and I was genuinely more able to function as a human being. Not because the two minutes were magic. Because my five-year-old had just cared for me with complete specificity, and something in my nervous system went: oh. Someone knows what I need.

The chart is a piece of paper on our fridge. It has two things for each person in our family: your current favorite sweet treat and what you need when you’re having a hard time. That’s it. It looks like this:

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Here is the assumption I want to dismantle, because I held it for most of my adult life and I suspect you might too:

People who love you should already know what you need.

That if you have to ask, something has already gone wrong. That real intimacy means being known without explanation. That good partners intuit. That good parents anticipate. That if someone loves you and still doesn’t know that what you actually need when you’re overwhelmed is fifteen minutes alone, not a hug, not a check-in, not a helpful suggestion about what you might do differently, then either the love isn’t as deep as you thought or you are somehow failing to make yourself knowable.

This is a lie. A very romantic, very persistent, very unhelpful lie.

Nobody knows. Your partner doesn’t know. Your kid doesn’t know. You don’t fully know, if we’re being honest, because what you need on Tuesday when you’re tired and overwhelmed is not the same as what you need on Saturday when you’re just having a slow, sad morning. Needs are not stable. They shift. They’re contextual. And the people around you are not psychic. They are just people.

What the chart does is replace the expectation of telepathy with something more durable: actual information.

I spent fifteen years in middle school classrooms and one of the things I understand better than most is that adolescents are not self-absorbed because they are selfish. They are self-absorbed because their brains are in the middle of the most dramatic remodel of their lives, and that remodel requires an enormous amount of inward focus. They are figuring out who they are, what they feel, what they believe, how they come across, who likes them and why. The self is the project right now. That’s not a character flaw. That’s development.

But here’s what that means in practice: they have very little bandwidth left over for noticing you. Not because they don’t love you. Because they are genuinely, neurologically, developmentally occupied.

The thing I love about the Family Care Chart is that it doesn’t try to fight this. It works with it.

Your teenager doesn’t have to notice that you look tired, put that together with the context of your week, remember that you tend to need space rather than support when you’re depleted, and then act on that observation. That is a lot of cognitive and emotional real estate to ask of someone who is currently using most of their available RAM to figure out why their best friend has been weird at lunch this week.

But your teenager can look at a piece of paper on the fridge.

They can see that your post-it says a few minutes alone and a cup of tea and think: she seems like she’s having a hard time, the chart says tea and space, I can do that. I have seen what a thirteen-year-old looks like when they figure out they can actually do something useful for a person they love. It is not small. It lands in them in a way that vague encouragement to “be more aware” never will, because it’s specific and it worked.

Meaningful feedback loops are central to adolescent development, and when we give them the experience of delighting someone with care, it does not land small. It sends an immediate rush of dopamine and oxytocin that tells them: That felt great! I loved that! Let’s do that more! Our adolescents want autonomy, belonging, and a sense of purpose. Making caring and joy an open book test fills all three of those needs in a way that works directly with that inward focus. I want to be the kind of person who makes people feel good because it makes ME feel good. That is how they grow into the kinds of humans we are proud of, not lectures.

The chart sneaks prosocial behavior through the side door of developmental narcissism. It gives them the information so all they have to supply is the action. And the action, repeated enough times, starts to become a habit of noticing. That’s how empathy actually develops. Not through instruction. Through practice.

The interview is the part that matters as much as the chart itself.

You sit down with each person and you ask. You write down what they say, in their words, not your interpretation of their words. If your kid says their favorite sweet treat is “a Sprite and those specific chips, not the regular ones, the kettle ones,” you write down Sprite and kettle chips, not sparkling drinks and snacks. The specificity is the whole point. Generic care feels like nothing. Specific care feels like being known.

Some version of this conversation will be the best one you’ve had with your teenager in months. I’m not being hyperbolic. There is something about being asked what you need, and having someone actually write it down, that loosens people. Kids who won’t discuss their feelings will tell you what song they’re obsessed with right now. And the kid who tells you the song is giving you a window. Ask them what they love about it. Actually listen. You don’t have to do anything with the answer except care that you got it.

Post-it notes are non-negotiable. Your thirteen-year-old’s needs will not be the same in February as they are in September. Your own won’t either. The chart is a living document, not a permanent record. When something changes, swap the post-it. This is also modeling something worth modeling: that people are not fixed, that knowing someone is an ongoing practice, not a thing you did once and finished.

Hang it somewhere everyone walks past daily. The fridge is ideal. The habit is passive. You’re not asking anyone to sit down and consciously review the needs of their family members every morning. You’re just letting the information exist somewhere visible until it starts to become part of how the house operates.

The thing my five-year-old did for me last night was not complicated. She didn’t comfort me or problem-solve or ask me what was wrong. She remembered the chart, matched what she observed to what it said, and made a small suggestion. That was the whole intervention. Two minutes later I was back at the table, actually present, actually capable.

We are not raising a generation that needs to learn how to read minds. We’re raising a generation that needs to learn how to pay attention and then act on what they see. The chart handles the attention part. Your kid just has to show up with the action.

And honestly? So do you. Because your post-it goes on the chart too. And filling it out means you have to actually know what you need, which for a lot of us, is the work underneath the work.

How to Make Your Family Care Chart Tonight

Grab whatever you have: a poster board, a piece of paper divided into sections, or a sticky note cluster on a cabinet door. One section per family member. Four questions each. Interview them. Write it down.

The four questions: Use mine or invent your own

What’s your current favorite sweet treat? (Current is doing important work here. Ask again in three months.)

What do you need when you’re having a hard time? (For kids who say “I don’t know,” offer options: do you want space, or company? Quiet, or distraction? Give them language if they need it. Write down what they land on.)

What’s your current favorite song? (Follow-up move: ask them to play it for you. Listen all the way through. Say something real about it.)

What’s a chore you hate that you love when someone just does it for you? (This one gets people. Adults too. Something about being relieved of the specific thing you dread is disproportionately meaningful. File this information and use it.)

Use post-it notes for each answer. When something changes, replace the note. No ceremony required.

Put it somewhere everyone passes every day. Not in a notebook. Not in a shared document. On the fridge, or the wall by the back door, or wherever your family’s actual traffic patterns take them.

And fill one out for yourself. Don’t skip this! If you can’t articulate what you need when you’re having a hard time, you’re going to spend a lot of energy being vaguely disappointed that no one figured it out. One of the most important things we can do for our adolescents is invite them into the idea that they are part of the emotional ecosystem of our homes, not the center of it. Remind them that their parents are full humans with needs, and as they grow, their job is to become more accountable to the ecosystem, not more convinced they’re the only plant that needs the sun.

If you want to think through how something like this fits into how your family actually operates, and what else might help you stay connected to your kid through adolescence without losing your mind, I work with parents one-on-one on exactly this. You can book a call to talk about what that looks like.

Book a call here!

Xo,

Meg

My oldest, Lucy, is five and a half. She just graduated kindergarten and is really excited about being a “big kid.” A few days go she announced, with the full authority of someone who has just made an important decision, that she wanted to be more of a helper and start taking out the trash.

She very happily went to grab the bag out of the bin in the kitchen. It was heavy. Not heavy for a grown person, heavy in the way that was telling me, “well this is going to cause a huge issue and make a giant mess.” I watched her grunt it toward the front door and I felt the whole familiar sequence happen in my body: the impulse to say no, the calculation about how this was going to go, the image of the bag splitting on the front steps and garbage rolling into the yard. I very strongly felt the urge to just take it from her, or at least go with her and lift the lid.

I didn’t do any of those things. I fought my instincts and said yes and stayed inside. I waited. I watched from the window like a weirdo for a few minutes and then I made myself stop watching, because if I was watching, I was one step from going out there, and if I went out there I was going to ruin it.

She was out there for a while. Long enough that I started doing the math on how bad it could actually be. And then she came up the front steps, high-fived me, and said, laughing a little to herself: “That was way harder than I thought.” Then she turned around and took the recycling out too.

I want to tell you the Lucy story is easy to replicate. That the same instinct that made me hold back with my five-year-old translates cleanly to the twelve-year-old who has been sighing at me from the couch since noon. It doesn’t, and I’d be doing you a disservice to pretend it does. With Lucy, the wanting was so visible. She announced it. She picked up the bag. She was, for one unambiguous moment, transparent about her desire to matter to someone in a concrete way. That is a five-year-old’s particular gift, they haven’t learned to bury the wanting yet.

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With a twelve-year-old, the wanting is still there. The research is unambiguous about that. But something significant has happened in the years between five and twelve: they have become aware that wanting to help you, wanting to matter to you, wanting your approval, all of that is now in tension with the developmental work of figuring out who they are apart from you. The pull toward contribution is real. So is the pull toward independence. And when those two things collide, what comes out the other side often looks nothing like a kid who wants to be useful. It looks like sulking, or silence, or doing the thing you asked so badly that you vow never to ask again. We read that as indifference. It usually isn't. It's a kid who hasn't figured out how to want something from you without feeling like they're losing ground. And because we read it as indifference, we stop asking. And because we stop asking, they never get the chance to high-five us on the front steps, and neither of us ever finds out what they were actually capable of.

That’s the cycle I want to interrupt.

Andrew Fuligni is a developmental researcher at UCLA who has spent years making the case that adolescents have a genuine, biological need to contribute. Not as a character lesson, not as a chore strategy, but as a developmental requirement as real and specific as sleep. His argument is that we have systematically underestimated this need, in part because the field of adolescent psychology grew up during a cultural moment that was focused on protecting kids from labor, on giving them more, on removing obstacles rather than handing them weight.

The result is that we have an entire generation of kids who are, neurologically speaking, primed to give and culturally situated to receive. And that mismatch has consequences.

Here’s what the research actually shows: the reward circuitry in the adolescent brain is specifically activated by helping others. The same dopamine-rich regions that light up for social rewards, for status, for peer connection light up when a teenager does something that has a real impact on someone else. The brain during this window is not just capable of contribution. It is hungry for it. It is wired to find meaning in it in a way that can reduce depression, buffer against stress, and generate a sense of purpose that Fuligni argues we often go looking for in all the wrong places.

Here is what Fuligni's research actually argues, and it's a little inconvenient if you've been operating under the assumption that chores are basically optional: contribution doesn't just sit alongside the classic developmental tasks of adolescence. It drives them. Autonomy, the thing we spend approximately 80% of our parenting energy either granting or withholding, isn't built through freedom alone. It's built through impact. Through doing something that matters to someone and being able to see it land. Identity, which we worry about constantly and can do approximately nothing to manufacture, is shaped in part by the roles a kid occupies and the obligations those roles carry. And intimacy, the capacity to actually be close to another person, requires practice giving, not just receiving. A teenager who is never handed anything real, never asked for anything that actually requires effort, is being quietly starved of the exact experiences their development is calling for. We think we're helping by doing more. We are, in a very specific and well-documented way, not.

There’s something else happening underneath all of this that doesn’t get talked about enough. Early adolescence comes with a developmentally normal, research-supported self-centeredness. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s the brain doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, turning inward, constructing a self, asking who am I and does anyone see me and do I matter. The problem is that a kid who never gets the chance to contribute stays stuck in that inward loop longer than they need to. Contribution is one of the primary mechanisms through which adolescents move from that necessary self-focus toward genuine cognitive empathy, the ability to consider another person’s experience not just as an intellectual exercise but as something that actually informs how they act. When a kid does something that has a visible impact on someone they care about, and they feel that land, they are practicing the thing that will make them a good friend, a good partner, a good colleague. They are building the neural and emotional infrastructure for caring about people other than themselves. And here’s the part that loops back to identity: kids who contribute develop a clearer, more stable sense of who they are, because their identity is no longer just a private internal question. It’s something they can point to. I’m someone who helps. I’m someone whose effort matters. That is not a small thing to hand a kid.

There’s one more thing worth naming: contribution that goes unrecognized doesn’t count. Fuligni is careful about this. It’s not enough to hand a kid a task. The impact has to land. They have to be able to feel that their effort did something, changed something, mattered to someone. Which means the parent’s job isn’t just to ask more. It’s to wait on the steps. To receive the high five. To let them come back in and feel the weight of what they just did.

Summer is, structurally speaking, the best possible time to experiment with this.

I know that’s not what summer feels like from inside it. From inside it, summer is a long unstructured argument about screens and nobody knowing where the good scissors went. But remove the schedule, the homework, the performance demands, the constant assessment, and what you actually have is the lowest-stakes window of the year to try something different. To hand them something real without worrying that it’ll destabilize everything else.

Before you start mentally redistributing tasks, there’s a move worth making first. Ask them. Not in a sit-down-we-need-to-talk way, not with a preamble about responsibility and growing up, but in the way you’d ask anyone who lives in your house and is part of how it runs: what do you actually want to help with this summer? Where do you want to have a role? Some kids will shrug. Some will say something surprisingly specific. Some will say “I don’t know” and then think about it for three days and come back with an answer. All of those are fine. The point isn’t to get a perfect answer. The point is to signal that they are on the team, that the team has a role for them, and that you genuinely want to know what that role should look like. That signal alone does more than most of us expect.

Think about where, right now, you are doing something for your kid that they could do instead. Not something you’re doing because they literally can’t do it. Something you’re doing because it’s faster, or because the last time you asked it went sideways and you didn’t want a fight, or because somewhere along the way it just became yours. The laundry. The grocery list. The call to reschedule the appointment. The decision about where the family eats dinner Friday night. The judgment call about whether the thing in the fridge is still good.

These are not small things I’m describing. They are, in aggregate, the entire experience of being a competent person in the world. And your kid is watching you do all of it, every day, while their hands are empty.

Summer is when you can start putting things in those hands. Not all at once. Not with a lecture about responsibility. Just, quietly, like you’re staying inside while they take the trash out, start saying yes when they reach for something. Start asking for their opinion on things you’d normally just decide. Start letting something go sideways and not fixing it. Start noticing, out loud, when their effort changed something for you.

A brief word on what to do when you try this and they look at you like you’ve just asked them to explain the federal budget. First: do not take it personally. I know that sounds easy and isn’t. But their lukewarm response to your genuine, well-intentioned invitation to be part of something is not a verdict on your relationship or your parenting. It is a twelve-year-old being a twelve-year-old, which is a full-time job with very specific performance requirements, none of which include making you feel good about your ideas in the moment. Try again in a week. Try it more casually. Try it in the car, where nobody has to make eye contact and things land differently for reasons neuroscience is still sorting out. The research is clear that even kids who resist contribution in the moment report feeling more competent and more connected when they’ve actually been given a real role.

If you've made it to the end of this and you're now staring at your kid on the couch wondering how you accidentally became their full-time support staff, hi, that's what I'm here for. I work with parents one-on-one to figure out exactly this: where you took over without meaning to, and how to start handing things back without it turning into a whole thing. Book a call and let's talk.

How to Practice 🩷 💫

• Pick one thing you do every day that could belong to them and just... stop doing it. Don’t announce it. Don’t explain it. Don’t leave a note. Just stop. See how long it takes them to notice. See what they do about it. This is data.

• Ask for their opinion on something real, then actually let it land. Not “do you want chicken or pasta.” Something where their answer might change what happens. What should we do about the neighbor situation. Do you think I handled that right. Where should we go for the long weekend. Then close your mouth and listen like you might actually be wrong. You might actually be wrong.

• Let the job be done badly and do not make a single sound about it. Not a sound. Not a small inhale. Not a look. If you hand them something and then stand there radiating feedback through your pores, you have not handed them anything. You have just invented a more demoralizing kind of chore. Let it be crooked. Let it be inefficient. Walk away and think about something else. The dishes can be rewashed. The relationship cannot.

• Find one moment a week to say “that actually helped me” out loud, directly, to their face. Not “good job,” which is about them. “That helped me,” which is about the effect. This feels small. It is not small. Their brain is sitting there waiting to find out if their effort landed somewhere. Land it for them.

• Give them a real family problem to solve and then leave the room. Not a fake problem you already solved. An actual open question. The camping trip logistics. What to do about the thing with grandma. Hand it to them like you mean it, and then go do something else, and try to look less surprised when they figure it out.

You’re present, you’re asking questions, you text back within minutes. You know their friends’ names and the drama from last Tuesday. You show up to everything. You keep the fridge stocked with the right snacks.

And somehow your kid still feels far away and you don’t understand why.

I hear this almost every week. A parent comes to me about their kid, and then, almost every time, we end up somewhere else entirely: with you. With what you’re carrying.

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Nobody told you that loving a kid through early adolescence would require you to get a lot more comfortable with not knowing. That the very instincts that kept them safe as little kids would start to feel like they’re working against you. That your nervous system would essentially stage a coup every time the bedroom door closed. This is not a character flaw. It is a completely logical response to a genuinely disorienting season.

There is a version of staying close that is actually about managing your own anxiety.

Checking in because you need to know they’re okay, not because they asked to be checked on. Following up on the conversation not because they wanted to continue it, but because you’re not done processing it yet. Being available every minute because the alternative, not knowing, is just genuinely intolerable.

It feels like closeness. It might even look like closeness from the outside. But the engine running underneath it is fear, not connection. And the kid on the receiving end can feel the difference, even if they couldn’t explain it in a million years.

Eli Lebowitz’s research on anxiety started with clinical families, but the pattern he identified reaches way past just helping kids with anxiety. His work is all about parents shifting their behavior with no asks of the kid. The parent has to stop accommodating, the parent has to stop accidentally sending their kid the message that yes, that are unable to manage.

When parents reorganize their behavior around a child’s discomfort (monitoring, smoothing, anticipating, heading things off at the pass) the intention is love. Full stop. What’s sneaky about this stage is that the same moves that worked beautifully when they were seven start to land differently on a twelve-year-old who is actively, urgently trying to figure out who they are outside of us.

Every time we ask the same question three different ways hoping for a better answer, every time we can’t quite let a hard conversation be over, every time we check their location like it’s a slot machine that might finally pay out, we are showing them in real time what it looks like to struggle with uncertainty.

Here’s what that shift can look like from inside a twelve-year-old, and I want to say this gently because it’s not an accusation. They know when you need them to be okay. Not because you told them, but because they’ve been reading you their whole life, the way kids do. They know the difference between a question you’re asking because you’re genuinely curious and a question you’re asking because you need a specific answer. They know when “how was school” is actually “please give me something that lets me stop worrying.”

So they start curating. They give you the version that keeps things calm. They figure out which feelings are safe to bring home and which ones might land too heavily. Not in punishment, but in the conversation that follows, the follow-up texts, the look on your face that they love too much to put there. They are trying to protect you. They learned that from you, actually. You protected them for years.

Slowly, almost invisibly, they stop bringing the real stuff. Not because they don’t trust you. Because the real stuff is complicated and they’re already carrying a lot and “I’m fine” is so much lighter. And then you feel them pulling away. And then you reach more. And then they step back more. Not out of cruelty, out of the same love that started all of this.

This is the cycle. Nobody built it on purpose. It assembled itself out of good intentions on both sides.

Closeness is a gift. It asks nothing back. Control is a transaction. It needs the kid to perform safety, openness, reassurance, proof that everything is okay, back at the parent. These are not the same thing, even when they’re wearing the exact same outfit. And some of the control is actually grief.

You’re tracking them so closely because you can feel them pulling away and you don’t want to miss a single inch of it. You remember when they told you everything. When they reached for your hand in parking lots. When you were the first person they looked for in a room. That kid is still in there. You can see them in flashes. But something is shifting, and you can feel it before you can name it, and you don’t quite know how to stay close to someone who keeps moving away from you.

That is not pathology. That is love meeting loss at the kitchen table at 9pm. It deserves tenderness, not a correction.

The question, and I offer it as a question not a verdict, is simply this: in any given moment, whose need is being served? Not as a constant audit, because that sounds exhausting and frankly a little grim. Just as an occasional, gentle check-in with yourself. When you circle back to the conversation they thought was finished, when you can’t quite let the silence be silence: is this for them? Or is this for you?

What I’ve learned from sitting with parents in coaching, over and over again: we come in talking about our kids. And what we find, almost every time, is that the place where things actually shift is in us. Not because kids don’t change. They do, constantly, that’s basically their whole job right now. The possibility inside this window is genuinely enormous. But if we stay locked into the same reaching-and-retreating pattern, all that change just swirls around a stuck center.

The most available thing to move is you. And I know that sounds like a consolation prize. It isn’t. It is actually where all the leverage is.

The shift isn’t going cold. It isn’t deciding connection doesn’t matter or that pulling back is somehow the sophisticated move. It’s learning to offer the kind of closeness that works at this age, which is spacious. Which leaves room. Which says “I’m here when you’re ready” and then actually tolerates the waiting. Not “I’m here when you’re ready, and I’ll be right outside your door, and I might text you twice just to see.”

Your kid needs to know you can handle not knowing. That the relationship doesn’t depend on them reporting in. That your okayness is not contingent on their performance of okayness. That is not distance. That is the most stabilizing thing you can offer a kid who is in the active, disorienting, completely necessary process of becoming their own person. They need a place to land. You’re building it every time you choose to wait rather than reach.

Now, a very legitimate question: if you’re not supposed to transmit all of this onto your kid, what exactly are you supposed to do with it? Because stuffing it down and hoping for the best is not a plan. That is just emotional shrapnel waiting to happen. That is you, weeping in the Target aisle buying a graduation dress for your kid’s preschool graduation, completely blindsided by your own feelings in the formalwear section at 2pm on a Tuesday. This is a totally hypothetical scenario, definitely not live footage of me last Saturday.

The answer is genuinely unsexy: you feel it yourself, for yourself, without an audience.

Kristin Neff has spent her career researching self-compassion and what she found is that it actually has a structure. Three moves, in order, and they work.

The first is mindfulness. Which just means: notice what’s actually happening before you do anything about it. Not “I need to know if they’re okay.” Underneath that: “I’m scared.” Not “why won’t they just talk to me.” Underneath that: “I miss them.” Name the actual feeling. That’s the whole step. You’re not solving it. You’re just seeing it clearly enough to know what it is.

The second is common humanity. This one is my favorite because it is the fastest exit from the spiral. You are not the only parent who has ever stood outside a closed bedroom door feeling like a stranger in their own house. This is not evidence that you failed or that your relationship is broken or that you are uniquely terrible at this. This is Wednesday. This is the middle school years. This is happening in approximately one million other houses tonight, including the houses of people who seem like they have it completely together. You are not alone in this. You are, in fact, in enormous company.

The third is self-kindness. Which means you talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend who just told you she cried in Target over a tiny graduation dress, which was definitely not me last Sunday buying my kid a dress for her pre-school graduation. Not “pull it together.” Something closer to “of course you did. That’s a lot to feel. You’re doing great.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Three moves, five minutes, no audience required.

You hide in the bathroom. You name the feeling. You remind yourself you’re not the only one. You say something kind to yourself that you would actually say to someone you love. And then you go make dinner.

This is not suppression. You are not pretending the feeling doesn’t exist. You are just finding it a more appropriate home than your twelve-year-old’s nervous system.

And here’s the part that actually matters developmentally: when they watch you take a breath instead of spiraling, when they see you recover instead of explode, when they notice that you can feel something hard without making it their problem, they are learning something they will use for the rest of their lives. You are not hiding your humanity. You are modeling what it looks like to carry it well.

Which is, it turns out, exactly what staying close actually looks like.

If any of this landed, I want you to know that the spiral you’re in right now (the reaching, the checking, the not-quite-being-able-to-let-it-go) that is exactly what I work on with parents. Not your kid. You. Your emotional agility. Your ability to feel the hard stuff without transmitting it everywhere like a feelings fire hose.

I am a certified Emotional Agility Practitioner, trained directly under Susan David, PhD. If you haven’t encountered her work yet: she’s a Harvard psychologist who spent decades researching what actually helps people navigate difficult emotions without getting stuck in them or bulldozed by them. The short version is that emotional agility isn’t about being positive or keeping it together. It’s about being able to unhook from the feelings that are running the show so you can actually choose what you do next. It is, not coincidentally, exactly what this essay is about.

I am now one of a small number of practitioners certified to do this work directly. And I do it with parents of adolescents, which means I understand the specific flavor of fear and grief and love and confusion you are navigating right now.

So if you are the parent who read this whole thing and thought “okay but who is going to help ME with MY feelings while I figure all of this out?” That is me. I am that person. Book a sales call here. Bring the thing that’s looping. We will look at it together and figure out what one move changes everything.

Making it Happen IRL 🩷 💫

• Name the feeling underneath the feeling.

  • Before you send the third “you okay?” text, pause and ask yourself what’s actually happening in there. Not the surface thing (”I just want to make sure they’re fine”). The real thing. “I’m scared they’re pulling away and I don’t know how to stop it.” “I miss them and they’re twelve feet away and that’s a weird thing to grieve.” You are not solving it. You are just seeing it clearly enough to stop accidentally making it someone else’s problem.

• Do the three-second common humanity reset.

  • You are not the only parent who has refreshed Find My Friends seventeen times today like it’s going to tell you something different. You are not uniquely broken or uniquely anxious or uniquely unable to handle a closed bedroom door. You are a person having a completely human response to a genuinely hard season. One million other parents are doing the exact same thing tonight. Some of them are also hiding in the bathroom. You are in excellent company.

• Actually hide in the bathroom.

  • Seriously. Five minutes. Door locked. This is not avoidance. This is you choosing where your feelings live. Let them live in the bathroom for a few minutes instead of all over your kid. Breathe. Say something kind to yourself that you would actually say to a friend. “This is hard and I’m doing my best” counts. “I am a disaster and everyone can tell” does not count. Try again.

• Unhook from the story your brain is telling.

  • Your brain is very confident that if you just check one more time, ask one more question, re-read that text exchange from Tuesday, you will feel better. You will not feel better. That is a feeling dressed up as a plan. Notice the thought (”something is definitely wrong”), notice that it’s a thought and not a fact, and then very gently decline to let it drive. You can have the thought and still put your phone down. Those two things can coexist.

• Do one thing that has nothing to do with your kid.

  • Watch something terrible on television. Text a friend something unhinged. Eat a snack that is just for you. The goal is to remind your nervous system that you exist outside of this relationship, that your okayness does not depend entirely on how tonight’s dinner conversation goes, and that you are a full person with an interior life that predates this child and will outlast this phase. Even if that interior life currently includes a lot of crying at graduation dresses in Target. That counts too.

I live in a suburb outside Atlanta, close enough to both the middle school and the high school that when the final bell rings, kids descend on our little town square. They spill off the sidewalks, they’re loud, they take up space. And every single day, without fail, the adults around them tighten. Shoulders go up. Eyes narrow. Public safety officers materialize to monitor the situation.

The situation being: children, existing in public, after school.

I always stand there thinking the same thing. Where are they supposed to go?Not rhetorically. Actually. We built suburbs with no third spaces, scheduled every hour of their lives with adult-supervised activities, pulled them out of the low-stakes unsupervised play that used to happen naturally in neighborhoods, and then we act genuinely surprised and irritated when they show up in the one open space available to them and just... hang out. We built this world. And then we called public safety on it.

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I read a lot of think pieces about teenagers. You probably do too. And the last few years have produced a particular genre: the teen panic piece. Kids are addicted to their phones. They’re vapid and attention-fractured. Gen Z can’t handle the workplace because they have too many feelings. They’re in crisis, they’re declining, they need to be saved from TikTok, from themselves, from whatever the current villain is.

I’ve spent 15 years in actual rooms with adolescents. And I want to offer a different read. Not that nothing is hard. Not that tech has no role in any of this. But that overwhelmed nervous systems love collapsed nuance, and we are collapsing a lot of nuance right now. We are so eager to hang every complicated thing on the one shiny visible culprit that we have stopped asking the harder question — the one that requires us to look in a direction we’d rather not look.

How did we get here, all of us, together?

Here’s what I keep coming back to: kids didn’t learn to soothe discomfort with frictionless experiences by themselves. We handed them a phone in the grocery store because we were overwhelmed and it worked. They grew up watching us build the “don’t talk to me” feature into every service interaction we could find. They watched us choose the self-checkout, the no-contact delivery, the text instead of the call. They didn’t build those systems. They just absorbed what those systems were telling them about how the world works and what comfort is supposed to feel like.

I’m not saying this to make anyone feel bad. I’m saying it because I think it’s actually the more interesting story. The one that leads somewhere.

When we locate all the problems in teenagers, we close off every useful avenue. There’s nothing to do but manage them, restrict them, panic about them. But when we locate the problem in the systems and the modeling and the world we all built together, including us, including me, suddenly there are things to actually do. We become agents in the story instead of bystanders to it.

Adolescents have always had the particular honor of embodying every fear and anxiety of the generations watching them. They do what we modeled, they inhabit the world we built, and then they get to be the symbol of everything going wrong. That’s a heavy thing to carry. And I think most of them are carrying it without anyone acknowledging how heavy it is.

So what do they actually need from us? Not less tech, necessarily. Not more rules, necessarily. Not a different teenager. They need to see us introduce friction back into our own lives. Not as punishment. As modeling. The willingness to take the long way. To be bored without immediately fixing it. To stay in a hard conversation instead of ghosting it. To let something be uncomfortable long enough to learn what it’s actually about. To model bothness, that a thing can be hard and worth doing, frustrating and worth staying, scary and worth saying out loud.

15 years in rooms with kids taught me that they are watching everything. Not to catch us failing, they’re not keeping score like that. They’re watching because they’re trying to figure out how to be a person in the world, and we are their primary data. When we model that discomfort is something to be optimized away, they learn that. When we model that hard things are worth staying in, they learn that too.

The kids spilling into my town square every afternoon at 3:30 are not a problem to be managed. They are doing exactly what adolescents are supposed to do: seeking autonomy, claiming space, figuring out who they are outside of adult supervision. The fact that we’ve arranged the world so there’s almost nowhere for that to happen, and then stationed officers at the one place it does happen, is information. It’s information about us.

Sometimes I feel like The Lorax, but instead of speaking for the trees, I am speaking for the teens. He speaks for the trees because nobody else will. Not because the trees are helpless, but because the people who could speak aren’t looking in the right direction. They’re too busy watching the Thneeds fly off the shelves.

I think a lot of us who love teenagers, who have worked with them, raised them, stayed curious about them, are standing in the same position. Not because kids need saving. Because the adults in the room keep looking at the kids when the more uncomfortable look is at ourselves. At the town squares we built with no benches for them. At the schedules we filled so completely that boredom became a crisis. At the frictionless world we constructed and then handed to them and then panicked about.

This isn’t a guilt trip. It’s an invitation.

Because the Lorax doesn’t just stand there being sad about the trees. He says: unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not. Someone like you. A parent who is already asking harder questions than most. Who is reading about adolescent development at 9pm and googling things and wondering if there’s a better way. You are exactly the person this requires.

Not perfect. Not starting over. Just willing to look in the slightly more uncomfortable direction.

If summer is already making you a little twitchy, that’s information. A sales call with me is 60 minutes where we figure out exactly what’s making things hard in your house right now and what one real shift looks like before July gets away from you. You’ll leave with something concrete. Not a framework, not homework, just a clearer picture of what’s actually happening and what to do about it. Book here.

Xo,

Meg

How to Make it Happen IRL 🩷 💫

• Pick one friction you’ve been avoiding and stay in it for ten minutes. The conversation you’ve been texting instead of having. The errand that’s easier with delivery. Let it be mildly inconvenient on purpose and notice what happens in your body. That noticing is the data.

• Do something inefficient with your kid this week. The long way to school. Cooking something that takes longer than it needs to. A board game instead of a show. Not as a lesson. Just as proof that slow things exist and you can survive them.

• The next time you’re tempted to smooth something over for your kid before they’ve had a chance to feel it, pause for fifteen seconds first. See if they need the rescue or if they were about to figure it out. This is harder than it sounds.

• Ask yourself once this week: what am I modeling right now? Not to shame yourself. Just to stay in the loop on your own data.

• If there’s a third space near you like a park, a town square, a coffee shop where teenagers congregate, try just being there without tensing up. Notice what they’re actually doing. Most of the time it’s nothing alarming. It’s just being young in a world that keeps telling them to do that somewhere else.

Part of parenting an early adolescent specifically is getting out of the way. Not abandoning them, but loosening the grip enough that they can start to figure some things out on their own. Their whole developmental project at this age is becoming a self.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is hand them something and walk away.

Not because you don’t care. Because you do, and you also understand that you cannot be their only resource.

The Wild Feelings Field Guides are a set of free tools written directly for young people. For them. In their language. About what’s actually happening inside when things feel big and loud and out of control.

Here’s what’s in the collection:

“I am freaking out.” — a guide through anxiety: what it actually is, why the brain does what it does, and how to get through it without imploding.

“I feel overwhelmed.” — built around emotional granularity, the idea that having more specific words for your feelings gives you more control over them. Includes an emotional landscape exercise that kids genuinely love.

“I feel lonely.” — because loneliness during adolescence is its own particular beast (belonging uncertainty is real and it is relentless), and someone should say that directly to the kid, not just to the parent worried about the kid.

“I am having a hard time.” — a self-compassion guide. Gentle, honest, a little funny. Does not tell kids to think positive thoughts. Does tell them that being hard on themselves is their brain’s clumsy attempt at self-protection, which lands differently than “just be nicer to yourself.”

“Field guide to a feeling.” — a nature-journal-style worksheet where kids can catalog any emotion: its habitat, its close relatives, what it sounds like, what threatens it. Weird and wonderful and oddly effective.

“Feelings landscape.” — the Kind Sidekick activity, where kids design an inner voice character who isn’t the critic. Also includes emotional landscape mapping. Kids draw zombies. It’s great.

They’re free. All of them. No email required, no funnel, no strings. You can send them directly to your kid, leave one open on the kitchen table and pretend it was an accident, print one and put it in a backpack. Whatever works.

Download the Wild Feelings Field Guides here

I made these because parents are not supposed to be the only emotional resource their kids have access to. You are doing so much. Sometimes a kid needs something that isn’t you. Something they can read alone, in their room, with the door closed, that meets them exactly where they are without any parental energy attached to it.

That’s what these are. Go give them away.

A few notes before you hand these off:

No introduction necessary. Seriously. You don’t have to explain why you’re sharing it or what you hope they’ll get out of it. Just put it somewhere they can find it. The guides do the talking.

They’re also not just for crisis moments. The field guide to a feeling is genuinely fun on a normal Tuesday. The Kind Sidekick activity is a great car ride activity if you have a kid who likes to draw. The emotional landscape one works as a family conversation starter if you’re into that kind of thing.

And if they want to talk after reading one, great! If they don’t, also great. The goal isn’t a follow-up conversation. The goal is that they have a tool whenever the might want it.

Xo,

Meg

I am a huge curriculum nerd and love digging into the details of what makes learning work. The specific aspect she wanted more info on was how we opened 6th grade, because the first 6 weeks of the year were a standalone unit on metacognition where we explored these questions:

Essential Question: How can understanding metacognition support academic and personal growth?

Guiding Questions

1. What is metacognition?

2. What is critical thinking?

3. How can we (teachers and students) create an academic ecosystem that supports emotional agility, promotes ethical decision making, and encourages students to be flexible, adaptable, and critical thinkers?

It was the best 6 weeks of the whole year and I still think about how fun it was. It was also a great delivery vehicle for my specific brand of silly goose vibes. For example, this was the first homework assignment they every received from me. My brilliant co-teacher, Mike, and I fought hard for it’s place in the curriculum. So many folks thought it was a waste of time, fluff, or just didn’t understand why we would spend so much time here at the beginning of the year.

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I have spoken often about what a hard time I had in school because of my learning differences and how those impacted my burgeoning sense of self. Feeling stupid all the time sucks. So, I weaponized defiance, sarcasm, and apathy often because, to my middle school self, that seemed a lot easier than being vulnerable. When I became a teacher I had this short cut built in, this painfully earned awareness that kids desperately want to know what is happening, why, if it makes them weird, or if it’s just normal.

The irony is not lost on me that that same desire is also, often, why parents come to me for coaching. They are desperate to know if there is something wrong with their kid or if it’s just normal. So, just a reminder, you and your kid are likely, regularly, freaking out about the same things, just in different fonts. Wink!

But! Back to the metacognition program. I am passionate about the idea that anything we really want for our kids needs to be an open book test. Belonging, emotional agility, cognitive empathy, conflict, etc should not be these mysteries of the world that have to be discovered through hardship. We can just give them the concepts, the vocab, and opportunities to practice. I taught humanities, my bachelor’s is in English, as is one my Master’s. I love words.

So, what I knew all too well from my painful journey through school was that if we just gave kids words to better understand all the stuff that feels weird or hard, we are giving them an immense gift. Why? Because having words for something gives you a place to PUT IT. It gives you the necessary distance from the feelings a situation or event causes, and your sense of self so you can take a beat and, eventually, see the experience more clearly and less personally.

For example, one tip I used to give students all the time was to name their anxiety something weird. Like Glen, or Eugene, or Gertrude. Why? Because naming your anxiety something weird is how you take some of your agency back, how you separate the feeling from the self. You are not your anxiety. Anxiety is a feeling that happens in response to certain things and you have more control over it than you might think. Yelling, “Glen! Get out of here with those stupid ideas!” Or comforting Eugene and saying, “I get that you don’t like taking tests, but you are lying to me about what could go wrong,” is far more helpful than just telling kids not to be anxious or don’t worry.

What does that have to do with their learning? I knew that just giving them a set of words that explain how to think about their thinking was exactly how we needed to start 6th grade so that the rest of the year, whenever things felt weird and wobbly, they didn’t also feel scary because they were unknown. They had a home, and that home was a word. Belonging is oxygen in early adolescence, and making sure they started the year equipped with a vocabulary to make sense of how their brain worked, why things feel hard sometimes, and how they learn meant that their belonging was never up for debate in that room.

What words? I am so glad you asked! Get ready, it’s long :)

Metacognition Unit Vocabulary

• Metacognition

  • Awareness or analysis of one’s own thinking and/or learning process. Literally just thinking about your thinking.

• Self-regulation

  • Mindfulness regarding one’s thoughts and actions and the choice to attempt to control and/or redirect them

• Growth mindset

  • A way of viewing the world characterized by working to embrace failure as an opportunity, see challenge as a positive thing to engage.

  • With the reminder that mindsets are a spectrum.

• Fixed mindset

  • A way of viewing the world characterized by seeing our talents/abilities as fixed entities that cannot change and that having to exert effort at something means you are not good at it.

  • With the reminder that mindsets are a spectrum

• Deliberate Practice

  • Working at the forefront of your ability

• Self-Advocacy

  • Learning to stand up for your needs/desires and seek assistance from others

• Productive discomfort

  • The awareness that some discomfort is necessary to change

  • The objective is to reach that optimal level so that our skills increase and we become comfortable with that new level of anxiety. And ideally, we will get more used to those feelings of “productive discomfort” and won’t be so scared to try new things in the future

• Comfort Zone

  • The emotional zone where we are not stretching ourselves or pushing our levels of ability

• Learned Helplessness

  • When people feel helpless because previous experience has made them think that they have no control.

• Neuroplasticity

  • The understanding that the brain is a constantly evolving organism that is capable of change no matter age, current habitual patterns, or ability.

• Cognitive Load

  • The amount of material our short term working memory is attempting to process at any given moment

• Frustration Point

  • when you reach a moment that causes cognitive discomfort that you have to strategize around

    • Adaptive Strategy

      • Strategies that help us address the frustration point productively

      • For example: If you are stuck on a HW assignment, email your teacher and ask for help and let them know

    • Avoidance Technique

      • Negative strategies that help us avoid dealing with the frustration point but also temporarily alleviate the discomfort

      • For example: If you are stuck on a HW assignment, scroll through Instagram for an hour

• Amplification

  • When an action/event, or our own anxieties, “turn up the volume” on stress/negative feelings

• Muffling

  • To lessen the “sound” emitted/created by an action/event

• Feedback

  • Information about reactions to something; used as a basis for improvement.

Critical Thinking Terms:

Weak Inferences:

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

This is simply a weak causal inference. This infers that two events are connected simply because they happened at around the same time. Betty walked into the restaurant; ten minutes later, the building was engulfed in flames. Therefore, Betty must have burned it down. This fallacy is the root of superstition – you base your beliefs on a weak causal link.

Hasty Generalization

Making a claim about a large group based on a small sample. You infer that all dog’s bite because one dog bit you or that all New Yorkers are mean because one spat on you. This is the root fallacy of racism and prejudice, among other ugly shortcuts that our brains make to save time.

False Dichotomy

(Either/Or Fallacy) – You assume that there are only two inferences available when there are, in fact, many more. If you hear a bump in the night you might infer it was either a ghost or a burglar, even though there are many, far-stronger inferences available. If you are a salesperson, you can take advantage of this by presenting a buyer with a terrible product followed by whatever product you actually want to sell. It doesn’t matter that there are thousands of products out there. The buyer may very well assume that these two options are the only two available.

Slippery Slope

This fallacy is a predictive inference claiming that one action will unleash a flood of terrible events, even though we have safeguards in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen. This fallacy might also be described as a string of weak predictive inferences: If I leave my desk, someone will steal my computer, which means that I won’t be able to do my work, which means I will be fired, which means I won’t have enough money to buy food, which means I’ll die alone in the gutter.

Types of Bias

Availability Bias

We make inferences with the information that is readily available to our brains. Not only is this information a small fraction of what’s out there, but our brains gravitate to information that is sensational, weird, or otherwise emotionally compelling. Fear of flying is largely based on this bias. Planes are outrageously safe, but we don’t hear about the thousands upon thousands of flights that land safely every hour. Instead, we hear disproportionately about troubled flights. A good way to conquer a fear of flying is to hang out at the airport and watch planes take off and land all day. Fear of sharks follows a similar pattern. The movie Jaws ruined the ocean for many of us.

Confirmation Bias

This is a tendency to generate and positively evaluate claims and inferences that support a previously held view of the world. If you feel strongly that flying is dangerous, you will notice more information that seems to verify your belief. Similarly, I seek out articles establishing Boise State football as the greatest program ever, and I quickly dismiss any dissonant or contradictory reports. This bias is significantly more dangerous now that the internet allows us to feed exclusively on information that supports our political, religious, social, and scientific points of view.

Suggestion Bias

(or Priming Effect) – This is an exceptionally powerful and sneaky inclination to be unduly influenced by recently acquired information. Much of this happens unconsciously based on the context of the moment, which can include our associations with the various sights, sounds, and the general context around us. We generate and favor inferences that jibe with what we just experienced.

Fundamental Attribution Error

When we mess up, we prefer causal inferences that incorporate the special circumstances of the situation. When others mess up, we prefer causal inferences that point to flaws in their respective characters. I failed that math test because I had to stay up all night with my sick puppy. Pat failed because he’s an idiot and never does anything right.

I told you it was long

And, starting the year here was the exact right move for 6th graders because early adolescence is one of the most pivotal moments for identity development, and if you have words to process your identity struggles through, your sense of self is less up for debate and more just a work in progress.

What I didn’t fully understand until I left the classroom and started sitting across from parents on coaching calls: the vocabulary was never just for the kids.

When I taught 6th graders about amplification, what I was really giving them was a way to step outside the experience long enough to look at it. Instead of I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know why and everything is terrible, they had a word that said: something turned the volume up. The feeling is real. The feeling is also not the whole story. That distance, even just a millimeter of it, is where choice lives.

Parents need that same millimeter.

Because here’s what I hear on calls all the time: “He just exploded over nothing.” “She went from fine to furious in thirty seconds.” “I don’t even know where that came from.” And here is what I help them understand. Their cognitive load hit a frustration point. Their anxiety amplified. The avoidance technique kicked in before either of you knew what was happening.

When you have words for what’s happening inside your kid’s nervous system, you stop trying to talk them out of it and start being able to actually meet them in it. You’re not arguing with a mood. You’re recognizing a process. And the beautiful, slightly unfair thing about this is that you don’t have to teach the vocabulary like a lesson. You just have to use it. In your own life, out loud, where they can hear you.

• “I’m at my frustration point with this project. I need a minute before I do something avoidant like reorganize the pantry.”

• “My cognitive load is completely maxed today. I’m going to need lower-stakes requests from everyone in this house tonight.”

• “I notice I’m amplifying right now. The email wasn’t that bad. Give me five minutes.”

That’s it. That’s the whole move. You’re not delivering a curriculum. You’re modeling what it looks like to have a home for your feelings. Which is, as it turns out, exactly what they need to see.

Your kid is going to spend these years trying to figure out if who they are is okay, if what they feel makes them weird, if the wobbliness inside them is normal or evidence of something being very wrong. You cannot answer those questions for them. But you can make your house a place where the wobbliness has a name. Where the frustration point is a thing that happens to everyone, not a character flaw. Where amplification is something you notice and address, not something that defines the evening.

You Need These Words Too

When that Mom called me last week, it wasn’t just to reminisce. She wants to figure out how to bring something like this to one of the biggest school districts in the country. Thousands of kids who might get to start middle school the same way my 6th graders did. Knowing what to call the wobbliness, knowing they aren’t weird for feeling it, knowing they have somewhere to put it. She saw how it impacted her son and she wants more kids to have that.

I’ve been thinking about that call all week. Because the thing she’s trying to scale isn’t a curriculum. It’s a really simple idea that we keep making complicated: when kids have words for what’s happening inside them, they are less alone. And being less alone at 11 or 12 or 13 is, developmentally speaking, just about everything.

You don’t need a school district to do this. You need a kitchen table and the willingness to use the words honestly. To let them show you something. To shift your perspective when they do. To stop taking the hard moments personally long enough to see what’s actually happening inside your kid. The vocabulary is just the door. You still have to walk through it.

Before you think about bringing any of this to your kid, spend a few minutes with that vocabulary list for yourself. Not as a teacher. As a parent. Read back through it and ask: where is this already showing up? Because I’d be willing to bet it’s showing up everywhere, just without the name attached.

• The moment you realized you were in a fixed mindset about your kid’s ability to self-regulate.

• The avoidance technique you deployed last Tuesday when the homework situation escalated and you suddenly needed to check your phone.

• The learned helplessness you feel when you’ve tried everything and nothing works and you’ve quietly decided nothing ever will.

• The confirmation bias running in the background every time your kid does the thing that unconsciously confirms your quiet fear about who they’re becoming.

This is not a guilt exercise. It’s a location exercise. The vocabulary isn’t there to indict you. It’s there to show you where you are, so you have somewhere to stand that isn’t just inside the feeling.

And once you know where you are, you can start to notice where your kid is. Not to diagnose them. Not to explain their behavior back to them in a way that makes them want to move to another country. Just to understand what’s actually happening underneath the thing that looks, from the outside, like attitude or laziness or being impossible. Usually it’s a frustration point. Usually it’s amplification. Usually it’s a kid, and a parent, whose cognitive load is completely maxed and who has absolutely zero adaptive strategies available in that moment, because nobody ever gave them the words. You can be the person who gives them the words. You don’t have to be a teacher to do it.

Giving them words doesn’t make the hard stuff disappear. It gives them somewhere to put it. And that, maybe more than anything else, is what staying close looks like during the years when staying close is hardest.

If any of this is landing, summer is actually the ideal time to work together. Not because everything is harder in summer, but because so much of the noise is gone. No homework battles. No early alarms. No permission slips. The things that were setting everyone off from September through June just... aren’t there for a few months. Which means you finally have room to actually dig in, figure out what’s going on, and build something before the fall starts. A connected summer is the best runway for a great school year. If you want to use this window, let’s talk.

Book a call here! You know you want some 1:1 time with this fun weirdo 😉

XO, Meg

How to Practice This Tonight 💖 💫

You don’t have to assign vocabulary homework. You just have to start using the words yourself and see what happens.

1. Pick one word from the list and use it about yourself before dinner. Not in a lecture. Not with a point. Just out loud, naturally. “I’m definitely at my frustration point with this.” Watch what happens. It might be nothing. It might be everything.

2. The next time your kid melts down over something that seems small, name the process instead of the behavior. Not “you’re being dramatic.” Try “sounds like something is amplified. What happened right before?” You’re not letting them off the hook. You’re giving them somewhere to start.

3. When they’re in avoidance mode. If they’re scrolling, retreating, pretending the thing doesn’t exist, don’t call it laziness. Call it what it is: “Looks like you hit a frustration point and your brain went sideways. That’s pretty human. Want to try a different way in?” Then leave them alone for ten minutes. The door back in is easier when no one is standing in front of it.

4. Practice productive discomfort narration. The next time something is hard for you, a difficult conversation, a project you’re stuck on, the gym, whatever, say out loud: “This is productive discomfort. I’m going to stay in it.” You don’t have to be performing it for them. You just have to be doing it near them.

5. Make Glen a family member. Name your family’s collective anxiety something. Ours would probably be Gerald. When the pre-trip chaos hits, when the Sunday scaries spread, when everyone is suddenly irritable about nothing: “Gerald’s here. Dang it Gerald! What kind of hug does he need guys?” It’s slightly absurd. It works.

And then there’s a tone. A sigh. An eye roll so aggressive it might knock you over. You feel it before you process it. That hot flash of something in your chest. And before either of you knows what happened, you’re in it. Voices up, words sharper than anyone intended, and then one of you leaves the room and the other stands there in the kitchen wondering what just happened, why it keeps happening, and what on earth is wrong with your family.

Nothing is wrong with your family. But something is happening that nobody told you about, and it has been there, underneath every one of those moments, the whole time.

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The Thing Running Your House Right Now Isn’t Attitude. It’s Dignity.

Dr. Donna Hicks, my mentor, spent decades studying human conflict. War rooms. Peace negotiations. Boardrooms. All of it. And the thing she kept finding underneath every single blow-up, shutdown, and standoff was the same: conflict comes from people feeling like they don’t matter.

Dignity is the felt sense that your worth is not in question. That you are safe here. That you belong and are not about to be diminished. Your kid’s brain, and your brain, are literally wired, at a biological level, to treat a threat to your dignity the same way it treats a threat to your physical survival. The alarm fires either way. Fight or flee. Blow up or disappear into a hoodie cave. Yell at your kid or shut down.

Two people. Two ancient alarm systems. One very small kitchen.

Why It’s So Loud Right Now

Researcher Ron Dahl at UC Berkeley studies the adolescent brain. What he found is that at the onset of puberty, the brain undergoes a measurable shift in what it pays attention to. Social belonging, being seen, mattering to other people, these things go from background noise to the loudest signal in the room. Biologically. Measurably.

Your kid isn’t being irrational when they spend 45 minutes catastrophizing over a weird text from a friend. Their brain has been upgraded to treat social belonging as a high-stakes priority. The intensity isn’t drama. It’s the developmental engine running exactly as designed.

And their dignity alarm? At maximum sensitivity. Right now. This year. These exact years you are living through. So when you correct them at dinner, even gently, their brain is primed to process that as a threat to their entire sense of worth. Not information. A verdict. And they respond accordingly.

Meanwhile, you are also running the same wiring. Because this stage does something nobody warned you about: it chips away at your own sense of mattering too. The kid who used to run to you now walks past you to text their friend. The person whose opinion was gospel to them is now apparently the stupidest adult alive. That registers. It’s supposed to register. Your dignity alarm is real too, and this stage has a way of keeping it low-grade activated, basically all the time.

Which means most of the blowups in your house are not actually about backpacks or tones or the thing anyone said. They’re two dignity alarms going off at the same time in a small space.

Make Belonging An Open Book Test

The pause helps. But a pause only gets you so far. You also need language for what comes after it. Something that lets everyone in the room name what actually happened instead of just cycling through the same fight with different words. That’s where The Elements come in.

When I was a middle school dean, I was the person called in for all of it. The dumb thing a kid said online. The person left off the group chat on purpose. The exclusion at lunch. The fight that needed two people to actually talk to each other. No matter what I walked into, I always started the same way. I handed the kid, or kids, The Elements of Dignity and gave them five minutes to find the one, or ones, that got hit the hardest. Then we talked.

What happened in those conversations was different from every other hard conversation I’d watched play out in a school hallway or a principal’s office. We were already at the core of it. We skipped the part where everyone defends themselves and nobody says what actually hurt, and went straight to: what do you need and how do we fix this.

Here’s why it worked. One of the hardest things about being in a hard moment, for all of us, is that you don’t know how to explain the hurt and you don’t want to be vulnerable enough to try. When you just hand someone a list and say “which of these landed on you,” you take the cognitive work out of it entirely. You also take the shame out of it. You’re not asking them to perform self-awareness under pressure. You’re just saying: there is nothing wrong with you. We all need these things. Which one hurts right now. When you remove the work of having to find the name for what’s wrong, you get to the real conversation so much faster. And the real conversation is the only one that actually helps.

When your kid knows the word “inclusion,” they don’t have to spiral trying to figure out why lunch felt so awful. They can identify that something happened that threatened their sense of belonging, and now they can say that instead of just feeling crazy. When you know the word “recognition,” you can name why doing everything for everyone with zero acknowledgment grinds you down, instead of just feeling like an asshole who can’t hold it together. Shared vocabulary depersonalizes conflict because it doesn’t weaponize shame. It turns a character attack into something navigable. It gives everyone in the house a framework instead of a verdict.

Remember that kitchen? The backpack. The tone. The eye roll that started a whole thing nobody wanted.

It’s going to happen again. Maybe tonight. That’s not a failure of this framework or of you, it’s just life. Two dignity alarms in a small space, both of them ancient, both of them doing exactly what they were built to do. You are not going to rewire that overnight. You are not going to lead with dignity perfectly in the moments when your own alarm is loudest. Nobody does.

But when you understand that dignity is underneath everything, you stop flailing. You stop wondering what is wrong with your kid, what is wrong with you, what is wrong with your family. You have the vocabulary now. You know what’s actually happening underneath the thing that looks like attitude or overreaction or a Tuesday night meltdown about nothing. And when you know what’s happening, you have somewhere to put your two seconds.

Leading with Dignity has a timing: before you respond.

It has a target: everyone’s sense of worth.

And it has a duration: two seconds.

That’s a practice, not just a philosophy.

Xo,

Meg

I work with parents one-on-one to build exactly this, Not the theory, the actual practice of it, in the specific hard moments happening in your specific house. If you’re ready to stop managing the blowups and start changing the pattern underneath them, a coaching call is where we start.

Book a call here

Make It Happen IRL 💖 💫

You don’t have to figure out how to fix it from scratch. You don’t have to find the magic words or become a different kind of parent or wait until everyone is calm enough to have a productive conversation. You just have to try one thing. Here are ten of them. Not all ten at once. Not perfectly. Just one, tried once, in a moment that would have otherwise gone sideways.

1. Avoid Taking the Bait — Don’t let the bad behavior of others determine your own. Yes, it hurts when we are treated poorly. However, we don’t get our real needs met by hurting others in return. We also give them more power if we lash out in response.

2. Stay Open to Feedback — We often don’t know what we don’t know. We all have blind spots and make mistakes. We need to overcome our self-protective instincts to resist constructive criticism and consider feedback as a growth opportunity. We need to be able to look at ourselves from an outside perspective so that we can see ourselves as others see us.

3. Learn to Sit in Discomfort — Don’t let shame control your choices. Don’t lie, cover up, deceive yourself. Tell the truth about what you have done, even when it’s hard. Your worth doesn’t change when you have made a mistake.

4. Practice Belonging to Yourself — Don’t let others control your worth. Beware the desire for external recognition of your dignity in the form of approval and praise from others. You do not depend on others alone for validation of your worth, you are worthy no matter what.

5. Remember Intent and Impact are Different — Intent means the purpose or the goal. Impact means the effect on someone. What you intend to communicate is not always how something is received. We can acknowledge the impact without internalizing it as something we have to feel immense guilt about or something we have to defend. When we refuse to be open to impact we are telling others our comfort is more important than their reality, which often creates the seeds of conflict.

6. Take Responsibility — Embrace the discomfort. Admit that you made a mistake and apologize for hurting them. You can make a mistake without being a mistake. Learning to sit in discomfort is super important.

7. Try Not to Blame and Shame — Get control of the urge to defend yourself by trying to make others look bad. Blaming and shaming may feel good in the moment, but it doesn’t actually fix anything for you or others.

8. Stand Firm in Your Worth — Don’t allow someone to violate your dignity without saying something — stand up for yourself. Don’t avoid confrontation. A violation is a signal something in the relationship needs to change.

9. Avoid Insecure Connection Through Gossip — Don’t connect with others through gossip. It’s tempting, I know. Being critical and judgmental of others can feel like a bonding experience. However, it is not true connection. Share your experiences and feelings to create genuine intimacy.

10. Beware of False Security — Don’t let your need for connection compromise your dignity — if we remain in a relationship where our dignity is routinely violated, our need for connection has outweighed our need to maintain our dignity. I know it feels scary, but leaving relationships where you are not treated well or don’t feel secure is essential for your longterm wellbeing.

Using The Elements Tonight!

Name Your Alarm

• Before you can lead with dignity, you have to know what trips your alarm. Read through the ten elements. Ask yourself: which one, when it gets violated, sends me sideways fastest in this relationship? Which one, when it’s honored, makes me feel most like myself as a parent?

• That’s your signature element. Write it down.

• This matters because most of us walk into hard moments already primed. We’re not reacting to what just happened. We’re reacting to the accumulation of every time that same element got poked this week. When you know your signature, you stop decoding the fight from scratch. You already know where to look.

• Once you’ve got yours, try it with your kid. Pick a low-stakes moment — not mid-fight, not right after something hard. Show them the list. Ask: “Which one of these feels most important to you? Which one, when it happens, makes you feel like I actually get you?” You don’t have to solve anything with the answer. Just knowing it changes everything about how you show up for each other.

Lead with the Element Before the Ask

• Pick your kid’s signature element from Exercise One. For the next week, before any conversation that has even a small chance of going sideways, lead with that element first.

  • If theirs is Recognition: name what they bring before you bring the feedback. “I see how hard you’ve been working” lands before “here’s what needs to change.”

  • If theirs is Independence: offer choice before direction. “Do you want to try to figure this out first or think through it together?” before you tell them what to do.

  • If theirs is Acknowledgement: reflect before you redirect. “That sounds really hard” before “here’s what I think you should do.”

  • If theirs is Safety: fix your tone before your content. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying if the alarm is already running when you say it.

You’re not lowering the bar. You’re making sure the floor is steady enough that they can actually hear you.

Element Signposts

• Once you know your signature element, you can stop being surprised by your own alarm. Because your element doesn’t fire randomly. It has patterns. Specific moments, specific dynamics, specific kinds of interactions that poke it almost every time. When you know your signposts, you can see the moment coming before you’re already in it.

• Think through your most common hard moments with your kid. Where does your alarm show up most reliably? That’s your signpost.

  • If your element is Recognition: the signpost is probably any moment where you’ve given a lot and nobody has noticed. You made dinner, managed the schedule, handled the thing, and they walked in and complained about something. You were already primed before they opened their mouth. Knowing that, you can decide in advance: I’m going to name what I need before I hit the wall, not after.

  • If your element is Fairness: the signpost is probably any moment where the rules feel like they only apply to you. You held up your end, they didn’t hold up theirs, and now you’re being asked to be reasonable about it. The plan you make ahead of time: explain your reasoning before you deliver the decision, so it doesn’t land as arbitrary.

  • If your element is Safety: the signpost is probably tone. Yours or theirs. A certain edge in the voice and the alarm is already running before either of you has said anything of substance. The plan: name the tone before the content. “I want to talk about this but I need us to come down a notch first” is not a detour. It’s the only way the actual conversation happens.

You’re not trying to avoid the hard moments. You’re just stopping pretending they come out of nowhere.

The Repair Script

• Most of us know we should repair after a hard moment. Almost none of us were taught how. Here is the simplest version that works:

  • Name what happened. “I came at you too hard in there.”

  • Name the element. “I don’t think you felt safe to talk to me.”

  • Take responsibility without making it about your own feelings. “That’s on me.”

  • Leave the door open. “I want to try that again when we’re both ready.”

  • No lengthy processing, no asking them to validate your apology, no turning it into a teaching moment. Just accountability and an open door. Practice it on your own first so it doesn’t feel foreign when you need it.

  • Then, when things have settled, invite them in. “I want us to get better at coming back after hard moments. Here’s what I’m going to try to do. What would help you?”

Exercise Four: The Dignity Check-In

• Once a week, in a low-stakes moment like dinner, a drive, whenever your house has its most neutral air, ask one question from this list. Just one. Rotate through them.

  • “What’s something that happened this week that felt really unfair?”

  • “Was there a moment this week where you felt like nobody noticed what you were dealing with?”

  • “Did anyone make you feel like you didn’t belong somewhere this week?”

  • “Was there a moment this week where you felt really seen?”

You’re not conducting a therapy session. You’re building shared vocabulary in real time. You’re showing them that these things are worth naming, that feelings have reasons, and that your house is the place where that’s allowed.

And when they ask you, because eventually they will, answer honestly. You’re allowed to have a dignity alarm too. Modeling that it’s survivable to name it is most of the work.

“Everywhere I go, people staring at a phone. Sitting in a crowded room completely alone. It gives me more willies than the Twilight Zone. Our brains are hooked on that shit like a dog on a bone. Put down your gadget and look me in the eye…”

I had been trying to decide if I was going to write about tech this week, and I am taking Offerman’s song as my sign from the universe that the answer is, yes.

Please Wave at My Kid

This past Saturday I was walking my 2 year old to our quaint downtown to get a coffee and play in the park while my husband took our other kiddo to her belt test for Taekwondo. We only have 1 car, so off in the stroller we went. We listened to the birds and talked to each other while she was also trying to engage in her other favorite activity, waving at strangers. And every single person we walked past ignored her because they were looking at a phone. Every one. And each time they’d pass without acknowledging her, Sammy let out a little, disappointed, “Aww.”

Now listen, I think my kid is really cute and that you should want to wave at her, but I get that not everyone loves to wave at little kids like I do. Did it fill me with brief bouts of rage because my kid was being ignored and thus disappointed? Sure. But it also filled me with this deeper, complicated mix of longing, dread, sadness, and nostalgia.

That little "Aww" is not nothing. John Gottman, who has spent forty years researching what makes relationships work, calls these moments bids for connection. A bid is any attempt, verbal or nonverbal, to get attention, affection, or acknowledgment from another person. A wave from a stroller is a bid. A toddler holding up a drawing is a bid. A kid saying "watch this" from the diving board for the fourteenth time is a bid. And according to Gottman's research, how we respond to bids is one of the most powerful determinants of whether a relationship thrives or quietly erodes. We turn toward, we turn away, or we turn against. The phone is turning away, over and over, dozens of times a day, without anyone meaning to do it. Gottman found that in relationships where people consistently miss each other's bids, people eventually stop making them. They learn that reaching out doesn't work. And that learning starts early.

Sammy doesn’t know any of this yet. She just knows that the wave didn’t land, and she said “Aww,” and we kept walking.

But I know it. I know it and I can’t unknow it, which is its own particular burden. I know what a bid is and I know what it means when it goes unanswered and I know that little kids are running experiments on the world every single time they reach out, collecting data on whether connection is available to them or not. Sammy is two. She has not yet learned to stop trying. She will wave at every single person between here and the coffee shop with the full faith that someone is going to wave back.

And that makes me sangry. That’s my word, sangry, sad and angry collapsed into one feeling because sometimes they are genuinely the same thing and English has failed us by pretending otherwise. Sad that the world she’s waving at is somewhere else. Angry that we built it that way. And if I’m being honest, a little sad and angry at myself too, because I know I have been the person on the other side of someone’s wave, eyes down, somewhere else entirely.

We kept walking to the coffee shop where she, again, tried to wave at and engage strangers. Again, everyone was on their phones. I turned her stroller to face me and we had a good chat about bellybuttons while we waited for our drinks. We dawdled around watching the chipmunks, pointing out birds, wishing for the train to come by, and eventually made our way to the playground. We immediately jumped into our favorite game, which is where she hides in a tunnel with little holes on the sides and I stick my hands in making weird noises, pretending to be a monster. All of a sudden, all the other kids who were at the playground, who were not my children, were also clamoring to get into the tunnel and be attacked by the imaginary monster. I played my part loud and well, while glancing around for the other parents. Again, most of them lost in their phones.

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Sometimes I Wish I Was Dumber

I often tell my therapist that sometimes I wish I was dumber, that I didn’t pay attention to so much, because I think it would make life a lot easier. And Saturday was no exception, because as we walked home and I listened to Sammy pretend to make bird calls, I felt a growing mix of frustration and sadness. It just made me so aware of the social message she is getting as a toddler, that phones are really important.

Now before you think I am going to rant about having a screen-free household, that is very much not true. Hell, part of my business is making content for social media. Our kids watch plenty of TV and can quote Bluey. I am not coming at this from the lens of someone who is anti-screens.

I am coming at this from someone who has built a career around dignity, leading with the idea that everyone wants to matter, especially kids.

There’s actually a name for what was happening at that playground. Researcher Brandon McDaniel coined the term “technoference” back in 2015, and it means exactly what it sounds like: the way our devices interrupt and interfere with the people right in front of us. His research found that parents of infants spent about 27% of their time around their baby also on their phone. Objectively measured, not self-reported. Which matters because when we self-report, we almost always lowball it. And it’s not neutral. When McDaniel studied parent technoference and child behavior, he found that the kids of more distracted parents showed higher rates of both internalizing problems — think anxiety and withdrawal — and externalizing ones — think hyperactivity and acting out. Not because the parents were bad, but because the interruptions added up.

What gets me about this research is that it’s not measuring catastrophic neglect. It’s measuring the ordinary, constant, totally relatable thing of being half-present. The quick phone check while your kid is talking. The scroll while they’re playing nearby. The “mm-hmm” while your eyes are somewhere else. That’s the thing that’s accumulating.

There’s a Reason for All the 90s Nostalgia

The kids who grew up watching us do this, the ones who’s screen time we obsess about, they are now nostalgic for a time before they had phones. Not the 90s specifically, because they weren’t there. But the feeling of the 90s. A 19-year-old in a recent interview, said it directly: “I am nostalgic for a time when I was present, when my generation was between 5 and 10, when we were still doing things in the real world. I don’t remember what I watched yesterday on TikTok, but I remember what I did years ago when I didn’t have a phone.”

That’s not a kid who needs more screen time rules. That’s a kid who is grieving something. And what she’s grieving is presence. Her own, yes. But also, I’d argue, the presence of the adults around her when she was small.

Research has found that 60% of Gen Z adults wish they could return to a time before everyone was “plugged in.” They weren’t alive then. They are nostalgic for a feeling they’ve pieced together from old photos and movies and the brief windows of their own early childhood before the phone became the center of every room. Nostalgia expert Clay Routledge writes that Gen Z is specifically captivated by what life was like in the analog past and seems to be mining it to foster a greater appreciation for offline living.

They are trying to find their way back to something. And I think, if we’re honest, the thing they’re trying to find their way back to is us. A version of us that was looking at them.

I Have Beef with Jonathan Hadit

And meanwhile, your adolescent is drowning in adults who are very, very publicly worried about them.

Jonathan Haidt has sold over two million copies of The Anxious Generation. He’s had meetings with Macron. He had lunch with the UK’s chief scientific adviser to the Department for Education. Parents are obsessed with the book, though I would bet the number of adults who read the book is far less than the ones of watched a summary of it on social media. The whole thing has become a kind of cultural moment, this collective adult freakout about kids and phones, and it’s everywhere. School phone bans. State legislation. Op-eds. Podcasts. Parents forwarding each other Atlantic articles at 11pm.

I am not here to litigate Haidt, though I am not a huge fan. Plenty of his critics think he’s overstating the evidence. Lots of his supporters think he’s saving a generation. That debate is genuinely complicated and worth having. But here’s the thing nobody in that debate seems to want to say out loud: We are having a massive, high-profile, totally visible public conversation about what our kids are doing with their phones, while on our phones.

There is something almost poetic about it. We are posting about screen addiction. We are doomscrolling articles about doomscrolling. We are scheduling family phone-free dinners and then checking our email on the way to the table. And our kids, who are watching us with the relentless attention of people who are still figuring out how the world works, are filing all of it away.

The phone ban conversation is not wrong. But it is incomplete. Because you can lock every phone in a Yondr pouch from 8am to 3pm and it will not undo what kids absorb in the hours they spend watching the adults they love most decide, over and over again, that whatever is on that screen is more important than what’s right in front of them. Rules tell kids what to do. Modeling tells them who to be.

To Be Clear, I Blame Capitalism

Before we go any further, I need to say something clearly: I am not blaming you.

I mean that. Not in the way people mean it when they’re about to blame you anyway. I mean it because I live this too. After school pickup, when I need 45 minutes to make dinner and decompress from my own day, my kids watch TV. Not educational content. Not carefully curated screen time. Whatever keeps them occupied so I can stand in my kitchen and think one complete thought. That’s real, and I’m not apologizing for it.

We are working full time and paying what feels like a second mortgage on childcare. We are watching the news and trying to figure out if democracy is going to be okay. We are getting Slack messages at 9pm and emails at 6am and somewhere in between we are supposed to be present, regulated, screen-free parents who model healthy digital habits. The mental load alone is enough to make a person want to lie face down on the floor. And sometimes we do. Phones out.

This is not a willpower problem. It is a structural one. The same technology industry that has your kid by the attention span has you too, and they designed it that way. You are not weak for finding it hard to put your phone down. You are a human being who is exhausted and overstimulated and living inside an economy that has been very clear about the fact that your rest is not its problem.

So when I talk about what we’re modeling, I am not pointing a finger. I’m pointing at a pattern. A collective one that none of us opted into exactly, but all of us are participating in. The goal isn’t guilt. Guilt is useless here, and honestly we’re all already carrying too much of it.

The goal is just to zoom out before we zoom in on our kids. To ask, before we set the next rule or have the next conversation about screen time, what have our habits already taught them? What have they been watching us do since they were small enough to wave at strangers from a stroller?

Because that’s the curriculum they’ve already absorbed. And the good news, the only news worth focusing on, is that we can change the lesson. Not by being perfect. By being a little more intentional than yesterday. So here’s where I always land, after all of it. After the research and the op-eds and the very serious conversations about what screens are doing to our kids. After the guilt and the overwhelm and the honest admission that yes, I also use Bluey as a kitchen assistant. Start with something dumb.

I mean it. Not a family media agreement. Not a phone-free dinner with a conversation jar. Not a structured unplugged weekend that everyone resents by Saturday afternoon. Start with something so low-stakes and silly that nobody, including you, has to perform anything.

Do a bad accent for no reason. Buy the fart machine. Challenge your kid to a staring contest while you’re waiting for food. Text them an unhinged meme from across the couch and watch them look up from their phone to make a face at you. The bar is genuinely that low.

Because here’s what I know from years of working with families and also just from being a person: connection is the whole thing. It is not the nice bonus you get to after you’ve handled the hard stuff. It is the hard stuff. A kid who feels genuinely connected to you, who knows that you find them interesting and funny and worth looking at, that kid is more immune to the pull of screens. They have a reason to look up because other people they love are looking at them.

For the next two weeks, treat your phone like a landline. Put it down somewhere and get up to check it if you have to look at it. Stop carrying it around like a digital pacifier.

The technoference research, the nostalgia data, the Haidt discourse, all of it is pointing at the same thing underneath. Our kids are hungry for presence. Theirs, yes. But ours first. And the fastest, cheapest, least exhausting way to offer that is not a rule. It’s a moment. A ridiculous, unmemorable, totally ordinary moment where you are just there, being a little weird, making them feel like the most interesting thing in the room.

Which, for the record, they are. I taught middle school for 15 years and I can tell you firsthand, they are some of the most magical humans on the planet.

You don’t have to rewire your whole family’s relationship with technology today. You just have to be slightly more fun than your phone. And some days that’s a high bar. But most days? Most days you can clear it.

XO,

Meg

If you want to think through what this actually looks like in your family, not the theory but the real Tuesday evening version of it, that’s exactly what we do in coaching. Come find me.

Making It Happen IRL 💖 💫

20 Conversation Starters to Encourage Digital Wellbeing!

Some Pro Tips!

• These work best when you're genuinely curious about their answers, not when you're setting them up for a lecture. Teens can smell an agenda from three zip codes away.

• Start these conversations when you're both doing something else like driving, cooking, walking. Direct eye contact makes teens feel like they're being interrogated, but side-by-side conversations feel safer for deeper thoughts.

• Ask these questions when you're genuinely struggling with the same thing. Nothing kills a conversation faster than a teen sensing you think you have it all figured out. Lead with your own confusion: "I can't figure out why I keep opening Instagram when I'm stressed - do you do stuff like that too?"

• Don't try to "fix" whatever they share. If they tell you something concerning about their digital habits, resist the urge to immediately offer solutions or restrictions. Your job is to be curious and help them think it through, not to become the tech police the moment they open up.

1. “Do you think there’s a difference between being bored and needing to check your phone?”

2. “I realized I check my phone when I’m stressed. What feelings make you want to scroll?”

3. “If your phone could talk, what do you think it would say you’re trying to avoid?”

4. “What’s the longest you’ve gone without checking your phone recently? How did that feel?”

5. “Do you think the stuff you see online affects what you think is ‘normal’?”

6. “I’ve noticed I get sucked into drama in comment sections. Do you ever feel like you’re watching your own life instead of living it?”

7. “What’s something you do online that you wouldn’t do in real life?”

8. “Do you think your online self is the same as your real self?”

9. “If you had to explain to an alien how social media works, what would you say its actual purpose is?”

10. “I’m trying to be more honest about when I’m on my phone to avoid dealing with something. Do you ever notice yourself doing that?”

11. “I noticed I felt weird after scrolling for a while yesterday. Do you ever notice your mood change when you’re on your phone?”

12. “What’s the difference between how you feel after watching TikTok versus texting with friends?”

13. “I’m trying to figure out why I keep buying stuff I see in ads. Have you ever bought something because of social media and then regretted it?”

14. “Do you think the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself sometimes?”

15. “What do you think your phone thinks you’re interested in based on what it shows you?”

16. “I deleted Instagram for a week and honestly felt less anxious. What app do you think you’d miss most if it disappeared?”

17. “When you post something, what are you hoping will happen? Like, what’s the best-case scenario in your head?”

18. “Do you ever catch yourself comparing your real life to what you see online?”

19. “I’ve been thinking about how my feed makes me feel bad about our house. Does your feed ever make you feel weird about anything in your life?”

20. “What’s something you’ve seen online that you later found out wasn’t true?”

One of the schools I worked at required teachers to run clubs for last period one day a week, so I decided to build the Growth Mindset Club. We did all kinds of weird, fun, random things in the name of having a growth mindset. I ordered fancy cheese from my sister’s shop for them to try, we had dance parties, one kid’s grandma taught us all tai chi. It was pretty awesome, and at some point we decided we were going to do a flash mob. Morning meeting, the whole school, we were going to burst in and sing “Call Me Maybe.” Mind you, it was not my idea. It was totally kid led, organized, and planned. We practiced. The kids were fired up. They kept saying they were ready and SO EXCITED.

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The morning came. They were not ready. The moment arrived and every single one of them folded. Barely singing. Staring at their shoes. Completely giving into the cringe.

I watched it happen in real time and made a very fast decision, which was to go the other direction as hard as I possibly could. I sang loudly. I danced like an absolute idiot. I committed to the bit with everything I had, not because I thought it would save the flash mob, but because I understood something in that moment that I think about constantly now: the kids getting shy was not a reason for me to get shy. It was a reason to do the opposite.

They Need Us to Be Confidently Ourselves

There’s a concept in adolescent development called separation-individuation. The short version is that your kid’s job right now is to figure out who they are, and the way they do that is by differentiating themselves from you. The eye rolls, the cringe, the “oh my god, Mom.” That’s not rejection. That’s the work. They are actively building a self, and part of how they do it is by measuring themselves against you.

Here’s the part that trips parents up though. The research is clear that healthy individuation, the kind that produces a grounded, secure adult, doesn’t happen when parents disappear or dim themselves down. It happens when there’s a solid, present, fully-realized person to differentiate from. You have to be someone for them to push against. When you shrink yourself to manage their discomfort, you don’t make the process easier. You make the wall wobbly and harder to push against. And, you accidentally lose yourself in the process.

Which is exactly what happened with one of my coaching clients. She was theatrical. Funny. Genuinely goofy in the best way. Her kids had loved it when they were younger, and then somewhere around 11 or 12, the eye rolls started. So she dialed it back. She got quieter. More careful. She stopped doing the bits. When she came to be she said something I always think about, “I feel like I was a great little kid parent. And now I have no idea what to do.”

When we got into it, one of her core values was authenticity. She said it herself without hesitation. And I pointed out, as gently as I could, that she was being completely inauthentic every single day in her own home. She had reorganized her entire personality around avoiding her children’s social discomfort. Which is a loving impulse, honestly. But it was costing her something real, and she was too close to see it. So she just started being herself again. Using the weird voices, telling the jokes that didn’t land, doing weird bits. She started returning to the full version of her.

And she cam every week talking about how things were getting better. Not magically changing into utopia over night, but incrementally better. And what I reminded her of every week was that things got better mostly because she felt better. She stopped carrying the low-grade exhaustion of performing a smaller version of herself all day. And when she stopped shrinking, her kids got something back they didn’t even know they’d lost, which was a mom who seemed genuinely alive in her own life.

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Wanting Strong, Authentic Kids Starts With You

Most parents come to me with a version of the same end goal. They want a kid who can say no in a hard moment. A kid who won’t be swayed when the pressure is real and the stakes are high. A kid who stands up for their own dignity and for the dignity of the person next to them. A kid who doesn’t need the room’s approval to know what they think.

That kid does not appear out of nowhere at 16. They are built, slowly, by watching the adults they love move through the world.

And what are they watching? They are watching whether the people they love choose joy or whether they perform joy. They are watching whether the adults in their lives do fun, dumb, embarrassing things with total confidence, or whether they look around first to check if it’s okay. They are watching what you do in the moment when something might not land. When you might look silly. When you might be the only one.

Every time you sing anyway, dance anyway, make the joke anyway, commit to the bit when no one else will, you are showing your kid in real time what it looks like to not require other people’s comfort before you take up space. The ability to stand in a room and be fully yourself without the room’s permission is exactly the muscle they are going to need when the stakes are real. When someone is pressuring them. When saying no means standing alone. When doing the right thing means looking stupid in front of people whose opinions they care about very much.

You can’t lecture a kid into that kind of confidence. You can’t assign it. You can only model it, repeatedly, over years, in the low-stakes moments that don’t feel like they matter but absolutely do.

The Payoff Isn’t Immediate

A former student of mine sent me a message a few years ago that I’ve thought about probably a hundred times since. They wrote:

“Sax, you were just awesome in so many ways. One of the things I remember most was how you were so authentically YOU that it made me feel more comfortable being ME (and that’s saying something as an awkward 8th grader with braces hahah). When you used phrases like ‘weak-sauce,’ it made me realize that people can be smart, driven, AND their totally cool selves. It was such a small thing, but it’s something that has stayed with me for the last 13 years. In high school, college, and now in my working adult life, I find that I’m able to connect with people better because I allow myself to be real (and sometimes a little silly) with those I interact with.”

Thirteen years later. And what they remembered wasn’t a lesson plan. It was that I was unambiguously myself, and that watching me do that gave them permission to do the same. That’s what you’re building. Not in the big conversations. In the flash mob. In the dumb joke. In the moment you choose to be embarrassing and unbothered about it.

Your kid is watching whether you flinch. Don’t flinch.

Sing the whole song. Dance like an idiot. Be the person you actually are, loudly and without apology, in every room of your house. Not for them. For you first, and then for them, because you being fully yourself is one of the most important things they will ever see.

XO, Meg

If you're reading this and realizing you've been doing a slow disappearing act in your own house, let's talk. Book a sales call. We'll figure out together what's getting in the way and what to do about it. It’s 60 minutes where you brain dump everything, we come up with a plan, and you learn what getting coaching with me is all about.

Making it Happen IRL 💖 💫 🌈

• Say something out loud that you think is funny even if you’re pretty sure no one else will. Don’t explain it. Don’t apologize for it. Just let it exist.

• Put on a song you actually love while you’re making dinner and don’t turn it down when they walk in.

• Do something you would have done three years ago before you started worrying about the eye rolls. Nothing big. Just one thing.

• When something goes wrong or gets awkward, laugh at yourself first. Not to deflect, just because it actually is a little funny and you’re allowed to think so.

• Text your kid something genuinely stupid. A meme you like. A pun. A picture of a weird thing you saw. Don’t wait for them to respond with enthusiasm.

• If you have a bit, a voice, a character, a recurring joke, bring it back. Once. See what happens.

• Let them see you enjoy something fully, a show, a song, a meal, without performing enjoyment or narrating it. Just actually have the experience in front of them.

• Do the dumb thing. The goofy greeting, the ridiculous dance move in the kitchen, the impressions that have never once landed. Do it anyway.

• When they roll their eyes, stay with it instead of shrinking. You don’t have to say anything. Just don’t flinch.

• Ask yourself honestly: is there a version of me that disappeared when they hit middle school? Start bringing that person back. One room, one moment at a time.

Every year I give myself over to this day. I don’t plan anything, I don’t worry about grieving some “right way”, and there are no rules about the emotions that I am allowed to feel. Some years it has been lighter than I expected, some years it has been confusing, and this year it was just fucking hard. So, I spent the day wallowing, because I know that is exactly what I need. We are often too quick to try to make sense of hard feelings, to find a positive angle; and all the while we are unconsciously signaling to ourselves that despair is quicksand, that to linger here too long is dangerous. But what if the opposite is true? That a good wallow might actually be the only way through?

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For me, spending time sitting in my hardest emotions without running from the discomfort is exactly how I improve my wellbeing. I spend as much time there as I need and, when I feel ready, I make space for self compassion. Making time to wallow is how I build the bridge to being able to live in the bothness, of mourning all I have lost without letting it be the only prominent feature in my landscape. All of our landscapes have dark places, bogs, mud, sharp edges, cliffs. And we need them for everything else to grow. My friend is essentially my daughter’s personal librarian, and he recently sent her this gorgeous book about loss called Beneath by Cori Doerrfeld. A young kid, mourning the loss of his grandma, goes for a walk with his grandpa who encourages him to think about everything beneath, that bothness is everywhere. Not to rush him through this sadness, but to offer him another perspective when he is ready to see it.

In my coaching with parents, one of the most unexpected things I often tell them is that we have got to both model and allow for wallowing as a totally legit coping mechanism. We are so quick to want to strategize through the hard times, push to the positive, practice gratitude. And it’s both exhausting and disingenuous. Making space for the hard stuff is how it’s edges get less sharp, how it gets less scary. It doesn’t mean it is easy, but it is honest to just tell my small kids, “Mom really misses her sister and is just sad today. And that is ok. Being sad is ok.”

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There’s actually science underneath why this works. Researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett has spent years studying what she calls emotional granularity, the ability to name your feelings with precision. Not just “sad” but bereft, or hollow, or that specific longing that comes from missing someone who will never be older than they were. Barrett’s finding is that your emotional vocabulary doesn’t just describe your feelings. Your brain uses it to build them. More words in, more processing power out. Wallowing isn’t the problem. Vagueness is.

And wallowing is exactly how I get specific. When I give myself the whole day, I’m not just sitting in a blob of sadness. I’m moving through despair when I see that photo, longing when my daughter asks about her, gratitude when I think about what we had, rage that it was cut short, and something that doesn’t even have a clean word yet, like that specific grief of watching your kids grow up knowing she never got to see it. My brain needs time to find all of those. Rushing to “I’m sad but grateful” skips the whole process. It’s the difference between skimming a landscape and actually walking through it.

As parents we are often terrified of this. We worry that if we actually sit in what is hard, we will get stuck there. That grief is quicksand, that naming the loneliness out loud makes it more real, that letting ourselves feel the full weight of something difficult is somehow indulgent or counterproductive. So we reach for gratitude journaling, the silver lining, and “at least.” And none of that is bad, exactly. It’s just premature. Barrett’s research is pretty clear on what actually happens when you let yourself get specific about hard feelings: you become more able to act on them, not less. The parents who can sit with “I feel shut out” long enough to really name it are the ones who can eventually figure out what to do about it. The ones who skip straight to “it’s just a phase, I’m fine” are the ones who stay stuck. Real solutions don’t come from surface gratitude. They come from actually knowing what you’re solving for.

And if it's hard to let ourselves sit in the hard stuff, it is even harder to let our kids. Every instinct we have as parents is to fix it, reframe it, make it better. When your kid is devastated about a friend group falling apart or crying because something embarrassed them at school, the pull to rush them to the other side is almost physical. We want to say "you'll be fine" because we genuinely believe they will be, and because watching them hurt is its own specific kind of awful. But here's what the research tells us: kids who are allowed to sit in hard feelings, who have parents that can tolerate their distress without immediately trying to dissolve it, develop stronger emotional regulation over time. Not because suffering is good for them. Because getting specific about what hurts is how their brain learns to process it. Every time we short circuit that process with a silver lining, we accidentally send them the same message we send ourselves: that the feeling is too dangerous to stay in. That despair is quicksand. And they learn to skip it too. Which means they never build the vocabulary, and they never build the resilience that comes from knowing, in their bones, that they can feel something really hard and come out the other side.

For me, the bridge from wallowing to bothness doesn’t get built by rushing. It gets built by staying in it long enough that I find the edges of it, long enough that I can feel where the grief ends and the gratitude begins. Not forcing them to coexist before they’re ready, but waiting until they actually can. That’s what the day gives me. By the end of it I can hold both: my sister is gone and I am so glad she was here. The landscape has a bog in it and it also has light. That bothness isn’t a coping strategy I apply. It’s where I actually land when I let myself feel everything underneath it first.

So here’s my slightly unhinged suggestion for your family this month.

Throw a moping party. Actual agenda: everyone brings one hard thing they are feeling or worrying about, something real, something they haven’t been able to shake. You go around and each person gets to say their thing while everyone else just listens. No fixing. No silver linings. No “have you tried.” Just witnesses. Then when everyone has had their turn, you eat whatever snacks feel correct for the occasion and you put on the most reliable tearjerker you own. Cry together. Let it be a little dramatic. The goal isn’t to solve anything. It’s to practice being in hard feelings as a family without the ceiling falling in. To show your kids, and honestly yourself, that you can hold each other’s emotional reality without it being an emergency.

That’s not wallowing for no reason. That’s building the most important skill your family has.

Xo,

Meg

If this resonates, and you want to go deeper on how to actually hold space for the hard stuff without losing yourself in it, I’d love to have you at my next live workshop. We’ll get into the research, the real tools, and you’ll leave with more than a silver lining. You’ll leave with an actual map. Register here!

And if you're ready to work on this one on one, don't wait. The window you're in right now is the one that matters. Book a call and let's get to work!

How to Practice Emotional Granularity Tonight 🩷 💫

1. “I feel bad” is a dead end. Specificity is a survival skill.

For you: Parenting through early adolescence can feel like being bad at a job you used to be good at. When that feeling hits and you can’t name it, it just accumulates. But “bad” isn’t a feeling your brain can act on. “Powerless” is. “Irrelevant” is. “Scared I’m doing this wrong” definitely is. The more specific you can get about what’s actually happening in you, the less likely you are to take it out on them or quietly absorb it until something cracks.

For your kid: Early adolescence is an emotional firehose. If the only words they have are “fine” and “bad,” they’re not being evasive. They’re genuinely working with limited tools. Vague feelings stay stuck. Named feelings can move.

How to model it: Say the specific thing out loud. Not “I’m stressed” but “I’m anxious about this meeting and it’s making me short-tempered.” You don’t need to over-explain. You just need to show them what naming actually looks like.

2. Your vocabulary literally constructs your emotional experience.

For you: Parenting an early adolescent is disorienting in a way nobody really warns you about. You love them the same. But some days the relationship feels unrecognizable. If all you have is “this is hard,” your brain doesn’t know what to do with that. It just marinates in it. But if you can get specific, “I’m grieving the easy access I used to have to them” or “I feel rejected when they shut the door,” your brain actually has something to work with. Precision doesn’t make the phase easier. It makes you less at the mercy of it.

For your kid: A kid who only has “mad” doesn’t experience a richer feeling and lack the word for it. They actually experience a blunter version of the feeling itself. Giving them words like “embarrassed,” “overlooked,” or “overwhelmed” isn’t just communication coaching. It’s shaping how their nervous system processes the world.

How to model it: Read, watch, and talk about emotional complexity in front of them. When a character in a show does something confusing, say “I think she’s not just angry, she feels betrayed.” You’re building their library without making it a lesson.

3. Emotional granularity predicts whether feelings lead to action or paralysis.

For you: There’s a particular kind of stuck that this phase produces in parents, where you know something is off but you can’t figure out what to do about it. A lot of that paralysis lives in vague feeling. When you can get specific, “I’m not just worried, I’m scared we’re losing our closeness and I don’t know how to get it back,” something shifts. It’s not that the problem gets smaller. It’s that you can finally see the door.

For your kid: “Sad” after a friend group rupture is a weight with no handle. “Left out” or “replaced” or “embarrassed in front of everyone” are feelings you can actually respond to together. You can’t help them carry something neither of you can see clearly.

How to model it: When they come to you dysregulated, resist the urge to fix or minimize. Try reflecting a more specific emotion back: “That sounds less like you’re mad and more like you felt humiliated.” You might be wrong. That’s fine. The attempt teaches the skill.

4. High granularity kids (and parents) freak out less and regulate better.

For you: Here’s what this phase asks of you that nobody puts in the parenting books: you have to stay regulated when they are completely not. That is genuinely hard. And it’s almost impossible to do when you’re swimming in unnamed feeling. Knowing what you’re actually feeling in a heated moment, not just “furious” but “furious because I feel dismissed by someone I’m killing myself for,” gives you just enough distance from the feeling to choose your response instead of just having one.

For your kid: Regulation isn’t about suppressing what they feel. It’s about having enough precision to respond rather than just react. A kid who can tell the difference between “I’m nervous” and “I’m terrified” makes different choices. Better ones.

How to model it: Let them see you regulate in real time. “I notice I’m getting really activated right now, so I’m going to take a second before I respond.” That’s not weakness. That’s the whole skill, demonstrated live.

5. This is a teachable skill, and you are the primary teacher.

For you: The good news and the hard news are the same thing here: you don’t have to have grown up with great emotional vocabulary to give your kid one. But you do have to be willing to build it now, in real time, while also parenting a person who is going to test every feeling you have. The payoff is real though. Parents who can name what they’re experiencing during this phase are less reactive, less likely to take the distance personally, and more able to stay in the relationship even when it’s uncomfortable. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole game.

For your kid: Kids learn emotional vocabulary the way they learn everything else at this age: by watching adults they’re attached to navigate hard things. Not perfectly. Just honestly.

How to model it: Start small. Pick one feeling this week and get more specific about it. Not “tired.” Is it depleted, defeated, or just bored? Say it out loud. At dinner, in the car, wherever. You’re not giving a lesson. You’re building a shared language, one word at a time.

He also happens to be the godfather to our oldest kiddo and spent his morning reading to her class at school. A former kindergarten teacher turned grief researcher, his work is changing the way we think about the landscape of grief, how we build belonging, and why suicide prevention starts in kindergarten.

In our conversation we cover:

• What postvention work is in grief.

• Why the best prevention model is “upstream” work, meaning starting when the waters are calm.

• Why talking openly about suicide is actually best practice and does not increase the risk.

• What parents can do to make this topic feel less scary and more normalized.

You’ve been warned, if you come visit me, there is a chance I will force you into a public access channel style interview.

Steven, can’t thank you enough!

Xo,

Meg

What I kept thinking about were the boys watching them. The 13-year-olds. The kid who just started middle school and feels a little lost and a little invisible and is suddenly getting served content that says: I see you. You’ve been lied to. Let me show you the real world. That’s a powerful pitch. Especially when you’re an early adolescent and your whole job right now is figuring out who you are.

And, while there were tons of moments that were really disheartening because they are actually just sad, this documentary actually made me feel better because it points out the most obvious truth: the manosphere is just an MLM with a better aesthetic. And nobody is afraid of an MLM. Especially one that is, ultimately, so fragile.

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How MLMs Actually Work

MLM stands for multi-level marketing. Think companies like Herbalife, LuLaRoe, or whatever someone was selling on Facebook in 2016. The business model depends not on the product, but on recruiting new members to sell the same dream to the next layer down. The model keeps the people at the top rich, keeps the promise of success just out of reach, and keeps everyone else too invested in the idea that it's working to admit that it isn't.

They don’t lead with the product. They lead with the pain. They find people who feel overlooked, underestimated, or left behind by “the system.” They offer belonging, identity, and a sense of purpose. They say things like: most people are asleep. You’re not like most people. Join us. Then they sell you something. A course. A supplement. A lifestyle. And then they tell you the real way to succeed is to bring other people in.

The manosphere runs the exact same play, just for young men instead. The content isn’t really about fitness or finances or “self-improvement.” It’s a recruitment funnel. The extreme views, the red pill language, the us-vs-them worldview, that’s not the product. That’s the hook. The product is the $497 course, the $99/month discord, the merch, the algorithm engagement that makes these guys rich.

One of the influencers in Theroux’s documentary, HSTikkyTokky, said on camera that he’s fine with being called a scammer, a racist, a homophobic jerk because he’s only doing it for the money. He’s vocal about how “he’s not even hiding it” because he is just so authentically himself. And it is also so clearly a performance, because he then spends a good portion of the documentary freaking out online about the idea that this documentary might make him look bad. He’s trying to make himself look tough, impenetrable. All I saw was a toddler looking for a hug.

There’s a reason this works so well on young people specifically. The manosphere is a finely tuned Dunning-Kruger engine. It delivers just enough insider language and pseudo-framework of red pill, sigma male, hypergamy that a kid can feel, within weeks, like he’s cracked the code of human nature that everyone else is too scared or too stupid to see. That feeling of sudden clarity and superiority gives them a sense, no matter how fictional, that they matter. They have a group.

And it works because that feeling of finally understanding the system, of seeing what others can’t is exactly what an adolescent brain is hungry for. Competence. Insight. The sense that you know something real. That you have knowledge and prowess that no one else does, and you can rest in that feeling when you feel left out at school, or didn’t get asked to the dance. The cruel twist is that the more a kid consumes within this closed ecosystem, the more confident he becomes, and the less he knows he doesn’t know. That’s Dunning-Kruger working exactly as designed. The pipeline isn’t an accident. It’s the business model.

We all have tendencies towards this kind of bias, there is nothing wrong with your kid. There is something wrong about how the algorithm traps them inside the bias. You climb out of Dunning-Krugery by encountering enough genuinely new information, from outside the ecosystem, that your confidence starts to catch up with reality. You realize there’s more to know than you thought. The certainty softens. The questions get better. This is actually a natural developmental process. It’s what education is supposed to do, what travel does, what real relationships do. Exposure to difference is the antidote.

Which is exactly why the manosphere, like every good MLM, is engineered to prevent it. The lock-in mechanisms are not subtle once you know to look for them. Outside information is pre-discredited: mainstream media is lying, academics are captured, women are manipulating you, other men are weak or asleep. Any person in a kid’s life who pushes back becomes evidence of the conspiracy rather than a data point worth considering. Doubt itself gets reframed as weakness, as “blue pill” thinking, as exactly what they want you to feel. And the communities of Discord, the comments, the reply guys create a social belonging so immediate and so frictionless that leaving feels like losing your people.

That’s not an ideology. That’s a retention strategy. MLMs do the exact same thing. They tell you that skeptical family members are just negative people who don’t believe in you. They reframe doubt as a mindset problem. They surround you with true believers who will celebrate your commitment and quietly disappear if you start asking hard questions. The product almost doesn’t matter. The point is to make leaving feel like failure.

The exit from both requires the same thing: a relationship outside the ecosystem that doesn’t feel threatening. Not a debate. Not a correction. Just a person who is curious about you, who isn’t going anywhere, and who keeps asking questions that the ecosystem doesn’t have good answers for.

That’s the opening. And that’s what you can be.

Here’s What I Know About Adolescent Kids

Early adolescence is when kids are doing three things simultaneously, and doing all three of them intensely: They’re building an identity. They’re looking for belonging. They’re hungry for a sense of purpose and competence in the world.

These are not weaknesses. These are developmental imperatives. These are the things that are supposed to be happening at 12, 13, 14. The adolescent brain is literally wiring itself for exactly this kind of meaning-making. The manosphere creators know this. They are not confused about who they’re talking to or what those kids need. They carefully curate online identities that project moral authority, financial success, and masculine credibility while functioning as lucrative personal brands built entirely on selling solutions to the anxieties of their audience.

They took the deepest developmental needs of young people and turned them into a monetization strategy. That is worth saying clearly: they are profiting off your kid’s search for identity. I know this because I’ve watched it happen up close.

Making Space

When I was teaching in Ohio, I had a freshman boy in my orbit who was deep in the OG version of this world. Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, the early pipeline. He was genuinely curious, genuinely bright, and genuinely struggling. He was new to the school, had come from a much smaller place, and was having a hard time finding his footing. And he was angry in that specific way that this content manufactures: not violent, not cruel, just convinced that the world had already decided something about him before he’d had a chance to do anything at all. He used to say: “I didn’t actually do anything. I am just a kid. But I feel like everyone hates me because I am a white guy.” I didn’t dismiss him. I didn’t argue with him about privilege or tell him he was wrong. I didn’t assign him a corrective reading list. I just invited him to come hang out with me during my free period sometimes. I asked him questions. I let him show me things and explain them. I told him honestly when I found something uninteresting or unconvincing, and then I asked him something else about his life. His friends. What he missed about his old school. What he was hoping for.

What I knew, watching him, was two things at once: I could see exactly why this content was appealing to him, and I could see that what he actually needed had almost nothing to do with the content. He needed someone who wasn’t going to be judgmental. He needed to feel like he wasn’t already a verdict.

He also needed someone to widen the aperture. Because the Dunning-Kruger trap only holds as long as the information ecosystem stays closed. The moment you start asking genuine questions, curious ones, not combative ones, the framework starts to wobble on its own. You don’t have to knock it down. You just have to let in some air.

He ended up doing great, by the way. Found his people. Grew into himself. But I think about him a lot when I see parents approach this topic like it’s a fire to put out, because that’s exactly the wrong instinct. The content wasn’t the problem. The loneliness was the problem. The content was just what filled the space.

Here’s the Plot Twist the Manosphere Doesn’t Want You to Know

The very thing these influencers are hijacking, a young person’s drive to ask big questions about the world, to think about systems, to wrestle with what’s fair and what’s real, is actually one of the most important cognitive skills your kid can develop right now.

Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues at USC have been studying something called transcendent thinking in adolescents, and the findings are genuinely exciting. In a five-year longitudinal study, teenagers who showed a stronger tendency to think beyond the immediate situation by asking why systems work the way they do, and considering the broader ethical and personal implications of what they’re witnessing, showed greater coordination between two key brain networks over time. That neural development then predicted stronger identity formation in late adolescence, which predicted higher life satisfaction and relationship quality in young adulthood. Independent of IQ. Independent of socioeconomic background. Across ethnically diverse youth.

In other words: the capacity to ask why, not just react, but genuinely wonder about systems and meaning and implications, is literally brain-building work during this developmental window. Every single kid in the study was capable of this kind of thinking. What varied was whether they were in the habit of doing it, whether the environment invited it, and whether someone helped them practice it. The researchers put it plainly: transcendent thinking may be to the adolescent mind what exercise is to the body. Most people can do it. Only those who do will reap the benefits.

The antidote to Dunning-Kruger is not humiliation. It’s not correction. It’s genuine curiosity and connective moments, the kind that opens the ecosystem back up and invites the kid to think more, not less. The boy in Ohio was already asking big, systems-level questions about fairness and identity and how the world works. He just needed those questions pointed somewhere more interesting than a monetization funnel.

So What Does This Mean for a Kid Watching This Content?

It means the question isn’t how do I get them away from this. It’s how do I use this as a training ground for exactly the kind of thinking that will serve them for the rest of their life. Because transcendent thinking doesn’t require wholesome content. It requires real questions. And the manosphere, it turns out, is absolutely full of them. You’re not trying to make your kid agree with you. You’re inviting them to think. That’s a different ask. And developmentally, it’s one they’re ready for.

Wanting to be strong is not the problem. Wanting to feel capable, respected, and like you matter in the world? That’s not toxic. That’s human. That’s especially adolescent. And a culture that responds to those needs with eye rolls and suspicion is going to leave a lot of kids feeling like the only people who understand them are the ones trying to sell them something. We have to be honest about that part.

Kids are not wrong to want identity, purpose, and belonging. They’re not wrong to want to feel strong and competent and like they have something to contribute. The manosphere didn’t invent those needs. It just got there first with a slick pitch and a merch store. Real strength of character, the kind that actually holds up under pressure, doesn’t come from performing dominance online. It comes from building something real: relationships that require honesty, commitments that cost you something, the ability to repair after a fight, the capacity to care for someone who can’t do anything for you in return.

And the funny part about this documentary is that you can see the inability for these performances to hold up under the gentle, quiet curiosity Theroux approaches them with. One influencer is caught getting chastised by his mom for not having juice and for the room being messy before a planned “live stream take down,” and he immediately calls her Mummy and apologizes. Another, Myron Gaines, is talking so loudly to the camera about his sexual conquests and his “one way monogamy”, and then when his girlfriend joins him on camera it is just so hilariously clear that he is very devoted to her and snuggles with her and their dog when he’s not spouting performative misogyny on his podcast.

Watching the whole documentary, what I kept feeling wasn’t outrage. It was a low-grade sadness that nobody helped these men feel better about themselves when they were adolescents, before the performance calcified into a brand, before the loneliness got monetized. Before they had to become a product to feel like they mattered.

I know this can feel overwhelming, but your job is not to stop them from finding bad ideas. Kids have always found bad ideas, that is practically the job description of being 13. The stakes are whether your kid gets to grow up knowing that their identity doesn’t have to be a sales pitch. That strength doesn’t require an audience. That belonging isn’t something you buy into and it isn’t something you perform.

When you ask your kid a real question and wait for the real answer, you are not just keeping them out of a pipeline. You are doing exactly what the neuroscience says builds the adolescent brain. You are practicing transcendent thinking together. You are doing identity development in real time.

You are not behind. You are not powerless. You are, in fact, the most important variable in this whole equation, and you already know how to do this. You just need to trust that curiosity is enough. That questions are enough. That showing up, without an agenda, is enough.

It always has been.

XO, Meg

Also, if you are parenting boys, and wrote one of the best parenting books of this year, Talk to Your Boys. It is rightly being praised by every expert in the game and you should buy it!

What You Can Do Tonight 🩷 💫

Not a lecture. Not a confrontation. Just a questions. You can open with saying you read this substack that got you thinking, or you watched the documentary, or that you just saw it advertised. Heck, you can even invite them to watch it with you.

Here are 20 questions for kids to push their thinking around the MLM that is the manosphere. You don’t need all of them. Pick the ones that fit your kid and your comfort. The only rule is that you ask them like you actually want to know the answer.

Follow the money

1. Do you think these guys would still make this content if nobody paid for it?

2. If this guy is so successful and free, why does he need so many subscribers?

3. What do you think he gets out of people feeling like the world is against them?

Zoom out on the system

4. What kind of person do you think watches this the most? What do they have in common?

5. If this is what breaking free from the system looks like, what’s the system they replaced it with?

6. What would have to be true about the world for this to actually be right?

Turn the lens inward

7. Does watching this make you feel more like yourself or less like yourself?

8. After you watch a lot of this, do you feel more excited about your life or more annoyed at it?

9. If you followed this advice for a year, what do you think your friendships would look like?

Who’s actually strong here

10. What do you think it takes to actually be respected by people?

11. Is there anyone in your life you actually look up to? What’s different about them compared to these guys?

Low-stakes openers

12. What’s interesting about this to you? Like what actually hooks you in?

13. Do you think it’s exhausting to have to always be streaming, commenting, living online just for this all to work? They say it’s about freedom, but they seem pretty stuck to me. What do you think?

14. Is there anything about this you find kind of annoying or that doesn’t add up?

15. What do you think I would think if I watched this with you?

The bigger picture

16. If everyone believed this, what do you think the world would look like?

17. Do you think this stuff would land the same way if you were having a really good week?

18. What do you think a 30-year-old version of you would think about this content?

The wildcards

19. Do you think these guys are actually happy?

20. If this guy met you, do you think he’d respect you or would you just be another customer?

I opened Instagram and saw the message, and before I could read it, Meta’s AI that I did not give permission to access my DMs, asked me if I wanted it to summarize the message for me. I do not know how to fully describe how irate I felt at this stupid notification. No, Meta. I really fucking DO NOT want you to summarize a deeply human message from one of my dearest friends who is asking for care and connection. And all I could think about in that moment, while screaming into a pillow, was how helpless I felt.

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I am not anti-AI. I use it for work, find it immensely helpful for certain tasks, and know that it offers amazing opportunities when it comes to accommodation and support for neurodivergent folks. Like anything tech related, it is not all or nothing. I am neither an AI optimist or convinced it means the inevitable demise of our society. I just know that I kind of hate it sometimes.

Those occasional bursts of hate are because of the messaging it’s rapid incorporation (both voluntary and not) sends to our kids. That summary is best, that everything in our lives should be frictionless, that there is always an answer close at hand and curiosity is a waste of time, that we should always be striving for more, that you can outsource the most essential aspects of our relationships to a probability machine that is, as my husband Max calls it, a benevolant psychopath.

My good friend was visiting last week and we went out to dinner and I was being so annoying because I could not stop watching this table next to us. A father and his son were out and the Dad was on his phone basically the entire time, even when he was talking to his kid. The son’s face lit up every time the Dad engaged and chatted with him briefly, and the kid was not on his phone. At one point his son was just sitting there, looking at his Dad, clearly anxious and wanting to talk. And after about 5 minutes of the Dad ignoring him and being totally absorbed in his phone, the son reluctantly picked up his phone, opened Chat GPT, and started chatting with it.

These are my I Hate It moments. I have no idea what was going on, and I am fully aware that Dad could have been using his phone for any number of reasons, but what I saw was the inverse of the story we are always being fed: kids are addicted to their screens and want nothing to do with their parents. This kid was probably 15 or 16, but watching him hope for his Dad’s attention made him look about 6. This kid wanted connection, he wanted to matter. And in the absence of human connection, he turned to AI.

I do not think all tech is evil nor do I have a screen free home. My kids watch tons of long form, story based TV shows, they love Danny Go when they need to get the wiggles out on a rainy day, and I LOVE snuggling with them and watching movies. And there have also been hundreds of times I have put a show on so I can finish some work. I just get pretty freaked out that we are being too chill about AI’s impact on young people and are going to get too worried, too late in the game.

When parents come to me for coaching and want to talk about tech, I always make them start with their own digital habits. Adolescents have the best bullshit detectors in the game, and if we try to shift your kid’s habits without addressing yours, that is going to lead to a giant nothingburger and lots of conflict. Those are some of the best coaching sessions I ever have because parents always come in so heated (and I get why) about their kid’s habits, and leave that session way more aware that is an ecosystem issue, not just a “their kid” issue. And that the digital habits they are worried about are actually a call for connection. I was on a podcast that I love called Screen Less, Play More and was telling the host, Cynthia, that if we want kids off their devices, we have to create IRL opportunities that give them the same things they are seeking when they go on their phones: entertainment, connection, fun, etc. Otherwise, we are doing nothing to disincentivize the kid’s belief that all good things come from screens. I am not telling you to have screen free homes and be obsessively trying to hang out with your kid, we all know this is going to be a big fail for tons of reasons. Creating IRL opportunities is about being open to having kids over more, to be the parent that has a phone basket, to have board games or card games available, to let them run wild in enclosed space without over monitoring. And yes, it does mean sometimes forcing them to hang out with you, and pushing through their eye rolls and whines. My family called it Forced Family Fun. It happened every few weeks for a few hours, and it was non negotiable.

We are underutilizing one of the most important moments in our kids' lives, and I think part of why is that we've been handed a story about adolescence that makes disengagement feel reasonable. The eye rolls, the closed doors, the grunts. We've been told this is just what adolescents are like, that they don't want us anymore, that backing off is actually good. I think that story is doing us all a disservice. Our biggest job right now isn't to survive their independence, it's to work with their development. It’s to stay in the game and design for connection in small and big ways, even when, especially when, they make it hard. Adolescent expert Ronald Dahl and colleagues describe early adolescence as a sensitive period specifically for prosocial learning. It’s a time when the motivation to matter, combined with new capacities for emotional connection and contribution, creates conditions that are genuinely unlike any other developmental stage. The window opens. It also closes. What gets learned here about self, relationships, and whether one's actions matter to others tends to stick.

AI is optimized to be available, responsive, and frictionless, exactly what a kid who wants to matter is looking for. If we leave a vacuum where connection should be, something will fill it. The question is whether it's us or an algorithm. Design for Connection, the final direction in the WILD Compass is the answer to that question. It's the deliberate, unsexy, sometimes awkward work of making yourself more compelling than a screen. Not by competing with it, but by offering the one thing it categorically cannot: the experience of actually mattering to another human being.

This is why Design for Connection is not a nice-to-have. It is not a cozy bonus round at the end of a hard parenting day. It is the actual work. Because AI is not going anywhere, and it will continue to offer our kids a frictionless, always-available, never-distracted substitute for the real thing. The only antidote to a benevolent psychopath is a present human. And the window to be that human, to be the one who gets to shape what your kid believes about connection, about whether they matter, about whether people show up is open right now. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be there.

5 Ways to Design for Connection TONIGHT 🩷 💫

1. The Terrible Playlist Ask your kid to make you a playlist of songs you will probably hate. Listen to it in the car without commentary. Bonus: they will be watching you the whole time. I don’t care how vulgar or intense the song is, no commentary in the moment! You can always bring it up later, but in the moment, just let them have the win of watching your reaction and feeling silly.

2. The Worst Part of Your Day Contest At dinner, everyone competes for who had the actual worst day. No fixing, no silver linings, just competitive complaining. Whoever wins gets to pick dessert or skip dishes. It makes hard feelings funny and makes the table a place where nothing has to be performed.

3. The Dumb Question Jar Fill a jar with genuinely stupid, low-stakes questions. Things like: “would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses” energy. Pull one out when the vibe is bad. Nobody has to be vulnerable. Nobody has to be right. You just have to be in the same ridiculous conversation together.

4. The Unsolicited Compliment Drop Once a day, say something specific and true about your kid with zero agenda and walk away. Don’t wait for a response. Don’t make it a moment. Just drop it and leave. “That thing you said at dinner was really funny.” Then disappear. Low stakes, high impact. Ideally in person, but if you adolescent is being particularly feral, can also be delivered via text or post-it note on a mirror.

5. The Bad Movie Night Let your kid pick the worst, most objectively terrible movie they can find and watch it together. The shared experience of watching something awful is deeply bonding. Mocking it together even more so. You’re not building memories through perfection. You’re building them through fun, dumb things.

If this resonated and you want to go deeper, I'm running a free workshop on March 24th where we work through all four directions of the WILD Compass together. Come. It's free, it's live, and it will change the tone of your home faster than you think. Here is the link to register!

Coaching is where we take everything in these posts and apply it to your actual kid, your actual house, your actual dynamic. I have a few spots left! If you've been thinking about it, this is the nudge. Book a Sales Call Here!

His work affirms that when puberty kicks in, the brain doesn’t just start growing body hair and getting mysteriously obsessed with a specific Spotify playlist. It begins to reorganize around a new, urgent, biological question: Do I matter?

Not “am I loved” in the abstract. Not “will I be okay.” Something more specific, more social, more raw: Do I matter to the people around me? Does what I do make a difference? Am I seen? This is not a mood. This is not a phase. This is a neurobiological reorientation happening in real time, right there at your dinner table, while you are trying to discuss the dishes.

Dahl and his colleagues at UC Berkeley describe it as a shift in “incentive salience”, which is a fancy way of saying: the adolescent brain begins to assign enormous reward value to feeling socially recognized. Feelings of mattering activate the same neural systems as other deeply motivating experiences. When kids feel like they matter, their brains essentially say yes, more of that. When they feel like they don’t, the brain registers it the way it registers a physical threat. Which means: belonging isn’t a nice-to-have. It is the operating system.

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Belonging = Boundaries

But I need to complicate the word “belonging,” because I think it gets misused in parenting conversations in a way that makes me genuinely tired. Belonging is not unconditional affirmation. It is not saying yes when you mean no. It is not letting the behavior slide because you’re afraid of what accountability will cost the relationship.

Actually, it’s almost the opposite.The research on mattering, and the decades of work on what makes adolescents feel genuinely secure, points to something that is counterintuitive but once you see it, you can’t unsee it: kids feel most like they belong in environments with clear, consistent structure. Not because rules feel good, but because rules communicate something crucial. This place is real. Someone is in charge. I don’t have to manage this myself.

When there are no expectations, when everything is negotiable, when a parent is so desperate to stay connected that they’ve quietly stopped holding the line, kids don’t feel closer. They feel anxious. The absence of structure doesn’t read as love. It reads as no one is home. Think about it from inside the adolescent brain. If belonging means “I matter here, my actions have consequences, this family has a shape I can push against and it will hold”, then a parent who never pushes back, never holds a limit, never names a real expectation, is actually sending the opposite message: You don’t matter enough here for anyone to bother.

Structure is relational. Accountability is a form of care. When you hold a limit calmly and repair quickly afterward, you are doing both things at once: you are showing your kid that the boundary exists and that you are still on their team. That is the combination that actually works. What backfires is the parenting that confuses warmth with permissiveness and then wonders why the kid is dysregulated, testing harder, escalating. They’re not trying to be difficult. They’re looking for the edge of the container. They need to find it to feel safe.

So when I say Lead with Belonging, I do not mean: always prioritize your kid’s comfort. I mean: make sure that even in your hardest moments when you’re holding a limit they hate, when you’re naming a consequence, when you’re staying calm while they are absolutely not, they can still feel that they have a place here. The limit and the love are not in conflict. They are, when done right, the same gesture.

Being Their Safe Space Often Sucks.

When your kid is being impossible, when they are sulking, snapping, exploding about a thing that seems objectively very small, withdrawing into their hoodie like a woodland creature, they are not primarily communicating something about their homework. Or their screen time. Or the dishes. They are asking, often in the most disorganized way possible: Am I still okay here? Am I still part of this? Who am I?

The adolescent brain, in the middle of rewiring itself for independence, is also deeply, anxiously tracking belonging. Early adolescence is when kids are asking, consciously and unconsciously, Who am I becoming? Where do I fit? Who notices me? This is why they seem hypersensitive to tone. Why a single word can feel like an entire verdict. Why being teased in front of a sibling can crater an evening. The threat detection system is calibrated for social value. And the stakes feel enormous even when, from your vantage point, the incident was genuinely small.

Here is what this means practically, and it’s the heart of L — Lead with Belonging in the WILD Compass: The most powerful thing you can do in a hard moment is not explain your reasoning. It is not re-state your expectation. It is not address the infraction. It is to make absolutely sure your kid still knows they’re in. Not despite the conflict. Through it. Belonging, the way I’m using it, isn’t warmth. It isn’t letting things slide. It isn’t the absence of expectations. It is the consistent, unmistakable signal that says: You are still safe here. You still have a place. You don’t have to earn your way back.

Dahl’s research suggests that when young adolescents find ways of mattering through prosocial behavior (caring, contributing, being genuinely useful to the people around them) it creates a powerful positive feedback loop. Their brains register it as deeply rewarding. It motivates more of the same. It builds identity. But here’s the part that landed for me: kids do this identity rehearsal in the places where belonging feels secure enough to take risks. They practice new versions of themselves where they feel safe enough to fail without being exiled. That place, for better or for worse, is usually your house. You are the training ground. Your relationship is the lab. Which means that how you hold connection during conflict (whether you repair quickly, whether you extend benefit of the doubt, whether your kid ever feels like a problem to be managed versus a person you’re still fundamentally on the side of) actually matters. Not in a high-pressure, you’d-better-get-this-right way. In a this-is-the-work way. A kid who has never felt the real edges of your expectations doesn’t actually feel safe. They feel uncontained. And uncontained is the opposite of belonging.

The goal is not a conflict-free relationship. The goal is a repair-full one. Every rupture you repair imperfectly, quickly, and without requiring them to grovel, teaches your kid that relationships are survivable. That connection is more durable than conflict. That they can bring their actual self into this house and not lose their place. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, the whole thing.

How to Practice This Tonight 🩷 💫

Host an I Hate It Dinner. This one is for you, not them. Gather your partner, your parent friends, whoever is in the trenches with you, and go out for the express purpose of saying everything you hate about parenting right now. Not to shame your kid. Not to catastrophize. Just to give those feelings a place to live, get some air time, and then leave them at the restaurant when you pay the check. You cannot pour belonging into your kid from an empty container. The I Hate It Dinner is how you refill. It is also, in my experience, one of the funniest evenings you will have all year. Turns out everyone is quietly losing their mind, and the relief of saying it out loud (in a booth, over wine, with people who actually get it) is its own kind of belonging.

Hold the limit, repair the relationship. These are not sequential. You don’t wait until they accept the consequence to reconnect. You do both. “This is still the expectation. And I love you and I’m not going anywhere.” The repair doesn’t erase the accountability. It just makes sure they don’t lose you in the middle of it.

Let the container be real. If you say something, mean it. Inconsistency doesn’t feel kind, it feels unpredictable, and unpredictable feels unsafe. A kid who knows exactly what to expect from you, even when they don’t like it, feels more secure than a kid who’s constantly testing to find out where the walls actually are.

Avoid belonging threats, which are different from consequences. No character assassination. No global statements “you always,” “you never.” No humiliation as discipline. A consequence says: this action had an outcome. A belonging threat says: you are a problem. One teaches. The other just wounds.

Repair before you resolve. When things go sideways, connection is the prerequisite, not the reward. “I didn’t love how that went. I’m sorry for my part. The expectation still stands, and I’m still on your team.” That sentence is doing enormous work.

Make belonging cheap and structural. Don’t make them earn your attention. A look across the room. A dumb inside joke. A hand on the shoulder when they walk by. These are not rewards for good behavior. They are the baseline that makes accountability possible in the first place.

Try the benefit of the doubt as a default setting. Before you assume they’re being disrespectful, lazy, or deliberately difficult just: “I know you’re trying.” Not as a lie you tell yourself. As a hypothesis you’re willing to hold for thirty seconds before escalating. You will be right more often than you think.

Use a creative intermediary when words are failing. A weird bird call from across the house. A Post-it note on their door that says something dumb. The theme song from their favorite show when they were seven, played at full volume from your phone as you walk into the kitchen. Nobody can stay in a standoff when someone is doing something genuinely stupid. Novelty breaks tension because nobody has to be wrong or save face. This is not a joke. This is neuroscience. (Okay, it’s a little bit a joke.)

Ask “what do you need right now” and then actually accept the answer. Even if the answer is “nothing” or “to be left alone.” Especially then. Belonging includes the right to temporarily not perform closeness. Let them come back on their own timeline and greet them like it was never weird.

Invite them to teach you something. Show me your favorite meme. Explain this game to me. What is this song actually about? You don’t have to care about the thing. You have to care about them caring about the thing. There is a significant difference and they can tell.

The WILD Compass is a framework for navigating early adolescence without losing connection. L= Lead with Belonging, and is the third letter in the series.

If this landed and you want to go deeper in real time, I have two ways to help:

Join the next WILD Compass Workshop on March 24. We go through the compass together live, with time to ask questions and actually apply it to what’s happening in your house right now. It’s 90 minutes and you will leave with a map. Register here.

Book a Reset Session. If things are feeling spicy right now and you don’t want to wait, a Reset is 90 minutes of tactical 1:1 coaching. You come with a problem. You leave with a plan, a strategy, and more dignity than you started with. Book here!

Either way, you don’t have to white-knuckle this stage alone. Start early. Stay close. Grow together.

XO, Meg

It’s the word that comes up in almost every initial conversation I have with a potential coaching client. Not always in the first five minutes, but always eventually. I dedicate the first 30 minutes of these calls to just listening. No framework yet, just: Tell me what’s going on. And what I hear, over and over, is some version of this:

“My kid is anxious about everything. School, friends, sleep, food, the future. And I’m trying everything I can think of to help, but it’s not working. In fact, I think it’s getting worse.” Then comes the part they say more quietly: “I’m exhausted. I don’t know if I’m helping or making it worse. My partner and I are fighting about what to do. I just need someone to tell me which direction is the right direction.”

If that’s you, I need you to know: you’re not alone. You’re not behind. And you’re not ruining your kid. Anxiety is one of the most common challenges parents bring to me, and it makes sense. Because anxiety doesn’t just live in your kid. It lives in you too. It shows up in the hypervigilance, the mental load of scanning for triggers, the negotiation fatigue, the 2 a.m. spiral wondering if you’re fucking up your kid.

You’re managing two nervous systems at once. And no one taught you how.

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Last Week We Talked About Welcoming Change

Last week’s post was about the first direction on the WILD Compass: Welcome Change. The core idea is that turbulence isn’t a sign something’s gone wrong. It’s proof that development is happening. Your kid’s emotional weather, the mood swings, the sudden shifts, the intensity, that’s not a bug in the system. It’s the system working.

But welcoming that reality is one thing. Sitting in it without losing your mind is another. Which brings us to this week’s compass direction: Identify Feelings. In you and in them. Because if you can’t name what’s happening when your kid is spiraling, you’re going to react from the feeling instead of responding to it. And if your kid can’t name what they’re feeling beyond “bad” or “anxious,” they’re stuck in a loop with no exit. Anxiety is the perfect example of why emotional specificity matters.

Here’s What the Research Says About Anxiety

A few weeks ago, a coaching client asked me to read a book with her. Her daughter’s anxiety had been escalating. School avoidance, friendship paralysis, bedtime spirals that stretched past midnight. She was doing everything she could think of to help: accommodating, reassuring, removing triggers, listening to her for hours at a time. And it wasn’t working. In fact, it was getting worse.

The book was Dr. Eli Lebowitz’s research on childhood anxiety. This is one of the leading researchers in this space (like he is the Director of the Program of Anxiety Disorders at Yale) and what his research says is something I now think every parent of an anxious child needs to hear: Some kids are just more anxious and we often do not know why. 5-10% of children currently have anxiety problems, and up to 1 in 3 will experience anxiety before the end of adolescence. Some children are born with a genetic tendency toward higher anxiety. It’s not something they chose. It’s not something you caused. And in many cases, the reason is unknown or unknowable.

What determines whether an anxious child thrives isn’t the anxiety itself. It’s whether their parents can help them walk toward it instead of away from it.

Why Naming Feelings Actually Matters

There’s research that should be plastered on every middle school wall. Adolescents who can clearly identify and label their emotions are better protected against mental health challenges, especially during the rollercoaster years of early adolescence. By age 14, children who had a richer emotional vocabulary were less likely to struggle with anxiety and depression by age 16, even if they started out with similar mental health challenges as their peers. Think about that for a second. The ability to say “I’m overwhelmed” instead of just “I’m mad” or “I’m anxious about disappointing my coach” instead of “I don’t want to go” isn’t just helpful communication. It’s protective. It builds resilience. It gives kids a way to understand what’s happening inside them instead of just reacting to it. It also, eventually, helps them have more agency over their emotional landscape.

And it doesn’t just help them understand themselves. Adolescents who can describe their feelings with more nuance tend to have stronger friendships and feel more understood. Words create connection. Specificity turns isolation into shared experience. This is why Identify Feelings is the second direction on the WILD Compass. Because you can’t navigate what you can’t name.

The Listerine Moment

When I was in elementary school, I faked sick constantly. My signature move? Pouring mint-blue Listerine on the carpet to simulate vomit so I could stay home from school.

Spoiler: it did not work.

What my parents didn’t know yet, what I didn’t know yet, was that there was a reason I felt stupid all the time and was constantly trying to evade school. By 4th grade, I had a diagnosis: visual motor integration and auditory processing challenges. From that point on, I was the kid with extended time, tutors, and the constant awareness that other kids didn’t have to work this hard. School felt like a daily confirmation that I wasn’t good enough. And my brain’s solution? Attempt to avoid it entirely.

My parents could have leaned into that avoidance. They could have let me stay home more, pulled me out of hard situations, advocated for reduced workload. But they didn’t. Instead, they did something harder. They held the line. They got me the support I needed, tutors, IEP accommodations, spaces where I could excel outside of school, but they didn’t let me disappear. They communicated, through their actions more than their words: This is hard. And you can do this.

The Accommodation Trap

Here’s how accommodation works, according to Lebowitz: When your child is anxious, you naturally want to reduce their distress. It is literally what you have been doing since they were a baby, helping them manage their emotions and responses. So you step in. You remove the trigger, rearrange the plan, send the email, let them stay home. It feels like support. It feels like protection.

But what’s actually happening beneath the surface is this: every time you remove the source of anxiety, you confirm the child’s belief that the anxiety is dangerous and that they cannot cope without you. Lebowitz calls this “avoidance creep,” the way anxious children gradually increase and broaden the circle of things they avoid. What starts as “I can’t go to that party” becomes “I can’t go to any party” becomes “I can’t be in social situations at all.”

And the parent, exhausted and desperate to keep the peace, becomes what Lebowitz calls the “reassurer in chief,” always expected to have the answers, always available to make the child feel better, always one step ahead of the next meltdown.

Lebowitz argues that the child’s problem isn’t how much anxiety they have. It’s how willing they are to be anxious. And when we accommodate, we accidentally teach them that anxiety is something to be avoided at all costs.

What Support Actually Looks Like

This is where Lebowitz’s framework becomes genuinely useful, because he gives parents a formula that works: Support equals acceptance plus confidence.

Acceptance means you fully acknowledge that anxiety is real and genuinely hard for your child. You don’t minimize it, dismiss it, or tell them they “shouldn’t” feel that way. You see them. You get it. Their feelings are valid.

Confidence means you believe they can cope with the anxiety and be okay despite feeling anxious. You’re willing for them to feel anxious sometimes because you know the feeling won’t break them. Here’s what that sounds like in practice:

Not: “There’s nothing to be scared of.”
Instead: “This feels really big right now, and I know you can handle it.”

Not: “You’re fine, stop worrying.”
Instead: “I know this is hard. And I believe in you.”

Not: “Just don’t think about it.”
Instead: “Anxiety is uncomfortable, and you’re strong enough to sit with it.”

The shift is subtle but profound. You’re not demanding they stop being anxious. And you’re not protecting them from every hard thing. You’re holding steady while they practice being anxious and surviving it.

But here’s the part that makes this so hard: you can’t help your child identify and tolerate their feelings if you haven’t learned to identify and tolerate yours first.

Identifying Feelings in You

When your child is spiraling, what’s happening in your body? Are you noticing the tightness in your chest? The mental scramble to fix it, solve it, make it stop? If you’re in public, are you responding out of embarrassment?

That’s your anxiety responding to their anxiety. And if you can’t name what’s happening in you, you’re going to react instead of respond. You’re going to accommodate because it lowers your distress in the moment, even if it reinforces their belief that they can’t cope.

This is why parental distress tolerance is the most important variable in helping an anxious child. Not your child’s willingness to change. Not their baseline anxiety level. Your ability to stay regulated while they’re dysregulated. So before you can help your child get more specific about their feelings, you need to get more specific about yours.

Not just “I’m stressed.” But: “I’m overwhelmed by the mental load of managing their anxiety. I’m scared I’m making it worse. I’m exhausted from the constant negotiation. I’m angry that this is so hard. I’m grieving the easy relationship I thought we’d have.” That specificity isn’t indulgent. It’s essential. Because when you can name what you’re feeling, you can make a choice about how to respond instead of just reacting from the feeling.

Identifying Feelings in Them

Once you’ve practiced naming your own feelings, you can start helping your child do the same. And this is where the research on emotional granularity becomes a superpower. Because when your child says “I’m anxious,” that’s a start. But it’s not specific enough to actually work with.

Anxious about what? What does the anxiety feel like in your body? What are you imagining will happen? What’s the worst part?

Those questions aren’t interrogation. They’re scaffolding. You’re helping them build the vocabulary to understand what’s actually happening inside them. And when they can say, “I’m anxious that I’ll embarrass myself in front of my friends and they’ll think I’m weird,” you have something to work with. You can ask: “How likely is that to actually happen? And if it did happen, how bad would it really be?”

You’re not dismissing the feeling. You’re helping them separate the feeling from the story they’re telling themselves about the feeling.

This is what my parents did without even realizing it. They didn’t tell me I shouldn’t feel stupid. They acknowledged that school was genuinely hard for me. But they also held the belief that I could handle it. They gave me language for what was happening, “Your brain works differently, and that makes some things harder and some things easier,” and they helped me see that hard didn’t mean impossible.

The Armor and the Soft Belly

When I was a kid, the armor I built was sarcasm and distance. I became the quick-witted, caustic smart-ass who was never wrong, because if I couldn’t be the kid who breezed through school, I’d be the kid who had the upper hand. Anxious kids build armor too. Sometimes it looks like avoidance. Sometimes it looks like anger or rage, fight responses are anxiety responses, not just cowering fear. Sometimes it looks like perfectionism or control. But underneath? The belly is soft. The need to matter, to feel safe, to know they’re okay, that’s what’s being protected.

Your job isn’t to dismantle the armor by force. It’s to build a relationship steady enough that they don’t need it as much. My parents did that. They held boundaries, I couldn’t skip school just because I wanted to, but they also held empathy. They got me the accommodations I needed and found spaces where I could thrive. They showed me I mattered, not because I performed well, but because I was theirs.

And that steadiness is what made it possible for me to take the armor off later. When I got divorced at 25, eight months into a marriage I knew was wrong, I had to say out loud for the first time in my life: I really messed up. Not quietly, not just to myself, but publicly. It was terrifying. But I could do it because my parents had built a foundation where I knew that even if I really messed up, I was always welcome.

That’s what you’re building for your anxious child. Not a life without anxiety. Lebowitz is clear that some kids will experience higher-than-average anxiety throughout their lives. But a life where anxiety doesn’t run the show. Where they know they can handle hard things.

Teaching Your Child Not to Fear Anxiety

Lebowitz says this directly: teaching your child not to fear anxiety and to take it in stride is one of the biggest gifts you can give your anxious child. Not managing it forever. Not building their entire life around avoiding it. Teaching them that anxiety is something they can move through. Which means the work starts with you.

You have to become the parent who can tolerate their child’s distress without fixing it. Who can resist the urge to accommodate even when it would make everything easier in the moment. Who can communicate confidence even when you’re scared too.

This is coachable. This is learnable.

And it starts with recognizing your own patterns. Where are you accommodating? Where are you protecting when you could be supporting? Where are you demanding they not feel anxious because you can’t handle their anxiety?

You’re Not Doing It Wrong. You’re In the Work.

If you’re in the thick of it right now, navigating avoidance creep, bedtime spirals, or the kind of anxiety that’s expanding faster than you can keep up with, I need you to hear this: You’re not doing it wrong. You’re in the work.

You’re building the kind of steady, unshakable relationship your child will lean on when they’re ready to stop running from hard feelings. You are their safe place, their compass, and their most persistent proof that they matter and are capable. And even if it doesn’t feel like it now, that’s world-changing work. So for now, when things feel impossible, picture a porcupine. An animal full of quills because their belly is so very soft.

How to Practice This Tonight 🩷 💫

Here are 5 ways to use Lebowitz’s research starting right now. Pick one. Try it. See what happens.

1. Name Your Own Feeling First
Before you respond to your kid’s anxiety spiral, pause and name what’s happening in you. Out loud if you need to. “I’m feeling overwhelmed and I need a second to think.” This models emotional honesty and buys your nervous system time to regulate before you react.

2. Practice the Acceptance + Confidence Script
Next time your kid says they can’t do something because they’re too anxious, try this: “I know this feels really hard right now. And I believe you can handle it.” Then stop talking. Do not fix, do not problem-solve, do not rescue. Just hold the line and let them sit with it.

3. Spot One Accommodation You’re Making
Pick just one. Not all of them, just one. Maybe it’s the email you send to the teacher. Maybe it’s the plan you cancel. Maybe it’s the reassurance loop at bedtime. Name it. Write it down. You don’t even have to stop doing it yet. Just notice it’s happening.

4. Build an “Emergency Funny” Collection
Here’s something Lebowitz talks about that sounds ridiculous but actually works: if your child can feel a powerful emotion that isn’t fear, they’ll feel less scared. So help them create a saved folder of funny videos, memes, or Reels they can pull up when anxiety hits. The goal isn’t to dismiss the anxiety. It’s to invite other feelings into the landscape. Laughter is a surprisingly effective anxiety interrupter.

5. Teach Them to Get Mad at Their Anxiety
This one feels counterintuitive, but stick with me. Teach your kid to yell at their anxiety for “tormenting them with annoying thoughts and lying about bad things that aren’t going to happen.” Bonus points if they name their anxiety something silly like Glen or Kevin. Why does this work? Because you’re teaching them to separate the feeling they’re having from their personality. They’re not “an anxious person.” They’re a person who sometimes has to deal with Glen showing up uninvited. That’s linguistic separation, and it’s actually you being a super genius.

Pro Tip From Your Sidekick:
If your kid thinks naming their anxiety is weird, lean into it. Say, “I know, it’s bizarre. But humor me. What would you name the annoying voice in your head that tells you everything is going to go wrong?” My money’s on them picking something like “Todd” or “Barbara” and then roasting it mercilessly. That’s the whole point.

The WILD Compass Workshop!

I spent this past weekend at a conference in my role as US Country Chair for Global Dignity, and I’ve been thinking a lot about access. The dignity work is central to everything I do, and I keep coming back to this: early adolescence is where belonging wounds can harden into armor, where kids learn whether they matter, whether they belong, whether it’s safe to be themselves.

The WILD Compass is my attempt to translate that into something parents can actually use. It’s not just about reducing conflict or making life easier (though it does that). It’s about building the foundational skills for creating a culture of dignity at home. And I realized: if that’s what this is really about, I need to get it in front of as many people as possible, in the easiest way possible.

So I’m making the workshop free.

Feb 24, 12-1:30pm ET. Live on Zoom. Limited to 75 spots.

If you already registered and paid, I’m refunding you and I hope you’ll still come!

Register here!

This isn’t me being precious about dignity or making it heavy-handed. It’s just: these ideas matter, and I want them to reach the parents who need them, without price being the thing that gets in the way.

See you on the 24th! You don’t have to do this alone.

Meg

The Hardest Part of Welcome Change

The first direction on the WILD Compass is Welcome Change. And what most parents hear is: “Oh, okay, I need to embrace the good stuff. The growth spurts, the new interests, the independence.” Sure. That too.

But what you actually need to welcome is discord. Turbulence. Emotional weather you didn’t forecast and definitely didn’t invite. Because here’s what the research tells us (and what years of teaching middle school and coaching parents through this phase has shown me): Adolescents rehearse new versions of themselves constantly. They try, fail, swap, refine, repeat. This is identity work, not insolence. Your kid isn’t doing this to you. They’re doing this in front of you because you’re the safest place they have to practice being a whole person with big feelings.

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Just today a parent texted asking for advice and I replied, “Then you just have to wait it out and just remind yourself that this is his brain building a map of boundaries, and part of making that map means running into the same wall over and over again.” This kind of discomfort is not enjoyable, but it is part of the change we have to welcome. Not because we like it and want to invite it into our house, but because the more we see this as normal, and not a sign our kid is broken or we are failing as parents, the more resilience we have to support them (and ourselves) through these messy, necessary moments.

Their Feelings About Your Boundary? None of Your Business.

Let me be very clear: I’m not saying you don’t care. I’m saying you cannot control how they feel about your decisions, and trying to will make you lose your mind. When you set a boundary and they explode, your nervous system initially reads as a red alert: “I’m ruining our relationship! They are a spoiled asshole! I’m a bad parent!” That initial response is super normal and expected. The work is in the re-frame. They are experimenting and trying to learn:

• Can I have big feelings AND still be safe?

• Do my feelings change reality?

• Can I survive disappointment?

• Does anger destroy relationships?

And you’re teaching them the answers by how you respond. If you:

• Stay steady

• Validate their feelings without changing your decision

• Don’t make their anger mean something about you

• Repair quickly if you lose your cool

Then they learn: I can be furious at someone I love. I can disagree and still belong. My feelings don’t destroy relationships. That’s the world-building part of parenting no one puts on a onesie.

Why This Feels So Hard

Figuring out how to matter is the reason this stage feels so high-stakes for both you and your kid. Mattering is basically this: Do I matter to other people? And can I make a difference in the world? Researchers break it down into two parts:

Social Significance: Being recognized by others as important. This includes:

• Belonging (feeling like you’re part of something)

• Recognition (being seen and valued)

• Status (where you fit in the social order)

Agentic Power: Having influence and competence in the world. This includes:

• Agency (the ability to make choices)

• Competence (feeling capable)

• Mastery (getting good at things)

• Influence (your actions have impact)

Here’s the kicker: Mattering is foundational. Babies can literally experience trauma when their actions don’t prompt a response from caregivers. We are wired from birth to need evidence that we exist in other people’s worlds and that we can affect our surroundings. And adolescence? It’s the stage where kids are actively constructing their answer to: Who am I becoming? Where do I fit? Do I matter? Which means they’re testing everything. Including you.

What Happens When You Take Their Feelings Personally?

Early adolescence doesn’t just activate your kid’s need to matter. It directly threatens yours. For years, you’ve been getting clear evidence that you matter:

• Your baby cried, you picked them up, they stopped crying. You had influence.

• Your toddler ran to you when they fell. You were significant.

• Your elementary schooler thought you were the smartest person alive. You had status.

• Your presence could fix almost anything. You had competence.

And then early adolescence hits and suddenly:

• They don’t want your help with homework

• They roll their eyes at your jokes

• They’d rather be literally anywhere than with you

• Your advice is “cringe”

• Your presence at school drop-off is embarrassing

• Everything you do is wrong, annoying, or proof you don’t understand them

Every single marker of your mattering as a parent is under siege. So when your kid says “I hate you” after you set a boundary, two mattering crises are happening simultaneously:

For them: They’re checking: “Can I be a whole person with big feelings and still belong here? Does my anger destroy our relationship? Do I still matter to you even when I’m furious?”

For you: Your nervous system is screaming: “I’m losing them. They don’t respect me. I’m failing. Do I still matter as a parent if they hate me? What is my significance if I can’t make them happy? Where is my influence if they won’t listen?”

See what just happened? You both just activated the exact same fear: Do I still matter? And when you start defending yourself, lecturing about respect, or trying to convince them you’re a good parent, you’ve just made their developmental work about your sense of mattering.

Now they can’t practice having big feelings because they’re managing yours. This, by the way, is how kids learn to perform emotional labor for parents. They start regulating your anxiety about whether you matter instead of learning to regulate their own emotions.

The Brutal Truth About Parenting This Stage

Your kid’s job is to become their own person. Your job is to let them, while maintaining your own sense of mattering independent of their approval, and that is searingly hard work. Because for a decade or more, your identity as “good parent” was built on evidence you could see:

• Happy kid = I’m doing it right

• Kid comes to me with problems = I matter

• Kid listens to my advice = I have influence

• Kid wants to be around me = I’m significant

Now your kid’s developmental imperative is literally to deconstruct that entire system. They’re supposed to:

• Test whether your love is conditional

• Seek advice from literally anyone but you

• Find you embarrassing

• Establish independence by rejecting dependence

• Practice autonomy by pushing against your authority

None of that means you don’t matter, but your nervous system doesn’t know that. So you interpret their normal developmental behavior as evidence of your failure, and you scramble to restore your sense of mattering by:

• Over-explaining your decisions (seeking recognition of your competence)

• Demanding respect (seeking status)

• Insisting they acknowledge your sacrifices (seeking significance)

• Trying to make them happy so they’ll like you again (seeking belonging)

And the more you do that, the less space they have to do their developmental work, and the more irritated and drained you are going to feel because no matter how much you do it, it doesn’t actually make anything better.

The Two Ways Mattering Shows Up in This Moment

Let’s break this down through the lens of what your kid actually needs, and what you’re afraid you’re losing:

Social Significance: “Do I still belong even when I’m mad?” What they need to know:

• Belonging: “Am I still part of this family even when I disagree?”

• Dignity: “Will you treat me with respect even when I’m disrespectful?”

• Recognition: “Do you see that I’m upset for real reasons (to me)?”

What you’re afraid you’re losing:

• Belonging: “If they hate me, am I still their parent?”

• Recognition: “If they don’t value my guidance, do I matter?”

• Status: “If they don’t respect me, what authority do I have?”

If your response is to punish, lecture, or withdraw affection, the answer they get is: “Your belonging here is conditional. Your feelings make you less valuable.” But the answer you get is: “I can restore my significance by reasserting my status.” Except it doesn’t work. It just teaches them that relationships require performance.

If your response is to validate, hold the line, and stay connected, the answer they get is: “You matter here even when you’re a mess.” And the answer you have to give yourself is: “My mattering as a parent isn’t determined by their mood. I matter because I’m steady, not because I’m worshipped.” That’s the harder path. And it’s the one that actually works.

Agentic Power: “Can I have an effect on my world?”

What they need to learn:

• Agency: “Do I have any control over my life?”

• Competence: “Can I handle disappointment?”

• Influence: “Do my feelings and opinions count for something?”

What you’re afraid you’re losing:

• Influence: “If they won’t listen to me, do I matter?”

• Competence: “If I can’t make them happy, am I failing?”

• Agency: “If I can’t control their feelings, what power do I have?”

When you hold a boundary and validate their feelings, you’re teaching:

• “You don’t control my decisions (I have agency too), but you do influence how I think about things.”

• “Your feelings matter. They just don’t always change the outcome.”

• “You’re competent enough to survive this disappointment.”

And you’re learning:

• “My influence isn’t measured by their obedience.”

• “My competence isn’t measured by their happiness.”

• “My agency includes choosing not to absorb their emotions.”

When you cave to their anger because you can’t tolerate feeling like you don’t matter to them, you teach them:

• Big emotions are dangerous

• Your mattering is their responsibility

• Relationships are transactions

When you dismiss their feelings entirely because they threatened your sense of mattering, you teach them:

• Your feelings have no influence

• You don’t matter enough to be taken seriously

• Protect yourself by not feeling

Neither of those is the goal. The best relationships are not conflict-free. They are repair-full. Your kid doesn’t need you to prevent every disappointment or avoid every conflict. They need you to show them that conflict doesn’t destroy belonging. Which means you need to be able to tolerate conflict without it destroying your sense of mattering.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

The Scenario: You say no to something. They lose it. Door slam. “You never let me do anything. Everyone else gets to. I hate this family.”

Old Script (Both of You Fighting for Mattering):

• You defend yourself: “That’s not true, we let you…”

• Lecture about gratitude: “Do you know how good you have it?”

• Threaten consequences for disrespect: “You don’t talk to me that way.”

• Spiral internally: Am I too strict? Do I matter to them at all? Am I ruining them?

New Script (Securing Their Mattering, Protecting Yours):

• Pause. Breathe. (Your nervous system needs 5 seconds to remember: Their anger is not evidence I don’t matter. It’s evidence they feel safe enough to have feelings.)

• Validate their significance: “I know you’re really disappointed. That makes sense. This matters to you.”

• Hold your agency: “And the answer is still no.”

• Secure their belonging: “I know you’re mad at me and that is ok.”

• Don’t make it about you: (Internal work: I matter as a parent because I can hold this. Not because they agree with me.)

• Repair later: “Hey. That was hard earlier. Want to talk about it, or do you need more space? Either way, I’m on your team.”

That’s it. No lecture. No convincing. No defending your character. Just: I see you. I hear you. The boundary stands. You still matter. You still belong. And so do I.

Why Parents Struggle With This

If this feels impossible, there’s a reason. Most of us were not raised in homes where our mattering was secure during conflict. We were taught:

• Anger = disrespect = consequences

• Disagreement = disloyalty

• Big feelings = manipulation

• Parents’ feelings > kids’ feelings

So when our kids rage at us, we’re not just responding to them. We’re responding to every time we were made to feel like we didn’t matter when we were upset. You’re trying to secure your kid’s sense of mattering while your own is still under construction. And early adolescence doesn’t just ask you to stabilize their mattering. It asks you to:

• Let go of the ways you used to get evidence you mattered

• Find new sources of significance that aren’t based on their approval

• Tolerate the discomfort of not being needed in the ways you used to be needed

• Redefine your competence as a parent around steadiness instead of happiness

This is hard work. It’s also the most important work. Because when you learn to stay steady in the storm, when you stop taking their developmental chaos as evidence that you don’t matter, you teach them something extraordinary:

Relationships can hold everything. Even this. Even when both people are struggling. Even when both people need to matter and those needs are in tension.

The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

Research shows that when parents expect turbulence, they stop interpreting development as disaster. When you understand that:

• The mess is the milestone

• Emotional volatility is proof the system is working

• Their job is to grow; your job is to stay steady

• Your mattering as a parent is not contingent on their current opinion of you

You stop bracing for impact every time they sigh, change outfits, or retreat into a blanket cave.You stop fighting reality. You stop taking their developmental chaos personally. And the relationship stays intact.

Why I’m Teaching This

Learning how to Welcome Change, even this really hard kind, is exactly what we’re working on in the WILD Compass Workshop on February 24th at 12pm ET.

90 minutes. Real strategies. Immediate relief. You’ll learn:

• How to stay regulated when they’re dysregulated

• The mattering framework that makes this stage make sense for both of you

• Scripts for hard moments that actually work

• How to stop taking developmental chaos personally

• Why your kid’s feelings about your boundaries are none of your business (and why that’s actually good news)

• How to rebuild your sense of mattering as a parent in ways that don’t require their approval

This isn’t about fixing your kid. It’s about recalibrating your nervous system so you can parent from clarity instead of panic, and from a secure sense of your own significance instead of constantly seeking evidence that you matter.

Feb 24 12-1:30 ET. Live on Zoom. Recordings Always Sent After!

Register Here! And Share with a friend!

Their feelings about your boundary are none of your business. But your capacity to stay steady while they have those feelings, to secure their mattering without abandoning yours? That’s everything.

Let’s do this together.

XoXo,
Megan