This article Parenting Teens Causes Stress: Here’s How to Prevent It from the website Your Teen takes a look at the way relationships and marriage often undergo stress from facing the challenges that come with raising a teenager. The article reads “The breakneck pace of change during adolescence gives couples little time to ponder choices as a team, and personal differences can make it difficult to come to a consensus.” It goes on to give several strategies to help prevent marital tension.

Here is The Feelings Wheel I talked about in Episode 7 of our podcast Unyielding. It’s a great tool that can be used to help people identify and communicate what they are feeling.  The center is labeled with primary emotions. The outer rings contain secondary emotions linked to the primary ones.  It’s a helpful way to get answers when you’re flooded with emotions, and you are thinking to yourself, “What is even happening right now?!” Take a look at it. It’s actually pretty cool.

Sometimes it’s challenging to know how to respond to a situation. We are flooded with emotions and pulled in different directions. I love to use the document below as a tool whenever I find myself spinning in the cycle of trigger/response.  Reading through it helps recenter me.

Print it out and post it somewhere you’ll see it regularly. Read it while you brush your teeth in the morning or before bed. Better yet, use it as a template to create your parenting manifesto by filling in your responses to the prompts below:

• Above all else, I want you to know _______. You will learn this from me when I __________.
• I want you to engage in this world from a place of ________. You will learn it when you see me ______.
• We will practice ______ in our family by ________.
• I will teach you _______ by practicing ________ with myself first.

Do you get the picture? This practice helps us shift away from their actions onto our influence. The more we can turn our focus away from our child’s journey and onto our own, the more we will regain a sense of control over our lives and truly begin to operate from a place of power. The most significant impact you can make in your child’s life centers around showing up as the best version of yourself. Stabilize yourself first, and then you will naturally bring stability into your child’s life.

Credit to Brene Brown.

In this blog post by Dr. Wayland Myers, he defines loving detachment, how it’s an act of love for others and ourselves and how to know when to detach lovingly. I discuss his blog in Episode 20 of Unyielding. I cannot stress enough what an incredible resource this is to print out and use again and again.

Click Here: Loving Detachment

Credit to Dr. Wayland Myers.