Teens Dating

I think those things end up feeling a bit different. Um, you know, when we’ve got a 15 year old who likes someone versus a 19 year old, maybe even in college who likes someone, those are kind of different categories, but. Regardless.  Teen dating.  Brings up a lots of feelings for you.  And I can help you with that.  Here’s the thing that’s really important to understand about your brain. 

Your brain is looking for danger.  And it’s scanning the environment for danger.  It finds things that it thinks are scary. And then it’s like, oh, no, this is very scary. We have to freak out about this. And our response to the danger is usually not very good. It’s usually coming from a stress state.  Like a fight or flight state.  And we’re not great problem solvers when we’re in that space.  And then we end up acting. Weird.  With our kids.  

The other thing that I say on this podcast often, is that your thoughts? Create your results. Okay. What you think about shows up in your life?  And to prove that. to you. You are living. In a home right now. That was a thought in your mind before you ever even saw it. Right. So you had a moment in your mind where you went, we need to move. And that generated a feeling of focus or determination or hope.  Or maybe you were renting a place and the lease was up.  And you had to stop. We need to move. And it created the feeling of even panic.  But from a feeling that came from a thought.  Your action line was to do a bunch of actions that resulted in you finding a home. 

So you had this thought we need to find home. It generated a feeling which generated actions, which resulted in you finding a home. I think this is part of my work that some people worry is kind of woo ish. But it isn’t, it’s really just that what we think about creates feelings in our bodies, those feelings drive our actions and then the actions add up to a result that is always tied to our thinking. So I’m going to give you some examples of that with teen dating.  

So let’s say your sweet 15 year old son comes home and says, mom, I like this girl. And she wants to go, out.  What’s your thought about that? Okay. Your thought might be. Oh, no, I’m not ready for this. And the, this, in this case, is your kids dating?  Uh, your thought might be, oh no, this is really dangerous.  

Your thought might be, oh, I really liked that girl.  Right. It’s not always a negative thing. I wanted to create a podcast that addressed the negative things, but it might be a positive experience. You might think, I don’t want them to mess up. Like I did.  So let’s dig in on that one. Cause that’s pretty common. I don’t want them. To mess up like I did. How does that feel in your body?  It’s going to feel constricting. It’s going to feel some version of fear.  It might be like heavy in your stomach, like dread, it might be anxiousness, kind of a buzzy feeling in your chest. It might be shame. It might just bring up your own shame. From each of those feelings and those are very different. feelings.  

How will you act? So let’s say you have the feeling of shame. He says, I want to go out with this girl. You remember what you did in your teens?  You feel the feeling of shame?  Shame is actually a hiding emotion. So likely if you felt shame, you might just say something like.  You can’t date here. We’ll talk about it later.  Or I can’t deal with this right now.  I have to talk to your dad about it. And then you hide. You’re going to go in your room and you’re going to be ruminating about it and feeling terrible and thinking about your own experience, having fear.  And then you may avoid it altogether with this kid.  I don’t know what to say.  

But then you might.  Have the thought, I don’t want him to make the same mistakes. And from there you feel fast feeling like panic.  And then you come at him too hard. Well, you shouldn’t do this and you’re too young to date all these things, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you’re in this like hyper energy.  And you’re not connecting with this kid. You’re not listening to him. You’re not thinking about this girl.  

You’re just having your own experience and then projecting all this stuff under this kid. And it will create disconnection. And it will very likely end up that he will then make mistakes because you showed up with such weird. Energy with him. Because if you have the thought, this is totally fine. Oh,  We’re unlocking the dating chapter of parenting. I didn’t know we were here already, but here we are. It’s totally normal. Nothing has gone wrong.  

I’m going to figure out what I want to say.  I want to do this better than my parents did it. I mean, most people’s parents.  I don’t say anything to them. Or clamp down on the kids really, really hard and maybe a third middle option. I don’t know, but most people.  Don’t love the way that their parents handled dating conversations and conversations about sex. And they want to do something different, but they don’t slow down to figure out what is it that I want to do. That’s different. The other thing that I highly recommend.  Is telling your kids, this is new for us too. And we’re going to learn and navigate it with you.  Like, here’s what we think the rules are, but they may change as we experienced this with you.  

And. I’ve seen several families do that where, you know, the rules for. The oldest two kids resulted in some actions and then they changed their minds. But I think because we’re so scared of teenage hormones and teen pregnancy and dating and all of the things which is appropriate because it is dangerous, but we end up not telling the kids the truth or connecting with them. We don’t say, Hey, let me tell you about what it feels like when your whole body is on fire. And it feels like you have to touch the person that’s sitting next to you. Let me tell you about that feeling.  Because most of the time when we’re lecturing the kids.  

Especially when they’re young, they haven’t experienced that yet. So they think we’re crazy and we just. don’t trust them. And when they think my parents are crazy, they’re so out of touch and they don’t trust them. It creates disconnection. Then they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do anyway. But when we talk to them, when we tell them the truth and we say, Hey, biologically, I mean, I will tell my girls biologically.  Y’all were getting married at 15 for ever and ever, and ever the humans were getting married. They were getting married and having children at 15.  Now society has changed, but the bodies haven’t.  So their bodies are like, let’s go.  And that’s not a you problem is what I’m going to tell my kids like this has nothing to do with you or my trust with you. 

You just have a human body. That’s wired. To want to get married and have babies at 15. But now we live in a society.  Or we don’t do that until later.  And so your job is to navigate these weird years where your body is screaming at you. To do, this thing. But your.  Not ready to do it emotionally or society societal wise.  

Because back when we were also having babies at 15, the life expectancy was so small.  So I want them to understand that too. So, what you think about dating is going to determine how you connect with your kid. And so here’s what I would love. What if we put connection in the feeling line? What would you have to think in order to feel really connected to your kid? Or we get also put connection in the action line. What are the activities that have you been connected with your, your kiddo and what would you need to feel and think in order to do those activities?  

And here’s the thing there’s no right or wrong way.  I’m not team Chassidy rings or, you know, team tell them all the things at 15, or I just really don’t know what we’re going to choose. But I know.  That I want to be really connected to my kid. And. I want them to feel seen and loved through the process. I also know it’s my job to protect them. So I want to tell them the truth.  I want them. to understand. How quickly things can go from zero to 60.  

Because of their biology. Right. Not because you’re a bad, bad girl.  Like, yeah, it’s just everybody. Like when we, when we’re close to someone that we like, and, and, and it’s cute and we’re going, and we’ve gone through puberty. It feels like fire in your body. I also want them to understand. How very quickly you can sleep with someone.  And then it takes four minutes.  And when we, you know, we build it up, like, it’s this huge thing, but I want them to understand.  

That it really can feel so quick that it’s almost like, it feels like it was an accident. I just don’t think we tell kids that enough.  You know, we just don’t want to tell them anything because we’re so scared.  But because we don’t tell them anything. They just don’t realize how fast it can happen and how terrible it feels afterwards. Right.  Now because I grew up not Catholic.  It will be easy for me to own.  Messing around and sleeping with people before I became religious and got married.  I think it would be a lot harder if I was Catholic and had been raised Catholic. But still mess around a lot in high school and had to own that with my kids. 

I just want to acknowledge that that’s a hard thing to own with your kids. Because as soon as we tell them that your brain goes, well, they’re going to say, Hey mom, you did it. So I should get to do it.  But not telling them is worse. I think. I tell them to tell them how awful it feels afterwards.  Even if, you know, even not being religious. I regret. All of that.  

And then just continuing to tell them like, Hey, I really trust you, but you don’t understand your biology yet. And you can show them how that is like with a three-year-old or a four-year-old the parallels between teenagerhood and toddlerhood are so strong because the toddlers just want what they want. And they’re not thinking things. through. And I think we could make a lot of silly analogies about that, that the teenager would see.  

Even just running into the road.  I’m a kid. I see a puppy across the street and I’m so excited. I want to run into the road. And you can tell the teenager as a teenager. Will you see that situation more clearly than the three-year-old and it’s your job to protect the three-year-old and grab them. And they may cry about it.  But you don’t want them to be hurt. And that’s what we’re going to try to navigate with you is that there’s some things you don’t see or understand fully yet.  

And we’re going to help you navigate that. And then also just really read there’s so much cool stuff now about theology of the body and how beautiful sex is when you’re married and telling them like, yeah, this is amazing. And you totally get to look forward to this. It’s not bad or yucky or evil.  But it’s really meant to be done. in this way.  

So I think if, you know, when one of my kids comes and says, Hey, I want to, date, I will for sure do what I call thought, download, which is I will take out a piece of paper and I will just like that. All the things that my brain is thinking.  

Negative things, positive things, just all of it. I will just dump it out. So that I see what’s going on in there.  And then, because I do this work all the time, I can kind of get there very quickly to see which thoughts will create results in my life that I don’t want. And which thoughts. We’ll create results that I do. 

I really want to be connected to my kids. In the time that they are navigating this. I want to build trust with them.  And I want to think about that instead of being like, oh no, they’re going to make terrible decisions. And then of course, underlying that is, and then. I’m a terrible mom, right? That’s that’s the double whammy. Like we’re sad for them making the decisions, but then we also feel the fear of how we’re going to feel.  When they make those decisions.  

The other thing. Is, you can form a relationship with the person that they are interested in dating.  Invite them over to your house. Sit both of them. down and say all the same things to this girl too. Or boy. Like, Hey.  If you want to date my son, if you want to do my daughter.  Or if you want to spend time with them, like here’s how we view dating. We may not even use that word.  And you can spend time together. You can come over to our house all the time. We’d love to get to know you.  

Like we don’t have to be knives out. Over this. But we can tell both of them. So they both hear it.  This is how I expect you to show up and treat. My kiddo. And this is how I expect my kiddo to treat you like just transparency with everybody. And then getting on the same page as your spouse.  My husband and I haven’t talked about this a lot. Yet. Mostly because. I just don’t think we need to, until it comes up.  But I’m sure that we will have slightly differing opinions and we will talk through them until we agree. And we will make some rules and then we will be really honest with the kids. 

Hey, these rules may change because we are also navigating this with you. We don’t know. How this is going to go. And the rules may be different for your younger siblings. They may be different kid to kid. You know, our job is to protect you. And we’re going to do that to the best of our ability. To keep you out of situations that are dangerous. To make sure that you have the information that you need. And the information to me, it’s not going to be like, this is how you use condoms and use protection. It will be, Hey, let me just tell you. How easy it is.  To slip into activity that you regret. Let me just like tell you what happens in your body. And, and he, cause the problem is to once that’s happened in their body, their brain is kinda gone. 

Like, you know how I say, it’s hard to do problem solving when you’re in a stress state. It is really hard to do problem solving when you are in a blown out. You know, hormonal. Intimate state. And that’s why it’s so important to be in a public place or with other people around. I don’t know why we hide that from them. Like, I think it’s, it’s good to tell them that. And.  To arm them with that information. So I want you to ask yourself, how do you want to experience them dating? How do you want to feel? How do you want to show up?  What do you want the result to be? We don’t know if they’re going to stay with this person or not.  We don’t know what their behavior is going to be, but you can decide what your result is going to be. How you want to be with these kids, and then you need to find the actions that create that result.  

And let’s say the result that we want. to create is, um, you know, it doesn’t have sex until marriage. That’s the result of most of us want for our kids.  What are the actions that create that? Have you stopped to think about that? Cause a lot of us just have fear that it won’t be that, but we’re not slowing down to go. What does create that? Who do you know that made that choice? Why did they make that choice? What did their parents tell them? We have more control over how we show up than we think.  And that really does influence the situation.  

The other thing you can do is you can ask people who’ve been through it before. So talk to the parents, you know, who are 10 years older than you and say, Hey, what do you wish you would’ve known or done differently?  I wish we had a more centralized place for gathering wisdom and sharing stories. That was always part of human culture and we’re so isolated now. And then we just have reels.  And short form video. I’m not as not the same thing. As aggregating and sharing really great wisdom. But you’re not the first person to go through this.  

So trusting yourself. Praying and asking God, what do you want me to know? How do you want me to show up?  What do you want me to tell this kid?  Trusting your kid, and that they’re going to have whatever experience they’re going to have and they’re going to be fine. Really. Most of us who have made some decisions that we’re not super proud of our adults and we’re doing just fine. And then how can you stay connected? To this kid. And how do you want to talk to yourself when they make decisions that you don’t agree with?  

Are you going to beat yourself up? Are you going to tell yourself? you’re a big failure and you’re terrible, mom. You can kind of decide ahead of time, how you want to talk to yourself. So I just wanted to make this episode because I’ve just been doing some coaching on this recently.  And I’m making them for myself, which will come.  At some point, my oldest is about to turn 14. There has been no boys yet.  Not even any hint of liking people. Like my oldest is very into reading and. I don’t know other things. 

I don’t see it in her yet, but it’s coming. And I don’t know what we’re going to do.  But I will figure it out. And my goal will be to stay connected to her.  And to build trust with her.  To teach her how to trust herself.  And an always I’m working on trusting myself to.  To know what God wants me to do and how to show up as a parent. All right. My friends. Whew. I’m praying for all of us. All of us moms praying for us.  Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.