YOUR VISION FOR SUCCESS AS A MOM
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional roller coaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 63.
Hello, my friends. As I get ready to bring my first born to college, I have been thinking a lot about raising my boys and what I thought success for them would look like. I've been thinking so much about the incredible memories I've had of my boys as they've grown up.
I can still remember with such clarity the first day that my first born ever smiled at me. Eight weeks old, and I remember this gummy, brilliant smile that lit up his whole face. It was like, in that moment, all of the sleepless nights and the worry and the overwhelm I'd experienced bringing him home for the first time, learning through painful experience how to care for a newborn.
It was like, in that moment, all of it became so worth it. That's not to say it wasn't worth it before, but I guess for me that smile surpassed any of the other positive feedback I'd gotten up to that point. For sure, I was relieved when he stopped crying or when I got him to fall asleep, but that relief wasn't anything compared to the absolute joy I felt seeing him smile at me for that first time.
For that first time and every single time thereafter. When my second was born, I looked forward to that first smile. In fact, it gave me more confidence to wade through those challenging first weeks knowing that on the other side of it was going to be that smile.
And wouldn't you know it, my second son was such a happy baby. And of course, after the smiles, there were the cuddles and the hugs and the first time they ever said, I love you, mommy. Although the joke in my house is that they both said dad well before they said mom, I tried to get them to say mom and they laugh at me and say dad or dad, I guess at that point.
So if you think back to all of those many moments throughout the years with your kids, and frankly, even those moments you experienced today, although they may be fewer and farther between when your child says, I love you or gives you a hug or even just a smile. I don't think I've ever experienced anything in my life as profound as the feeling of love. And honestly, it may even be more like a profound feeling of gratitude for those moments.
And of course, we don't do any of it for the quid pro quo, that return of love. But once you've experienced it, it's almost like a drug. It has a power to motivate you to want more of it.
It's interesting that during those toddler years, the kids start to tell us and show us they love us quite a bit more. They might even have at times told us they hated us when they didn't get their way. But I don't know how you felt in those moments.
But I'd imagine for most of us, most of the time, we were able to weather those moments and not take it personally. If they shouted out, I hate you in the fit of a tantrum, because intellectually, we knew that this was just part of what they were going through, that maybe in that moment, they didn't know a better way to express their frustration. I'll be honest, I am nowhere near the perfect mom.
This is actually why I would never suggest I'm a parenting coach. My role as a coach isn't about telling you how to parent your child. My role is to help moms decide who they want to be, and then in turn, how they want to show up with their children in their lives.
That's a much different conversation than having someone tell you how to parent. Because honestly, I think every single one of us struggles with our own kids at times, but we also approach the way we parent our kids with very different values. In my work as a coach, and as a sister, as a friend, someone who's worked in schools, I don't think I've ever met a who would say that they didn't always try their best at all times.
Unfortunately, sometimes it feels like the process of parenting is like a continual state of trial and error. We each have goals for our kids in terms of what we want for them. When they were younger, we defined these goals in terms of basic behavior, following the rules, listening, not hitting.
And so we try to model behavior and impart lessons to help our kids fall in line with the goals that we had for them. And of course, every family, every parent approaches this a bit differently. Some families might have had more of a strict approach or maybe an achievement-oriented approach.
And other families are very intentional in not wanting to raise their children with so much pressure. Ultimately, it all comes down to values, as I said before, what we think is important and the type of people we hope our kids will grow up to be. And there's no right or wrong in these different approaches.
Sometimes the way we parent might have been informed or be a reflection of how we were raised. Or on the flip side, there may be ways we're raising our kids that is intentionally different from the way we were raised or the kind of family environment we grew up in. So without even realizing it, we've created a culture within our families.
And that culture is defined by values and expectations. As you're listening, I wonder if you can define or describe the culture that you've created or tried to create within your family. What is that system of expectations and values for every single member of your family that you may or may not even communicate or articulate? Here's the thing.
In relationships, there are usually some expectations we have that we communicate very clearly, possibly because we view them as a high priority or because we've seen people in our family, our teens for example, fail to meet those expectations. And so it's required us to be very clear about what those expectations are. And sometimes we may have even had to set boundaries around these expectations, like setting curfews for example.
Typically in a relationship, we have a list of other expectations that we actually may not have communicated very well. But even though we haven't communicated them, we still have these expectations in the back of our minds, maybe even in our subconscious minds. One example is my expectation that I clean the kitchen at the end of the night and that in the morning I come down to a clean kitchen.
Well, I'm sure those of you with teens listening have had this situation where you come down and the kitchen is a complete mess. Clearly, I had an expectation in the back of my mind that the kitchen would be clean because when I come down, I'm disappointed. All of these expectations of what we want to be happening in our lives with our families, and this is even true for the expectations we have for ourselves.
For example, the expectation of what I might want the scale to say when I get on the scale every morning. We're constantly comparing what we see in the world with our ideal model of what we want to see. In my past professional life, I've done a lot of strategic planning for organizations.
This is the process of creating a plan for an organization that's based on clearly articulating goals and measurable objectives and putting into place a system to measure performance around these goals and objectives. I know this sounds like a lot of corporate jargon, but it's actually so much more interesting than it sounds, and I promise I'm making a point here, so stick with me. So before you can do any of this planning and goal setting, you have to decide what success looks like.
What is it that we hope will happen for this nonprofit or for this business in three or five years, for example? What will we have achieved? Because think of it this way, how can you possibly create goals and strategies if everyone isn't all on the same page about what that future success looks like? So this success we call vision. I think it's really interesting to think about this process or this concept of vision and goals in the context of a family unit because I actually do think that as moms we do have a strategic vision for our family, and this vision is again defined by our own values and experiences, the parts of our own upbringing that we want to emulate for our own kids, as well as the parts we want to do very differently from our parents. For me, I think my parenting style has mimicked a good portion of the vision my parents had for my brother, sister, and me.
They expected us to work hard in school, to not take privileges we had for granted, and it's actually interesting that looking back, I worked hard in high school and I continue to work hard in college, but when I graduated college, I had a bit of an identity crisis because I didn't know who I was if I wasn't working hard in school. Other things that my parents modeled were unconditional love and support, and in doing so they created this vision of a family that would always be there to support each other. These are all traits I've really wanted to replicate in my vision for my own family, that my kids would apply themselves, that we would be there for each other with unconditional love and support.
But when thinking about how my vision differs from that of my parents, and I think some of this is a generational difference, we just have access to so much more information about our kids now than our parents ever did. And I've talked about this before, the phones, the tracking devices, social media, there are just so many ways that we have this vision that involves so much more access and honestly less privacy for our kids. This is bringing back memories of those times when, remember when you were a teenager and you were talking on the phone with a girlfriend, one of those phones that plugged into the wall with a long, curly extension cord, and you'd be talking to a girlfriend, maybe possibly even a boy, and anyone in the house could pick up a receiver in another room of the house and listen in on the conversation.
And really sneaky people could manage to pick up the phone without that telltale click that someone was eavesdropping. Luckily, my parents were never that sneaky, so if they picked up, I'd immediately bark, get off the phone. Could our kids even imagine having to share a communal phone? Only one line, no call waiting even, the dark ages.
So the point being, our parents really had no visibility into what was going on with us in our lives if we didn't share it with them. And I didn't share a lot about what was going on with me to my parents when I was a teen. I've said before, sometimes ignorance is bliss.
And from that perspective, our parents were probably quite a bit less anxious about what was going on with us because they had access to so much less information about what we were up to. And look, I was generally a pretty good kid, but there were a number of things I did or experienced that would have been a big surprise to my parents. I saw a comedian recently who was talking about different generations and their parenting styles, and she was a self-proclaimed Gen X parent.
And if you're listening to this podcast in 2023, it's very likely you're a Gen Xer too, born sometime between 1965 and 1980. So she started off with a joke about how resilient we are as a generation because our parents just let us do whatever we wanted. At the very least, she joked, we drove in the back, in the way back of the station wagon, facing backwards with no seatbelts whatsoever, and we were told to come home when it was dark.
So then she went on to say you could think of our parents, the parents of the Gen Xers, as Home Depot parents. Nothing against Home Depot, but if you've ever shopped there, you can probably imagine this. You walk into this huge warehouse with, what, 50-foot high ceilings.
And the comedian's comment was, you walk in the store and you think somebody should be in charge, but you can't find anybody. Now, I can't say my parents weren't around. They were certainly present in my life.
But I get the message in terms of that concept that we were kind of out there on our own so much more than we ever let our own kids be out on their own. So unsurprisingly, in contrast to my parents, probably in contrast to many of our parents, I am, or at least I have been, quite a bit more involved in my kids' lives than my parents ever were in mine. And getting back to the concept of vision, I guess there's a big part of me that has a vision that I could somehow help my boys skip the part where they learn from their mistakes.
Let's just take the teenage years. I made mistakes. I knew plenty of other people who made bigger mistakes.
And of course, there's everything you read and see on the news and see on social media. We can't help but think that if we can just tell them what mistakes to avoid, or if we can just give them the right advice, then they would never, or at least rarely, have to suffer from deep disappointment or, God forbid, failure. Thinking about this in terms of vision, what does this imply in terms of how we're defining success for our kids and for our parenting? Does success really look like a lack of failure, a lack of disappointment, or do we think of it as keeping mistakes to a minimum? And I think the reality is our vision is also likely being influenced by our perception of the competition that's out there in the world.
Colleges are harder to get into. The average SAT and ACT scores reported at not only the top colleges, but the top 100 colleges, seems completely out of reach, without a significant investment of time and money in test prep. I had a meeting with my youngest and his school college counselor last week, and my son's perception was that he wasn't doing enough.
We seem to be living in a culture of overwhelm and that everything isn't good enough. Now, I would be the first to acknowledge that I've always wanted the best for my boys. And what does that mean? What does that vision even look like? Well, I've wanted them to apply themselves and live up to their potential, which already, as I say this, isn't a measurable objective.
How does one define potential, really? But of course, my vision for my boys doesn't stop at academic achievement. I want them to have caring, supportive friends. I want them to be engaged in things they love to do.
I want them to be happy, to get enough sleep, to wake up on time, to date women who are kind to them, and of course, that they're kind and considerate back. Here I am on a roll, and I haven't even scratched the surface of what I want from my boys. I want so much for them.
Oh, and by the way, I don't want them to be bored, lonely, overly disappointed, scared, depressed. When it really comes down to it, I want them to experience all of the positive emotion of life and very little of the negative. And if I'm really honest with myself, my vision for their success, maybe even my success as a mom, this vision is not only entirely out of my control, but it's not even realistic.
Our vision for our children, this hope that they'll never be sad or heartbroken or devastated or disappointed, or if they are, they'll bounce right back. This vision is tantamount to a company having a vision of discovering a planet with alien life. I mean, it's theoretically possible, but it's never been done before.
So what does vision for our kids look like if we really were to try to be realistic? Well, first and foremost, I think it's really important for us to take ownership of the understanding around what we can control and what we can't control. For those of you with kids who are still in high school, this is a rude awakening because as much as you still probably believe that you have authority, you do not have control. And my friend, these are two separate things.
Look, I get it. You have expectations. You have expectations for how you want your teen to behave, how you want them to speak to you, the chores you want them to do, how hard you want them to apply themselves in school.
I could go on and on. You have expectations. You're not alone.
I have expectations. So as long as my kids are under 18, frankly, until they're no longer financially dependent on me, I have some authority over how I give my children access to money or privileges that I can supply. So for example, if our kids are crossing boundaries like staying out past curfew, which is an expectation of when they'll be home, then I can establish the consequence of telling them their curfew was earlier next time, or they can't take the car.
And there are other consequences you could dole out, like taking away their phone that you pay for or not paying for college. What's interesting is that we as parents often spend a lot of time thinking about what consequences we can appropriately enforce to counteract behavior we don't want. But we're often frightfully opposed to letting natural consequences happen.
Here's some examples. We run homework to school when our kids have forgotten it so they don't get a zero. If they miss the bus, we drive them to school so they don't miss the test.
We try to stay on top of school deadlines and assignments so our kids don't miss something important. We wake them up in the morning so that they're not late for school or for work. We see they're speeding on Life 360, so we call them to slow down rather than risk the chance of a ticket.
There's so many ways we run interference rather than let our kids fail or suffer disappointment. That just doesn't fit with our vision for what success, for what our success as parents looks like. A successful parent wouldn't just let their kids fail.
That's what we tell ourselves. Literally this week, I kid you not, I totally let my son down. He was out really late.
We woke up in the middle of the night and he wasn't home. This was 4 a.m. and we had no idea where he was. So we called and he answered right away.
He explained what had happened and apologized that he hadn't reached out sooner. I was already feeling guilty that I didn't notice he wasn't home until 4 a.m. It was really late, but we knew he was okay. So at this point, I'm up.
An hour later, he still wasn't home. But I wasn't worried right away. I just assumed he was still talking or wrapping things up.
He's leaving for college in a matter of days, so it seemed futile or make a stink about curfews when those curfews are going to be irrelevant in a few days. So another hour goes by and at this point, I'm thinking this is weird and the kid has to work at 10 a.m. I actually had a thought that maybe he's intentionally pulling an all-nighter. And I'll be perfectly honest, a year ago, I would have been blowing up his phone every five minutes until he got his butt home.
But I've learned from my own past mistakes and a lot of thought work that this son is worthy of my trust. And so I didn't jump to save or protect him. My default was to trust that if he needed me, that he'd reach out.
But two hours later, I decided to send a text. He called within minutes and said, you guys didn't pick up. Okay, here I am.
I'm walking on a treadmill. At this point, it's 6 a.m. and I've been up for two hours. If he'd called, I would have picked up.
So it seems my son had been calling my husband who had his ringer off and was fast asleep, so didn't respond. But here's what happened. My husband and I weren't there to save my son.
It turns out he dropped his friend off at her house, knowing he was low on gas. He made it within 800 feet of the gas station and the car stalled. Luckily, he ran track, so he ran to the gas station, only to find that it was closed.
He ran to another mile, another gas station closed. I think he tried one more before he ran back to the car after running three or four miles. At some point, he remembered that his dad had given him a AAA card, and so he called the number, and 70 minutes later, they helped him fuel up his car.
So at 6 a.m., when I spoke to him, he'd figured it out. He was frustrated and exhausted, but he'd overcome what felt like a pretty big challenge, and he did it on his own. Look, if he'd reached my husband, I have no doubt one of us would have been there in a flash.
20 minutes later, my husband would have picked him up, left the car to AAA, and we would have dealt with it after a decent night of sleeping in. Or at least my son would have gotten a few more hours of sleep before going to work. But as it turns out, how amazing is it that my son had the experience of truly having to figure things out on his own? My vision for success typically includes me being there, 100% for my kids.
But this experience makes me wonder, could I be entering a time when my vision for success involves me being there less? This really opens up the conversation around how intentional we are as we live into our strategic vision and goals for our kids, for ourselves as moms. Could you articulate what your vision is? Have you been honest with yourself about your goals for your child? Some goals are obvious, but there are other goals under the surface, these goals that are driving the way you feel and act because you're constantly judging what is against what you wish were true or what you want to be true for your child or for your life. When institutions do strategic planning, as I mentioned, they create this vision of what success looks like, and then they create a mission statement, particularly in the nonprofit world.
This mission is really a statement about how the organization will go about the work of achieving its vision. Then the institution creates these broad goals and measurable objectives. And the beauty of a strategic plan is that it creates this rubric where you can measure the organization's success against these predetermined goals and objectives.
And so it's an interesting way of thinking about expectations because any company will set out a series of goals and expectations. And the understanding really is that while the intention is to meet these goals and objectives, at the end of the day, if the institution doesn't meet those goals and objectives, it's just information. For example, let's say a company's goal is to expand into a new market.
That's the broad goal. And the measurable objective is that they'll sell $500,000 of their products in this new market by the end of the year. Okay, so now there's a goal.
And as the actual sales come in, we can evaluate our success in achieving that goal. The reality of business is that they don't always achieve their goals. I randomly Googled this question, how often do businesses hit their goals? I hit on a statistic that said nine out of 10 businesses don't accomplish their business objectives, quarter after quarter, year after year.
Who knows how this stacks up across all global businesses, but seriously, let's just take the statistic as a barometer. Only 10% of businesses actually achieve their business objectives. And these are businesses that have theoretically articulated their objectives, as in they had the objective of selling something and then they didn't meet that goal.
What distinguishes successful businesses from those that fail is the willingness to learn from failure. A 2020 article from the Harvard Business School laid out the 10 characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. Among the traits were curiosity, a willingness to experiment, adaptability, comfort with failure, persistence, and innovation.
I'm not saying we all want our kids to go out and become entrepreneurs, but think about this, in life, how much more successful or resilient do you think your kids would be if they were curious, willing to experiment, adaptable, comfortable with failure, persistent? In fact, can you imagine what might be different if you approached your own life in this way? This entire conversation boils down to our mind and the vision you have for your child's life, for your own life, for your role as a parent. And the most important takeaway here is that the vision is a decision. It's not a fact.
It's not an absolute. In fact, it's very relative based on your experience and your values. Your children, your teens, are developing their own vision for success, and it's very likely that their vision differs considerably from yours.
And getting back to where we started, your vision for success very likely includes some expectation of positive feedback from your child. Let's be honest, my friend, and look, I'll be the first to admit, I loved the time when hugs and cuddles were a regular part of my experience. Would I love it if my boys gave me a big hug every time they came home and they said I love you mom every time they saw me? I'm not gonna lie, I'd love it.
And does it make me sad sometimes when my boys are preoccupied or would rather spend time with friends or when it seems they don't want to talk to me? Forget giving me hugs and telling me they love me. The reality is, when I expect things to be different than they are, yes, I'm sad. I might be disappointed.
When I think they're doing something wrong, I might feel hurt. But all of this comes down to our definition of what success looks like. And let's be clear, let's be really clear as moms, whose success are we really concerned about? Is it our child's success or is it ours? Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0, at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
