YOU DON’T HAVE TO LET GO OF SUMMER EXPECTATIONS WITH YOUR TEEN
Welcome back to the Almost Empty Nest podcast. This episode is all about managing summer expectations with your teen. But here's a hint: You don't have to let your expectations go.
Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest podcast with Small Jar Coach. This show is for moms of teens who are ready to let go with love, release anxiety, and rebuild connection with their teen and themselves as they approach the empty nest.
I'm your host, Jennifer Collins, a master certified coach and a fellow mom walking this path right alongside of you. You don't have to navigate this season alone.
If interacting with your teen over the summer has you feeling more frustrated, hurt, or let down than relaxed, you are not alone. In today's episode, we're talking about how your unmet expectations can often leave you feeling terrible and questioning your relationship with your teen.
But as I set up this conversation, I want to be clear upfront that managing these expectations does not mean that you have to let them go. Today we're going to talk about why even small hopes, like having dinner with the family, can feel so personal when they don't happen. We'll also unpack the emotional layers underneath those expectations, especially when it comes to parenting your teen.
And we'll talk about how to shift from disappointment to peace without letting go of your expectations or needing your teen to change. Let's dive in and start creating the summer you're actually hoping to create.
Hello, my friend.
It's the end of another school year. Summer is just getting started and I'm having all kinds of feelings about it. So I thought this would be a perfect chance to explore a little self-coaching and to bring you along for the ride.
My college son has been home for a few weeks and his stuff is everywhere. It's like, how did he even accumulate all of this stuff? There are bags and shoes and random piles of laundry everywhere. My younger son just graduated from high school, so we've had weeks of events and celebrations and family and friends in and out of the house.
Sometimes the boys are home, sometimes they're not. And when they're not home, they're definitely not getting home before 1 or 2 a.m. There are always dishes in the sink because the minute one person puts a dish in the sink, it's like permission for everyone else to just put dishes in the sink without checking to see if the dishwasher is clean or empty. I'm convinced I'm the only one in the house who has the superpower of knowing whether or not the dishes in the dishwasher are actually clean.
Some people thrive in the hubbub of a busy house. I definitely do not. Don't get me wrong, I love that the boys are home.
And I realize that in a few short months, the house is going to be very empty. So there's a small voice in my head that says I should be grateful and that I should just be in the moment of all of this. But the truth is, I also see the chaos and the mess and I wish it were different.
How interesting is it that even now, I know that in September, I'm going to look around at my clean and quiet house and wish things were different then too. Do you ever look at your life and tell yourself, I feel like I should be happier? I mean, you probably don't expect to be happy all the time. But do you sometimes feel like it shouldn't be so hard to be content? As I take a look inward and check in to see how I'm feeling right now, I feel a bit overwhelmed by the messes and the lists of the things that I need to do.
But I also feel a sense of disappointment. It's a feeling that I want things to be a little different than they are. As a coach, I'm very aware of what's going on with me.
But I thought I'd take you on this journey of self-coaching to see if it brings up any awareness for you. The thing is, we feel disappointed when reality doesn't match our expectations. Disappointment is, in fact, a very valid and understandable emotion when you hope for one thing and then something else actually happens.
So what is it that I've been hoping would happen that's different than reality? Well, to start, I guess I wasn't expecting the constant mess. And it's pretty funny that that's true because it happens every summer, particularly in the start of summer. This mess is something I should expect.
But here I am somehow thinking that it shouldn't be there. Maybe I'm expecting everyone else would take a little more responsibility for their messes. In fact, I'd love it if I left things at the bottom of the stairs or the top of the stairs and other people would just carry them up or down.
I'd love it if someone other than me knew how to evaluate whether the dishes in the dishwasher were clean or dirty. But it's not just the mess. Some of my disappointment is around the uncertainty of when we're going to spend time together as a family.
I have this feeling that I'd love to know when everyone's going to be home for dinner so I can plan. Or I'd love to know when everyone else is going out so I can plan to go out and do my own thing. We also had a conversation about going away this summer and the boys said they were actually happy to just stay at home and be able to hang out with friends.
But then I thought, wait, what about my vacation? I actually wanted to get away. One of my sons actually said, it's okay, mom, we'll just do a better job of finding time to be together as a family throughout the And this is actually what I want. And yet, I also want to do it far away from home, ideally on a beach somewhere.
The truth is, I had this hope that having both boys home over the summer would feel a certain way. And while there have absolutely been moments of joy and connection, the reality is a lot more complicated. I'm sharing this not because I need to vent, but because if any of this resonates with you, I want you to know that you are not alone in feeling this way.
This feeling of being let down is about the expectations we have, that we might not even realize are there until they aren't met. So here's the thing about expectations. We don't sit down and write out a list of all of the ways we want our life to go.
And even if we did, it would be almost impossible to write a list comprehensive enough to cover every detail about how we want things to play out. In fact, we often just think we're pointing out the truth of what's wrong with our lives. We don't even realize what we're really doing is evaluating our lives through this lens of expectations.
Reflecting back on what I just told you about my home life recently, here are just a few of the expectations I apparently have about my life. I expect that my son wouldn't bring home so much stuff from college, that messes in our house would be cleaned up quickly, that dishes would be put in the dishwasher, that other people would notice when the dishwasher is clean or dirty. I have expectations that people would clear things up or down the stairs without being asked, that people would be home at predictable times, and that I would know when people were available for family dinners.
I'd also like to know when people are going to be out so I can plan time for myself. I also apparently expect that I should feel grateful just to have them home because I know they'll be gone in September. I expect that over the summer I should feel content and at peace.
I want to feel present. I also expect to have meaningful family time and that this family time would be spent somewhere else on vacation. I could keep going.
There are so many expectations underlying everything I shared with you in the beginning. And although this list is somewhat amusing as you read it out loud, it also sounds totally reasonable. Like, of course I want to connect with everyone and to feel at peace and that everyone should help out.
In fact, if anything, you take a look at this list and you see all of the ways reality isn't meeting your hopes and expectations and you feel even more let down. And it's usually not just one point in time when these expectations aren't met, but it's time after time so that your disappointment builds into resentment. And that's when you find yourself yelling about the dishes or cleaning in a rage just to show them what they made you do.
My friend, I've gone down that spiral so many times in the past. I know what that used to look like for me. The resentment would lead to anger and a bit of a murder syndrome where I would just do it all myself.
And in the process, I would clearly show everyone that I resented every minute of it. It felt terrible for everyone, including me. And to be honest, it also didn't change anyone else's behavior in the long run.
I mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating that it's not just that we have expectations about the details of how things will go. We have expectations about what the experience will feel like. We want to feel relaxed, content, connected, happy.
This is really the goal. We experience our lives through our emotions. And so the only reason we want anything is because of how we think it will make us feel.
Like we want our teen to act a certain way or to do certain things because then we'll get to feel connected or relaxed rather than frustrated and worried. So when things don't go the way you hope, what you're really missing out on is the feeling you hoped you'd have. When reality doesn't meet your expectations, it's like you're subconsciously thinking it wasn't supposed to feel like this.
But here's something to consider. When you look at my long list of reasonable expectations for my life, all that's happening is that the reality isn't quite matching up with all of those very specific expectations. It's also worth pointing out that I have a lot of expectations about how people should behave, about how the house should look, about how I should feel and what I should know when, about where I get to spend my vacation, and how happy everyone should be about doing what I want them to do.
I recently did a masterclass and I talked about expectations as falling into eight different categories. Now in this class, I was specifically focused on life with teen or adult kids, so I came up with eight different categories. I'm sure we could find a few more.
And if we were to expand out to life in general, we could come up with many, many more categories of expectations. And within each of these categories, we could come up with hundreds of examples of specific expectations. Just for the dishwasher alone, I could come up with 20 or 30 different expectations I have.
So you add all of these expectations up and that is a lot of opportunity to be let down in life. And more often than not, we're not even really aware of all of these expectations that are running through our minds. Now let's talk about where these expectations come from.
I mean, at a basic level, your expectations are what you want, what you hope for. But those wants and hopes have been shaped by years of experience. They're shaped by your values, by what you've experienced in the past that makes you feel good, or what you've seen that you perceive to be something that would make you feel good.
Expectations are shaped by your perception of what matters to you or what's important to you. They could also be shaped by your upbringing, maybe how you were raised, things that you liked about your upbringing or things that you didn't. They could also be simply a function of how you perceive your role as a mom, your responsibility to raise your kids in a certain way.
So these expectations can all be really reasonable and well-meaning, but they also act as your mind's predictions about the way things should or could turn out. Your brain is subconsciously thinking, if I can picture how I want things to go, maybe I can make it happen. So you imagine how you want to feel, then you start anticipating what would need to happen to create that feeling for you.
And by the way, all of this can be happening subconsciously, so that it's not like you're having these present thoughts about this. Now, sometimes we can play a role in trying to get our own expectations met. Like I put the laundry at the bottom of the stairs.
I also, and you're going to laugh about this, I purchased this gadget that's mounted right above the dishwasher, and you can turn the dial so that it clearly says clean, dirty, or running. I kid you not, I have this thing mounted in my kitchen. But this handy gadget does not seem to have any impact whatsoever on my family's ability to assess whether or not there are dirty dishes in the dishwasher.
Because look, if life was all about us being able to do X, Y, and Z so that we could guarantee that our expectations were always met, I imagine life would be a lot easier, because then we'd be in control. But the truth is, all we can do is set the stage, ask the question, give the hint, give the friendly reminder. But then, whether or not the reality of what someone else does, or what they say, or even the reality of what someone else feels, whether that meets our expectations, is in their hands.
In other words, not in your control. And actually, that's another point worth mentioning. We don't just have expectations around what other people say and do.
We have hopes and expectations around how they'll feel. We don't want our kids to be annoyed when we ask them to do something. We want our kids to be in a good mood when they come home, happy to see us.
We expect them to not be bored over the summer. We expect them, in fact, to be motivated. Notice how all of the things we hope our kids will do also stem from the emotions that we hope or expect them to feel.
All of this, other people's actions, their feelings, the way they think about us and their lives, all of it is actually out of our control. And yet, our minds make these predictions about what we hope or expect to happen. Clients will sometimes tell me things like, I can't believe my kid or my mother-in-law said this thing, when everything they've ever told me about their kid or their mother-in-law makes me think, of course they said that.
Notice how our expectations are often largely fueled by what we really want, as opposed to what data or history would lead us to really, truly expect might happen. Clients will even tell me, I know it's developmentally appropriate for my kid to pull away, but then when they experience that, it's like they didn't really expect that to happen, because it's not what they want from their own child. They hoped it would be different.
So in all these ways, in so many areas of our life, you're confronted with reality. And when it doesn't meet your expectations, your brain wants to understand why. Why didn't they do what I wanted? Why didn't they respond the way that I hoped? Ultimately, you're trying to understand why the situation doesn't feel the way you thought it would.
And here's what's fascinating. Your brain doesn't just say, oh, well, I guess my expectation was wrong. Instead, your brain looks for some way to resolve the discomfort of this cognitive dissonance, reality not meeting your expectations.
There are a lot of ways your mind does this. One way is to blame the other person. When it comes to our kids, for example, this can look like us overgeneralizing assumptions about who they are based on their behavior.
It can look like us thinking they're lazy or unappreciative, distant or pulling away. We tell ourselves they should know better or should be helping more or should be showing up differently. And the fact that they're not implies a character flaw in them, and often one that we feel responsible to fix.
And from there, we can also go down a worst-case scenario spiral, thinking if they're this way now, it's only going to get worse. A conversation I often have with my clients is that when their teens pull away and they feel hurt by that feeling of rejection, they look ahead to the short time between now and when their kids will leave home and they get this feeling that the relationship will never recover. Or if their kid is disinterested in school or making poor choices, they can assume that their kid will never be successful, that they're destined to go down a bad path and not be able to hold a job and support themselves, to be responsible.
One way we can do to try to reduce this pain of disappointment and discomfort is that we try to do something to fix it. Especially when it comes to our kids, we feel responsible to turn them into happy, productive human beings. So when we see signs that they're not, we feel compelled to step in.
This is when we start worrying and nagging, trying to set boundaries, trying to teach our kids the lessons we think they should learn. And look, this isn't a judgment. This is the work of being a mom.
It is our job to guide our kids, and they're lucky to have in us someone who is so singularly focused on their future success and happiness. But some of this is also about us, about our discomfort and our expectations about what we think should be happening. And we don't often take a step back and get really clear on these expectations before we start trying to change our kids to try to get them to meet these expectations.
So much of this comes down to the story we tell ourselves about our responsibility as a mom. But it's also about our fear of failure, our fear of letting our kids down, thinking, it'll be my fault if I let this bad future happen. We can also blame ourselves for not being able to get it right now.
When our kids pull away or they don't respond to the rules we try to set, we keep thinking, what am I doing wrong? All of this judgment and fear and responsibility, all of this shapes how we feel about our kids and how we feel about ourselves and our role as a mom. And so it's no wonder that we're always second-guessing ourselves, constantly trying to figure out how to talk to our kids about their responsibilities, what they should ideally be doing, trying to set the right boundaries and consequences. Truly, at the heart of it, you're thinking, if I can just get them to meet these expectations, then maybe I can feel better.
Another place our minds can tend to go when we're working through this disappointment, and often when we're facing the reality that all these things we try to help our kids meet these expectations are not working, we start to say to ourselves, well, maybe I need to let this go. Or at a minimum, that I need to manage my expectations. But let's be honest, when we think we need to manage our expectations, it can feel a little bit like being told to stop wanting what we want.
Like we need to just let it go, let go of what we were hoping for. And honestly, that feels kind of terrible. Because most of our expectations come from this really loving place.
We want our kids to be happy and successful. We want to feel connected to them. We want peace in our home.
We want our homes to feel and look a certain way. So the idea of just letting these expectations go can feel like giving up on happiness and peace. So it's no wonder we fight against even the thought of managing our expectations.
We don't want to stop hoping to feel the way we really want to feel. But here's the good news. When I think about managing my expectations, it doesn't at all mean I have to let them go.
Okay, so now you might be thinking, if I don't have to let go of my expectations, what do I do with them instead? Well, the first step is to get curious about them. Honestly, to bring them up from the unspoken, unrealized thoughts living in your subconscious to something you can actually look at and evaluate. Because again, you may not even realize how many of these expectations you have that are fueling your disappointment.
So taking a look at them opens the door to helping you understand what these expectations are really about. And when you slow down enough to understand what you're really hoping for, you then gain the self-awareness to respond with so much more compassion and intention. Let me walk you through what that can look like.
First, let's explore what I'll call the surface hope. This is the expectation that we're usually most aware of. It's that specific thing you want to happen.
Maybe it's that your kid will put away their clean laundry or that you'll have a family dinner. Or it could be that specific thing you want them to do or say when they come home to see you. Think of this as the practical, logistical expectation around what you hope will happen.
As I said before, these surface hopes are very often reasonable hopes. We're not talking about hoping our kids would take us out to a five-star restaurant and foot the bill. These are hopes that, when said out loud, feel like the bare minimum, if we're honest.
And this is the part that I think where we can get stuck in feeling really justified about our expectations. Because it doesn't feel like a lot to ask that your kids put away their laundry, or that they're civil and nice when they walk in the door. Of course you want these things.
And for many of us in various stages with our kids, we already feel like we've had to let a lot go. You've tried to get used to the fact that your kid is always locked up in their room. You'd actually love to ask them to do more around the house.
But at this point, you're only asking them to do one or two chores. You're trying to respect their independence, and so you're not asking them to tell you everything. But you'd love if they'd say something.
Just notice how we can tell ourselves that we only have these modest expectations. But also, if we're honest, we have all these other expectations that we feel like we would really like, but that we're letting go. So notice that we're already disappointed ahead of time by all these things we already feel like we've had to let go.
And the hopes that you have left, they feel like the scraps. And so when even these simple surface hopes aren't realized, it feels beyond disappointing, frustrating, and hurtful. Truly, like your feelings and what you've asked your kid to do don't matter to them at all.
The truth is, underneath these surface hopes is an emotional need that you have. It's that feeling that you're hoping to feel when the surface expectation is met. When I come home and I look in the kitchen sink, I would love to feel supported, like other people in the house care as much as I do about keeping the house put together.
When we plan for a family dinner, I'm hoping to feel connected, that everyone can come together for even just a few minutes. It's actually never about the dishes or the dinner. It's about what those things represent.
We don't always recognize these deeper emotional needs that we're hoping for. We just hope that if that moment with our kid goes a certain way, that then we'll get to feel a little sense of peace and connection, that everything's okay. So when your hopes don't match that reality, really when your emotional need isn't met, you've missed out on something that's really important to you.
And sometimes it can feel like it's a sign of more of what's to come. Maybe a sign that your future expectations need to take into account this new reality. And this is where the third layer of the expectation comes in.
The story we start telling ourselves when our emotional need isn't met. Because when something hurts, your brain wants to make sense of it. It wants a reason, an explanation of why this moment feels so bad or why it didn't go the way that you hoped.
And when you're in pain, the story your mind usually tells is a painful one. It sounds like they don't care, or I'm losing my relationship with them. Maybe they'll never be successful, or even this is my fault.
And let's be honest, these stories don't come up after just one or two missed expectations. They come from the accumulation of all of those times that don't go the way that you hope. Over time, these small disappointments add up so that they feel like a pattern, an indication that things are going the wrong way.
And this is frustrating and heartbreaking, particularly with our kids who we love and would do anything for. Often you're not just disappointed by that moment, you're disappointed by a future hope that you feel like you might need to let go. Something that you feel responsible to fix or at fault for creating.
My friend, this is a lot of heaviness and responsibility to feel. So what do we do with all of this? Because I'm not here to tell you to stop caring or to just let it go. You're allowed to want the dinner and the laundry to be put away.
You're allowed to want a smile when your kid walks in the door. And you're allowed to feel disappointed when all these things don't happen. But here's the invitation, not to let go of these expectations, but to take responsibility for them.
Start by asking, what is that surface hope, that logistical thing that I was hoping would happen? Then ask, why did it matter to me? What was the emotional need I was hoping to feel as a result of that surface hope happening? And finally ask yourself, when that thing didn't happen, what story am I telling myself? Am I blaming myself or blaming my kid? Am I assuming something about my kid's love and feelings for me? Or am I using this moment to predict what the future will look like? These steps aren't about fixing anything or letting go of the expectation. The power is in noticing, seeing how it's your mind creating your emotional response. So often when we see that our expectations aren't being met, our first instinct is to act.
We think, maybe I need to set a boundary or I need to be clearer about what I need from them. I need to have a conversation with them about this. And yes, communications and boundaries are important.
But what if the first boundary you need to set is with yourself? This doesn't mean shutting yourself down or denying what you're feeling. This boundary is about taking responsibility for your expectations and how they're about you. It's about acknowledging how you're expecting someone else to meet an emotional need that you have.
Because here's the truth, your feelings don't come from whether or not your kids put away the laundry or whether they come to dinner. Your feelings come from the meaning you make of that moment. That's actually really good news because it means you don't have to wait for someone else to change for you to feel better.
You don't have to give up your expectations or stop caring. But you can stop outsourcing your peace and happiness to someone else's behavior. This shift is everything, my friend.
Because when you stop handing over your emotional well-being to someone else's choices, you begin to build something that you can always rely on to give you what you want. And that's a relationship with yourself, where your emotions are yours to create and care for. My friend, this is the work we do in my coaching program, Mom 2.0. We work together to take a close look at your expectations and understand these emotional needs that you're looking to meet by relying on things outside of your control.
I then teach you a powerful skill set to help you understand how to stop delegating your emotional well-being so that you know how to create a sense of peace that doesn't depend on your team's moods or their choices or whether or not they meet your expectations. And from this place, you know exactly what kind of conversations you want to have and what boundaries to put in place. And this changes everything.
Because it's not wrong to have expectations or to hope for connection or to hope your team will display some signs of being responsible. These hopes all come from love. They come from the part of you that's deeply invested in your child.
But when those hopes aren't met, it can hurt. Not just because reality didn't meet your expectations, but because of the meaning you attach to all of it. But here's what's also true.
You don't need other people to meet your expectations to create your own sense of well-being and peace. This is a power you already have within you. You just haven't learned how to access it yet.
So what does that look like for me? I started this episode by telling you about the mess and the disappointment I've already been feeling so early in the summer. The truth is, doing this work doesn't mean that I never feel annoyed or disappointed. But when I notice these feelings, I understand how to do the work to get honest with myself about what's really going on.
All that's happened is that I had hoped things would go one way and they went another. And my feelings about that make perfect sense. But also, I get to decide what I make the difference between my hopes and expectations mean.
At a simple level, I can decide that the dishes in the sink mean that my kids are lazy and that they don't care about my needs. Or I can decide that they have other priorities, that the cleanliness of the sink is more important to me than it is to them. I can decide to let go of the story that makes the dirty dishes more of a problem than it needs to be.
But I can also recognize that it's something that I really want. And from that place of honoring my experience and my needs, I get to decide. I can set a boundary around the dishes with my kids.
I can have a calm conversation with them about what I'd like to see when I get home. Or I can just do the dishes myself. I can also decide to just let the dishes sit in the sink.
But what I've noticed is that when I talk to my boys about dishes, when I'm feeling truly at peace and taking responsibility for my own emotional needs, the conversation always goes so much better than when I'm feeling pissed off and resentful. More than anything this summer, I'm leaning into creating my own peace, not by controlling the chaos or forcing connection, but by being grounded in the relationship I have with myself.
This power is available to you too, my friend.
Until next time.
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.
