The cost of trying to prevent your big kid's discomfort when parenting teens and navigating the empty nest. Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest podcast, where we moms of teens and college kids reframe what letting go really means to feel more connected, confident, and at peace. I'm your host, Master Coach Jennifer Collins.
Have you ever watched your big kid struggle and felt almost desperate to make it better? Maybe they're lonely or disappointed, overwhelmed, or facing the consequences of a decision you wish they hadn't made. And before you know it, your brain is already working overtime to try to figure out what you can do. In this episode, I'm talking about the cost of trying to protect our kids from discomfort, and why that urge to help can sometimes create more anxiety for us and less confidence for them.
I'll help you understand why our big kid's discomfort can feel so unbearable to us, and how to stay connected and supportive without making it your job to fix everything. Maybe letting go at this stage of parenting means learning a different way to love our kids as they grow up. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend. I was recently talking with a client whose daughter is getting married in the coming months, and it's interesting talking to her about the upcoming wedding made me think about what that moment will feel like with my own boys. We are a long way away from either of them getting married, but I can already imagine all of the things I'm going to feel.
The excitement and the joy. Probably a whole lot of other feelings. Like this will be another big step in letting go.
Actually, as I was thinking about this episode, I saw an Instagram post from a mom who you might follow. Her son just got married and there was this video of her dancing with him at the wedding, and it was just beautiful. I can imagine that when you get to one of these moments, you just want everything to go perfectly.
And that was what was coming up for this mom I was talking to. She shared that she was already anticipating the stress of having to manage other people on the wedding day, and she was trying to plan ahead to see what she could do to prevent bad behavior ahead of time. And so I mentioned that it's probably not likely she's going to be able to contain all these personalities in the way she's hoping.
After all, people are who they are. And she said, I know. I'm terrified.
We want so much to be able to protect the people we love from discomfort. And of course, this doesn't just show up at weddings. I've coached the mom whose middle school daughter is being left out by a group of girls who are clicky and mean, and she's beside herself watching her daughter get hurt.
Part of her wants to call the other moms and tell them exactly what she thinks of the way their daughters are behaving. I've also coached the mom whose high school son feels isolated, and she can't help thinking, if he would just get more involved, if he would just put himself out there, maybe try a little harder, then maybe he'd find his people and be happier. I talked to moms whose kids have just gone off to college, and they're wondering, are they adjusting and making friends? Are they going to class, taking care of themselves? And I notice this in myself right now.
One of my sons is at a new school, and I can feel the urge to check in with him more than I do with my other son, who, in my mind, is settled where he is. There's this little pull. Let me just make sure he's okay.
And this obviously doesn't end when they graduate from college. They move across the country. They start new careers or get married.
They build lives that we increasingly have less and less control over. My older son is approaching graduation, and I'm already thinking about the possibility that his next step could take him to Chicago or L.A., both a long way from us here in New Jersey. And in each of these instances, it comes up again and again.
What happens if they go out into the world or encounter the situation, and they're not happy? Because when our child is uncomfortable, when they get excluded, or when they're overwhelmed at school, or when the coach isn't playing them, or they're having problems with friends, when they're lonely at college, or when they've made a mistake and have to deal with the consequences, it's so hard for us moms not to jump to, what can I do? How can I help? How can I make this better? There are so many hard parts of raising big kids, but one of them, especially as our kids get older, is realizing that sometimes the most loving thing we can do is allow our kid to have an uncomfortable experience. And before I talk about why that matters, I think it's worth asking why we're so desperate to prevent our kids from feeling uncomfortable in the first place. Most of us would probably say, I just don't want them to be hurt.
I don't want them to be unhappy. And of course we don't. We have spent so much of our lives trying to take care of our kids, to protect them, and to help them.
So of course it makes sense that when we see them hurting or struggling, something deep inside of us wants to make it stop. But what I've come to discover is that there's something else here happening too. We don't just want our kids to stop feeling uncomfortable.
We don't want to have to feel what we feel when they're uncomfortable. Their disappointment seems to create anxiety in us. Their rejection makes us feel hurt and helpless.
Their loneliness scares us. And their bad decisions make us worry about what's going to happen next. And so we feel compelled to try to change their experience.
And in part we do that so we can feel better. Because on a very basic, primal level, our nervous system can react to our kids' discomfort as if something has gone terribly wrong. I talk a lot on this podcast about the motivational triad, especially in the Mindset Trap series.
It's a basic human instinct to seek comfort and avoid pain or discomfort. And watching your kids struggle is uncomfortable. So your brain can start treating that discomfort like danger.
Something is wrong. I need to fix this. Essentially, I need to do something about this right now.
But if you really think about it, a lot of the struggles we're talking about here are actually not dangerous. They are for sure hard and very uncomfortable. They may involve disappointment or loneliness or even embarrassment.
And these struggles are definitely uncomfortable for us to witness. But uncomfortable is not the same thing as dangerous. And obviously, there are going to be situations where we do have real concerns about our kids' safety or their mental health.
They may be dealing with medical issues that are also uncomfortable for them and for us. And sometimes in those situations, we will need to step in and help. But even in those situations, we don't necessarily have the power to make the discomfort go away.
And that is incredibly hard. But what I've also found is that even for the everyday struggles, like feeling left out or struggling socially or academically, our kids making a mistake and having to deal with the consequences, even in these cases, we can often have a really hard time just allowing our kid to be uncomfortable. And I think this is where it gets really interesting.
Because when we're worried that our kid is struggling, we start looking for evidence that they're okay. I've had this come up in a number of coaching conversations recently with moms whose kids are in college. They'll tell me, I need him to call me more, or I need to know what's going on, or I need access to more information.
And as we talk about it, what often becomes clear is that what they're really looking for is reassurance. They're trying to answer the question, is this actually a problem or is my kid okay? And I completely understand that. Because when you're worried, more information feels like it should help.
But what I've noticed in my own life, as well as through conversations with so many women, is that there is almost never enough information to completely put our minds at rest. Maybe your kid tells you they've been going to class and you think, okay, we're good today. Maybe they got a decent grade on the last test, but you worry about the next one.
Or they mentioned that they made a friend or went out over the weekend, and the next week you find yourself wanting to ask about the friend. How are things progressing? Your kid could be giving you all kinds of little signs that things are moving in the right direction, and yet your brain can still go right back to, yes, but I'm still not hearing enough from them. I still don't really know what's going on.
What if they're not telling me everything? And so we press for more information. We ask another question and we check in again. We try to cover all the bases because part of us believes that if we could just get enough information, then we would feel okay.
In other situations, instead of looking for more information, we try to manage the actual problem. We want to call the other moms and get their daughters to be nicer. We want to somehow manage the difficult personalities of our kid's wedding.
We want to tell our son exactly what he needs to do to make friends. We want to make sure our college kid doesn't make the mistake we can already see coming. And again, it all makes so much sense.
We love our kids, and we can see that they're uncomfortable, or we fear that they might be. And we can sometimes even see a path that we think would make things easier. So we want to help.
What's really interesting is that without intending to, we can communicate to our kids that we don't actually believe they're capable of handling the discomfort themselves. Even if we never say that, when we keep stepping in or trying to fix it, telling them what to do or making sure they don't mess it up, our behavior can actually communicate, this is too much for you. You need me to help you figure this out.
Maybe a little bit of, I don't trust you to do this on your own. Another thing we can unintentionally do is communicate that our kids shouldn't be feeling the way that they're feeling. That somehow the fact that they're uncomfortable means there's a problem we need to solve.
And think about that, because among the qualities most of us would probably say we want our kids to develop are resilience and confidence. But those qualities don't actually come from avoiding discomfort. If anything, they come from doing things that are hard and building the muscle of realizing, I can do hard things.
Even when I'm uncomfortable, I'm still capable. So consider what happens when we're always the one stepping in to manage what our kids are going through. Every time we protect them from discomfort, we potentially take away the opportunity for them to build that capacity themselves.
Now I think this probably shows up a little differently depending on the age of your kid. When they're younger, we may actually have more ability to shield our kids from discomfort. We can call the teacher or the other parent.
We can often smooth things over in a way we can't when they get older. But even though we have far less power to protect our big kids from discomfort, we still try. We still remind them and we try to advise them.
We tell them exactly what to say or do or try to make sure they make the right decisions. We might even still try to soften natural consequences. And again, none of this comes from a bad place.
And sometimes these are exactly the things we need to do. We obviously love our kids and we just want to help. But if we are always the one helping them decide what to say and do, how to solve problems or avoid mistakes, then at some point they miss the opportunity to build the skill of figuring things out for themselves.
Another message we can unintentionally send when we are so quick to protect our kids from discomfort is that we can teach our kids that discomfort itself is something to be afraid of. But again, that's not actually true. Think about something like public speaking.
For a lot of people, getting in front of a room full of people feels terrifying. Your heart races and your palms sweat. Your body is literally going into fight or flight.
But that does not mean anything has gone wrong. It just means your body is uncomfortable because you're facing something that is not easy to do. But if in that moment when you're about to speak, if someone kept saying to you, yes, this feeling means something is wrong, you should get out of here.
You should avoid this. You'd probably become more afraid of that feeling. And you definitely would not want to put yourself out there and ever try to do that hard thing again.
I think the same thing can happen with our kids. If every time they feel uncomfortable, we react like the discomfort has to be fixed immediately, we can unintentionally reinforce the idea that the feeling is the problem. And I want to be clear that I don't actually think every single thing we do as moms directly determines how our kids are going to interpret the world.
We can step in too much and our kids can still build resilience. We can tell them all the wrong things and they can still figure out what's right. I don't think there's actually a direct correlation to what we do and how our kids turn out, especially now that they're older.
But we do have influence. When they're out in the world doing hard new things, the last thing most of us want to communicate to them is, I don't think you can handle this. Because the truth is, some of the qualities we most want our kids to have are built through going through the hard things, not by never feeling uncomfortable.
There's also a very practical cost to all of this, especially as our kids get older. Sometimes they just stop telling us stuff. Because if every time your kid tells you something uncomfortable, you immediately launch into problem-solving mode or telling them what they should be doing differently.
At some point, they may decide it's easier not to tell you. They tell you they got a bad grade and before they can even finish the story, you're asking whether they studied enough or what they're going to do differently. They tell you about a bad decision they made and you immediately start explaining why it was a bad decision.
Or they tell you they're having trouble with a friend and you're already giving them three ideas for how to fix it. Sometimes our kids don't want any of that. Sometimes they just want a vent.
Sometimes they're trying to talk something through, figure out their own answer. Sometimes they actually already know what they need to do and they're just telling us about it. I don't know about you, but as my kids get older, I want them to feel like they can tell me the messy stuff.
I don't want them to think that they have to wait until everything is resolved and wrapped up in a little bow before they can talk to me, which means I have to be willing to hear something that makes me feel uncomfortable without immediately making my job to make the discomfort go away. So I've talked about the potential cost to our kids and our relationship with them when we rush in and try to fix their discomfort, but there's also a huge cost to us too. Trying to prevent our kids from being uncomfortable is exhausting because in all reality, it is an impossible job.
I'm sorry to have to be the bearer of bad news, but there is never going to be a point where your kid has no problems. You can help them through one thing and the next thing is going to be right around the corner and that is just life. So if your job is always to make sure your kid is okay, then there is never really a point where you get to put your pencil down because you're always watching and waiting.
How are they doing? Are they happy? Did they solve that problem? How can I get more information? What do I need to do to help? So it creates this endless cycle of hypervigilance where your kid's life feels like a never-ending series of problems that you need to monitor or solve. And the biggest problem is you actually can't control any of it. So no matter how much you do, there is always room to second-guess yourself because now you're not just worried about your kid, you're worried about your role in all of it.
When you really think about it, what we're doing to ourselves is making our peace dependent on our kid having a problem-free life. But you already know from your own life that a problem-free life does not exist. Every single one of us struggles.
We are going to be disappointed and feel rejected, and we all make bad decisions at times. We also have relationships that hurt. We all go through seasons where things don't go the way that we hoped.
That is just a part of being human. And as much as we love our kids, we cannot save them from that. I think so much of what makes this so hard is that we have this idea that being a good mom means protecting our kids.
We think a good mom helps and steps in and anticipates problems. And of course, that made sense for a long time. But as our kids get older, if we keep measuring ourselves by how well they're doing or how much discomfort we can prevent, we're going to feel like we're failing most of the time.
So maybe part of this stage of parenting is redefining what being a good mom looks like. Maybe it's not always protecting our kids from hard things. Maybe the real work is learning how to trust that our kids can handle hard things, or at least that they're going to have to figure out how to handle those hard things themselves.
But meanwhile, we also have to learn how to stay grounded enough to let them. And honestly, that is so much of the work we do inside my Mom 2.0 coaching programs. Because this stage of parenting asks us to let go of the control we used to have without letting go of our connection with or our desire to help our kids.
Inside Mom 2.0, I help you understand what's happening in your own mind when your big kid is struggling, so you can stop reacting from fear and start making more intentional decisions about how you want to show up. How do you know when to step in and when to let them figure it out? How do you let them be uncomfortable without making their discomfort mean that something has gone terribly wrong? It's really learning how to be the mom you want to be even when your kid is having a hard time or going through the messy process of figuring out their own life. What I teach in Mom 2.0 is a superpower that's not limited to the high school years or the college years.
It's honestly a lifelong skill set because our kids are going to struggle and they're going to need us differently at different stages of their lives. And learning how to stay grounded and connected and trust yourself in the middle of all of that changes everything. You can learn more about Mom 2.0 through the link in the show notes.
My friend, the invitation here is just to get curious. When your big kid is uncomfortable, what happens inside of you? What are you afraid might happen if you don't step in? And what do you make their discomfort mean about them or about you? Because sometimes there might be something you do need to do and sometimes there may not be. But just notice how quickly your mind goes from my kid is uncomfortable to something is wrong.
Maybe there's a little more space between those two things than we think. What if trusting our kids doesn't mean that they'll always figure things out in a straight line? What if it's actually just trusting that their journey is going to be their journey? And maybe our work is to learn how to trust ourselves to handle that uncertainty. That's something I'm still practicing.
Because loving our kids will always mean we want to protect them. But maybe part of loving them as they get older is staying curious about when protection helps and when loving them means trusting them enough to let find their own way. Until next time.
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to check out my next free masterclass. There's a link in the show notes. You have more power than you think, my friend.
