Developing Leadership: Navigating the Challenges of a Parental Hierarchy

What if there were a way to lead your family with intention, navigating the complex dynamics of the parent-child relationship, and ultimately building a resilient bond with your teenagers? As a single parent or a member of a two-parent family, you might be seeking guidance to balance hard work and recreation, or perhaps you're embarking on the challenging journey of parenting a teenager. This episode is for you. 

Today, we shed light on the importance of a parental hierarchy, exploring its crucial role in fostering a healthy family environment. Parents, it's your duty to lead your pack. But fear not, our discussion is filled with tips and strategies to help you do just that. We share the inspiring story of a couple who maintained a strong bond with their daughter through setting boundaries, managing expectations, and having those all-important difficult conversations. Take a leaf from their book as you navigate your own parent-teen relationships.

However, it's not all smooth sailing. The family hierarchy dynamic comes with its share of challenges, such as emotional outbursts, guilt trips, and even threats tossed in by rebellious teens. This episode offers practical advice on how to restore the family hierarchy without resorting to control, maintain your confidence, and stay grounded even when the going gets tough. Bask in the importance of leading your family with intention and the pivotal role communication plays in strengthening parent-child relationships. So, join us for an episode packed with insights, support, and hope, as we journey together in this rewarding yet challenging venture called parenting.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

There are as many ways to parent as there are parents in this world, but there is one way to parent that wins every time, and that's doing it intentionally. This show is about helping things go right before they can go wrong. Each episode is chosen to help parents like you who may be overwhelmed or uninspired, bringing the ideas and motivation to give their best efforts to the people and place that matters the most. I'm Dr Tim Thane, author of the book and host of the podcast. Not by Chance. I believe that a family's success and happiness is not by chance, so welcome to the podcast, built especially for intentional families. Let's jump in. Hi everyone. Thank you for joining me again for this podcast today.

Speaker 1: 0:53

I'm excited to be back in the studio today to carry on a little bit of the theme that we talked about last time. I just really felt it. Last time I was trying to convince you as a parent that you had influence, that you had power. I really felt it and I hope I convinced a few of you that you needed to go ahead and believe that that you have a special role that only you can play and that you need to step into it. Well, today I'm going to build on that a little bit by talking about another principle, and that is that parental leadership is essential to healthy families. Think about that statement for a second. Parental leadership is essential to healthy families. We have seen where the hierarchy or the leadership system is not in place and the outcomes in those cases are never as good as they could be. Now, this is where I think about the single parent out there and recognize that in the ideal scenario, you've got at least a couple parents who are all invested and they have different talents, they might have different personalities, but they have the same vision and they're trying to help convey that vision to their family and bring them along through the stages of the life cycle, and they do that together.

Speaker 1: 2:25

We all know what it feels like to be on the front lines in a parenting role, that we're there alone, and sometimes it might be just because our partner, our spouse, went on a vacation for a while and left all the duties to us, or, if we really are single parents long term out there, by ourselves doing it. I just want you to know. If you're in that category, my hat goes off to you. I really think that you have one of the toughest jobs on planet earth, and that is that you're on 24 seven all the time, needing to play that role on top of everything else that you need to do. I also hope the parents out there that have a co-parent can see the power of setting up the leadership structure that we're going to talk about today, so that you can really facilitate and lead out in front and by example, your family.

Speaker 1: 3:25

There's one thing that's harder than single parenting, and that is trying to parent with someone who is pulling in the opposite direction you're trying to go, or that they have serious mental health challenges, or they've got personality disorder, or they've got mental health disorders, or they just hate you. That's another one. If they just will not cooperate, that's tough, and they might even convince you that you have no power if you're in a situation like that. But I'm going to bring you back to some of the principles that will put you in a place of influence and a place of power. I don't want you to leave today feeling less powerful and influential because, ultimately, your kids need you to feel this way. They need you to feel confident in this role.

Speaker 1: 4:14

If you were to draw a picture, a diagram, of a healthy family structure, you would see the parents at the top and equally working together, maybe in different roles, but working as a team. And then you'd see below them, you'd see the children and almost like an org chart. Think about an org chart where you've got the president up here, you've got the executive presidents, the vice presidents here, and then you've got the directors In the family. There's at least a couple layers here. You've got the leadership team, the parents, and you've got the children. If we could draw it out a little further, you would start to look at the relationships between each parent and each child, and that has a huge effect on the family culture. And so one of the things I hope you will do as a leader inside your family is get really, really good at understanding how you're coming to that role, what kind of influence you're having over each one of the children and your co-parent, and become very intentional about what you bring to those interactions, because as you do that, your leadership influence will increase, it will get stronger and you're not undermining your own authority or your own role, because you're being intentional about how you're managing the emotions, about the way you're communicating with members, your family, about the culture you're creating.

Speaker 1: 5:53

If you say to yourself I want, we value having fun as a family and you intentionally go about that, you're probably going to find a good balance between all the other responsibilities you have and then having a good time with your family and building those bonds. I bring that up because that's one of my regrets. I believe that I over-emphasized hard work in our family and I do think my kids picked up on that and in some ways I'm afraid they've maybe picked up on it too well, but we miss some opportunities to have more recreation together and more fun together. So we're trying to catch up on that. We're trying to build that in at this point in time. But it starts with the structure in place, right, getting the right structure, with the parents at the top of the hierarchy.

Speaker 1: 6:47

Now I've mentioned a little bit in our last podcast how sometimes teens will flip the hierarchy upside down, and it's natural, isn't it? Think about the natural progression of a child as they grow up and over time. Their goal and your goal as a parent is to help them become an independent, successful, happy adult, and you're equipping them with the tools and the knowledge and the skills to be able to do that. So, in essence, your role as the leader will ultimately be replaced with you being more of a consultant or a supporter in some way, and so that change over time and the maturation of a child over time, where they start to take on more and more of self-leadership and self-determination of what they're going to do in their life, is a challenge for us parents, because sometimes we struggle to let go and let them start to make those decisions in their life, because we have evidence in our minds that they're not quite ready for it, and so we hold on, maybe to that leadership position a little too long in some cases.

Speaker 1: 8:01

In other cases it's really clear that our child or teen is trying to flip the hierarchy upside down and put themselves in a place of power so that they can maintain the status quo. They don't want to, they don't want you necessarily to be their leader, even though they really need a leader. And there's lots of ways that they try to do that, and all of them include a lot of strong emotions. And when our teenager can trigger us in a way that brings on serious you know, heavy duty emotions, then we oftentimes lose some of the leadership that we had, some of the influence that we had before this and we have to get that back, and so one of the core things that we all need to do as parents is to be able to take this journey, you know, with our family members, the most intense relationships that we'll ever have, where we feel every bump they go through, where we feel every emotion they feel. We can sense that, empathize with that and still stay steady and strong along the way. That's what our families need from us. As hard as that is, that's one of the biggest challenges, and so I invite you to continually monitor your emotions. That is the big thing going on all the time. That's the thoughts and the emotions we have in different situations with our kids that get the best of us if we're not aware of what they are. So we're doing this parent group that I mentioned to you. It's a pilot group for the trusty parent group, and they're going to help us beta test the app as it comes out, but it's going really well. We had our third week and I'm also doing some individual one-on-one coaching, so I'm kind of getting back into that role and really enjoying that.

Speaker 1: 10:04

One of the couples that I'm coaching that's in our group. I asked them to share their story last night with the entire group because it's inspiring. Now this is a situation where there's a daughter that struggled. She's been into treatment, she's now home and doing quite well. But, as is always the case with kids that are coming back from treatment, there's a period of time where they move into what I call the testing phase and that's where they start to test these new skills they developed in treatment. That's where they begin to maybe push back a little bit on the initial boundaries that were set with their families. So they've entered the testing phase and what's so impressive about this couple is that there was there's sort of the story of who they were before their daughter went into treatment, and it's quite different from who they are today. It's a huge change.

Speaker 1: 11:09

So I was asking the father, because they had a little incident that came up. I asked the father I said so what would have you done in the past? Because we were talking about, you know, setting boundaries, having consequences for those issues, those big expectations they have that are most important, and being able to follow through with those consequences. He said, oh, I would have grounded her till she was 30. He exaggerated that, obviously, but he was trying to share with me that his natural instinct is to clamp down. You know, really get tough with things, and it's all coming from a really strong emotional reaction to what the behavior was. And I said so let's talk about what you did this time.

Speaker 1: 11:58

Well, this incident happened. They knew they had to follow through with the consequences they talked about related to this kind of behavior, and there was a lot of strong emotion. And so he did the very opposite of what he did in the past. In the past, he would have plowed ahead with all that energy, with all that negative emotion, and that's where the you know grounding till 30 comes from. Instead, he said we do need to talk about this, but I can't yet, I'm not in a place that I can do that, and so we'll get back to you on this issue. Well then, you know, we're kind of on a pause until we can have, you know, this conversation and so forth. So it took him four days four days to kind of work through the emotion, get to a place where they could then have a really great conversation.

Speaker 1: 12:54

Part of that time was mom and dad getting on the same page. You know, think about, you know, leadership being so essential to healthy families, you get that leadership team on the same page, working through their emotions and then finally getting ready to have a really good conversation with their daughter. And that is exactly what happened he shared in our group meeting last night. He said he said there was some emotion we have not seen before from her, some empathy, even some emotion from him. It was soft, it was open-hearted kind of emotion and in the end, you know, they came up with the right consequences and the follow-through. She felt like they were light on her, even though the consequences are probably the same as they would have done. But because the conversation itself was one that lifted their relationship and honored the relationship and it was not heavy-handed but it was consistent with what they had talked about. He said it's the best conversation they've had, probably in two years, and had little tear in his eye and, honestly, all of us parents listening in we just wanted to rejoice with him because they had such a successful experience.

Speaker 1: 14:20

But that's because a lot of these things were lined up right. They had clear expectations before the event happened. They knew that they had to be on the same page, you know, instead of mom being worn down by the daughter and kind of you know, taking her side on some things. Potentially, the mother is also doing some amazing things. Her daughter still has the same natural instinct. I'm going to go to mom first. I'm going to kind of get her on my side a little bit and that'll help me.

Speaker 1: 14:54

When it comes to my dad, who's stricter, and instead what mom did was, as her daughter came to her and wanted to talk about all this that had happened and kind of soften her up a little bit, she said you might want to wait until your dad gets here, because you're going to have to go through all of this again. Anyway, it's up to you, but you're going to have to share it with him. Another thing she said that I thought was awesome is when her daughter texts her that has anything to do with any concern or you know thing that might be important for the dad to be involved in. She'll say, hey, this is probably one of those things that you ought to text both of us at the same time. So at every turn, as the daughter is trying to potentially separate this leadership team, they are closing the gap each time and what that's done is it's helped the dad realize oh, I've got to take responsibility. Now I'm not trying to offset my spouse from the past or her mother from the past, where she'll get soft, she's not, because she's not doing that Now. I got to take responsibility on my side and manage my own emotions, take the time out if I need that time out, and then we come together and have a conversation and it's the best one they've had in over two years. So I wanted to share that success with you, because that is the ideal. We can do that a lot more often than we do. Too often.

Speaker 1: 16:26

Parents are actually undermining each other instead of finding a way to work together. Some parents like the feeling of I've got my child on my side because I'm either mad at or I don't like the, the co-parent, or we've got this tension between us. They tend to enjoy the feeling of closeness with their child over the feeling of this leadership team, of us coming together, doing the hard work that would be required for us to see eye to eye about a few things, because they haven't connected the dots to the negative downside, to their child, who they love, that they're going to have because they were not united with their co-parent, and so they will do things, whether it's intentional, whether it's obvious or not, you cannot not communicate with your kids. Everything you do you are communicating with them. If you're mad at their mother or their father or the other parent, that is going to come through. So I'm saying, if you have those strong feelings, get some help and work through that so that that leadership structure that's so essential to healthy families is in place. Your kids will thank you later, when they get to be older, and say thank you for working that out. Even though you weren't you know, maybe you didn't see eye to eye about a lot of things you worked as a team to make it work for us.

Speaker 1: 18:07

Now there are obviously these exceptions where there's a parent that's so far out and so off track that you can't, you can't unite or align with them. But I'm telling you that 90, I don't know high percentage, 90, some odd percentage of all the families I've worked in the past that's had this division between them. You know you talk to one parent and they'll tell you the reason their co parent is is impossible to to align with. And then you talk to the other parent and they'll tell you why it's impossible to align with that other parent and you can see both parents perspective, and you could really agree with both of them. And so if you are skeptical as you listen to this and say, well, I'm different, my co parent is impossible, please, please, put a question mark on that. You know, don't take that face value anymore. The best thing you could do is figure out why you should apologize to your co parent, and you might say never. I'm telling you, though, that if you can find a legitimate reason why you can apologize even if it's really not all your fault, you've you can find something that you can do better and apologize for that, and that's your part. You don't have to fix them, you don't have to change them or anything else, but just do your part and see if that improves that co parenting alignment even 10, 15, 20% and your kids will be better off as a result of that.

Speaker 1: 19:45

I'd like you to do a little exercise and just get a piece of paper out, and I'd like you to kind of list all of your family. You know immediate family members and, and just hierarchical, you know who's who's at the top of the hierarchy and what's the what's the order of things. The way to figure this out is to ask yourself who in the family is most responsible for the emotional climate of our home, who tends to get their way. You know if they, if there's a disagreement, you know that person is probably at the top of the hierarchy and it's not always apparent. A lot of times it can be a teenager. So do that activity and then I want you to think about how do you get this right. Flip the hierarchy back up to where it needs to be. And it's not through control, it can't be through heavy handed means, but but you need to figure out how to address the issues that are happening. That's attempting to flip the hierarchy.

Speaker 1: 20:47

Like I said earlier in the podcast, there's always some strong emotions attached to this. So let's think about just a few of the things that a few of the ways teens either intentionally or unintentionally flipped the family hierarchy. One for sure is emotional outbursts and you know, I, I, I know that this is going on in a lot of homes and you would never know that. If you know this kid outside their home, you would, you would meet this, this, you know girl or boy, and you'd say, wow, what a great kid. They're nice, they're, you know, good student, they're doing some good things in their life. But if you get into their home, you would see that that's where they let it all go. You know, maybe they're holding it together and they've got all this, these challenges outside the home and it it wears them out all day, but then they get home and they just relax and they let themselves be whatever they want to be in their home. Sometimes, though, they literally are saying I know, if I escalate, escalate, escalate, then what will happen is, out of the strong emotions that are there, my mom or my dad and my parents in general will lose the influence they have and they'll sort of take their hands off and I'll be able to kind of go forward with what I want to do.

Speaker 1: 22:14

Look at the patterns, figure out how emotional outbursts are often, the ways that the family hierarchy has flipped and you're removed from your leadership position. Another very common one is a guilt trip. You know you, none of us are perfect, and so there's definitely some places our kids, if they wanted to, could point out our imperfection, and if we're prone to guilt, guilt is one of those emotions that causes us to want to repair or get rid of that feeling by making our child happy. And so if you're operating from a place of guilt. Just know that most of the time that is not going to lead you in a good direction. So figure out what you need to do to get rid of the guilt. Recognize that no parent's perfect, you're not going to be and it's okay. And if you need to apologize, do that for your teen, but don't go forward with this sense of guilt and I've got to make up for this all the time.

Speaker 1: 23:20

Another one is threats that could be either vocal, vocally threatening something, or it might be by their action. I remember a boy that we worked with a long time ago that he'd escalate his anger when he didn't get his way and at one point he took the hockey stick and he started smashing things in the house and broke the stick over the mantle and a few things like that and of course you see a display of kind of violence like that and trashing the property in the house and all of that. That now sticks with the parents and they're like, wow, he can escalate. So in those cases, in order to restore the family hierarchy, sometimes you have to bring in help. You know, especially if you're a single parent and he's bigger than you are, you know, and there's a real threat and a worry about what he might do physically. You have to help him understand that that is not going to be okay and you're not going to be afraid of that. You're going to get the help you need whether it be a neighbor, a friend, a family member or the police to help you to establish order and safety in the home. That's your job and you'll be the judge of that really what's needed. But get a plan to make sure that you've got the influence and the power behind you to accomplish that important task.

Speaker 1: 24:46

These days it's interesting what I see. Just this week I heard a son that was basically saying things like you're just, you know, you're just. Every time you get a new book and you read the book and you try to apply that, you really don't know what you're doing. He's undermining them and kind of demeaning his parents for them trying to do a good job, and that's another way to try to undermine their leadership. Another one that's so common I've heard it for years and years is that if your team tells you you are the only parent that does this, you're so far out. You're crazy as a parent, basically, if your team's trying to get you to think that you are on an island and you're only parent in the world that is expecting the things that you expect from their child. They're trying to undermine your confidence and make you think that you're dumb or you are clueless as a parent. That's a really you know very obvious manipulation that they're doing, and they want you to stop trying to be a leader. So don't take the bait, you know. Figure out a way that you can get that confidence and maybe it's talking to more parents and realizing you're not alone. But at the same time, be careful, because a lot of parents are out there just sort of doing what everybody else is doing.

Speaker 1: 26:16

If you're not going swimming upstream a little bit as a parent, doing something that's not the common thing to do, then you probably need to be going the other direction. I've seen teens give their parents the silent treatment, and if you're a parent, that's one of the worst things that you could go through. You know, the cutoff of information and obviously the lack of communication really hurts the relationship, and it does take two to maintain that relationship. They've got to contribute some, and so I'm sure there's a lot of anxiety. If you have a child that's doing that to you, it is definitely a manipulation tactic and be careful, don't allow that to work, just because you don't want to have those kinds of demands made of you and I'm not going to talk to you until you give me what I need. You know, you have to realize that starting a precedence like that is not going to be good. It's not going to work out well All right. So I've shared a few things about how parents undermine each other sometimes and how teens undermine the authority of the parents. I want to give you a back, get you back to some solid ground. You've probably been taking some notes and nodding and some cases saying, yep, my child does that, does this, does this other thing, and so what do you do about it? Right, where do you go from here? I want to invite you again to go back to that place we talked about last week, where it's.

Speaker 1: 27:49

The circle of control is where your greatest control is, is over your own thoughts, feelings and actions. If you take full responsibility for all three of those things, you can begin to change them and see that you've got a lot of power. If nothing else changes, but your emotion changes around these certain topics, guess what? Your influence goes up. Your leadership ability goes up. So start there and have a different experience internally. That's the first place.

Speaker 1: 28:21

The next one is to develop communication skills. When I think about the tool, I think about the tool. It's almost the universal tool in family life and really anytime there's an interpersonal situation going on. That is, get really good at communication. I want to do a whole podcast on communication soon because it's so core to everything else. But if you can get good at that and there's at least two real big parts to that, that is sort of this ability to step outside yourself, checking in and seeing, watching your emotions, watching your thoughts and then making decisions about those emotions and those thoughts and those actions and then following through with the skills. So the skill of personal insight into all of those things and the skill of actually knowing how to speak with responsibility, how to listen actively, how to summarize all of those things we've heard about.

Speaker 1: 29:24

But it makes it difficult. The most difficult place you'll try to do this communication is going to be inside your own home, because there's so much emotion and that's exactly why that second part of the emotional management and intelligence is going to be so key to this. So those are a couple of really big things. Go back to where you have control and influence over yourself. Add to that the communication and do that really well. And notice when you have good conversations that are productive, that lead to greater connection even if you haven't made a decision on how you're going to go forward yet, but there's a better connection you have already started to again put yourself in that leadership position so you can guide your family. Oh, there's so much more to talk about on this subject. So know that if you will step into that leadership role with confidence, with education and learning, if you can put all of this together, it doesn't take long for you to begin to see the results of all that effort.

Speaker 1: 30:31

So I wish you all the best as you apply these principles, and I hope that you'll find at least one thing from today's podcast that you can do differently, whether that be strengthening that co-parenting relationship, recognizing when you're in a leadership role, when you're kind of undermining yourself or others inside the family. Whatever it is, write it down, tell someone, tell me I would love to hear about it and then make it something you intentionally do for a while until it becomes habitual to you, and then you can move on to the next thing. We can't do it all at once, but we can do something. Thanks for listening and wish you all the best as you intentionally lead your family. Parents, your time is valuable and I'm grateful you spent some of it with us. What you're intentionally doing in your home life is inspiring and unmatched in its importance and long-term effects. Ask yourself what am I going to do because of what I've learned today?