Parenting Teenagers Untangled: The award-winning podcast for parents of tweens and teens, offering realistic, science-backed advice for calmer, more connected family life.
I'm Rachel Richards, Teen Parenting Specialist, former BBC Correspondent, CNBC Europe World News Anchor and mum, on a mission to make parenting teens much less stressful, and even enjoyable.
Do you ever feel like you don’t know what you’re doing? I've experienced that too, so have a big hug from me.
Here's the truth. You’re doing better than you think you are. No, really, you are. There’s too much talk about what a parent should be, and how we can optimise and perfect ourselves, and not enough about how well you’re coping in this complicated world as you hold your shizzle together.
I mean it, the most important message is that you CANNOT be perfect. You’re going to lose your rag, you’re going to get upset and say stupid things and make mistakes and hate your kids and your partner and your life from time to time.
Take it from me, if you’re going to worry about anything make it: ‘Am I being curious enough?’
Asking questions will get you everywhere as a parent of teenagers, and the place to do most of your practice is… yourself and your own thoughts and beliefs.
So, welcome, pull up a chair, drop your baggage, and make yourself comfortable. Let’s learn together.
The Podcast:
A fellow mum begged me to start my podcast because she wanted someone she trusted to help her through the teen years, and I’ll be forever grateful to her because the journey has transformed my own parenting and benefited my family beyond imagination.
Here’s the good news, this podcast is free and you can learn everything I learned just by starting at the beginning and going through every episode.
If you want to go a bit faster then scroll through and pick subjects that cover what you need right now. If you can’t find what you want then message me and I’ll tell you which one will help you most. If it’s not something I’ve covered then I’m like a dog chasing a stick, so you’ll soon get your answers.
My main aim is to help you stop trying to be perfect, or comparing yourself and your kids with others. Your only real job is to focus on getting to know the amazing people you have in your life, loving them unconditionally, and showing them you believe they can do hard things.
JOIN ME ON SUBSTACK:
For those of you who want more, or who just want to help me feel like the pebbles I have dropped in the ocean of life are making a difference, why not join my paid community? You’ll get one-to-one support and printable PDF’s that give you the top tips from each podcast episode so you have your own little, bespoke manual.
ASK ME ANYTHING: I’m very busy behind the scenes reading everything so you don’t have to, and when you subscribe you have the chance to ask me anything. If I don’t know the answer I’ll head out like an eager truffle pig, ready to snuffle out the best for you.
COMMUNITY: I’ll be offering regular extras, including tips and thoughts, that help you tune into what matters.
All of the community notes, and tips, will remain available to paid subscribers. I want to make this more about fun and less about fear.
PDF NOTES: So many listeners say they have rewound the episodes to write down notes, well now there’s no need. Paid subscribers will have a weekly, downloadable, summary of the top tips from each episode, so you don’t have to take notes.
Please let me know if there are any old episodes for which you’d like the notes. I’m very happy to supply them.
POINTERS: Ask me if there’s something you’re struggling with, I can tell you which episode is most suitable for you, because there are a lot to trawl through.
Episodes
195 episodes
Parenting Thriving Teens using Science
If you’ve ever looked at your teen glued to a screen, living on junk food, or melting down over “nothing” and thought, What am I doing wrong? — this episode will change how you see everything.In today’s fast-paced, often overwhe...
Prepare for the Inevitable: The Guide to Grief for Parents of Tweens and Teens
Parenting tweens and teens is challenging enough, but when someone in the family becomes seriously ill or dies, it can feel overwhelmingly difficult. In all honesty, we Westerners are terrible at talking about death, often avoiding it, so when ...
The Vital Skill Parents Can Teach Teens and Tweens: Critical Thinking
Click here for my blog post and summary of the core skillsOur teenagers are growing up in a world saturated with information, outrage, a...
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Parenting in High-Conflict Homes: Protecting Your Kids When Your Partner Won’t Change
“My husband is highly critical of the teenagers, gets angry over little things and yells, so I’m having to make up for his behavior, and I often avoid involving him in parenting decisions."This message came into my Substack. It was a pla...
The Manosphere for Parents of Teens: Signs Your Son Is Being Influenced (and How to Respond)
“Is my son secretly being taught to hate women?”If you’ve ever heard your boy casually repeat a line from Andrew Tate… seen him disappear into his room with his phone… or wondered what on earth he’s absorbing on TikTok and YouTube, t...
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‘Lazy’ to Motivated: Parenting Revision, Homework & Exams. Hear a Teen On What Really Helps
It's exam season and so important to keep a steady ship with all of the stress in the house. I thought it would be a great time to interrupt my youngest, Amelia, for an honest chat about what she sees as both good and bad strategies...
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Parenting teens for connection not perfection
So many parents of teens quietly worry that they’re “failing” — not doing enough, not staying calm enough, not getting the outcomes they hoped for. This episode is an invitation to step off that perfectionist treadmill. Instead of p...
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Parenting Teens Through Love & Heartbreak: What we do wrong and what helps
When parenting teens through their first experience of love and attraction it can bring up a lot of feelings we thought we'd neatly packed away; the intensity of that first crush, the humiliation of not being chosen, the heartbreak that felt li...
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Parenting teens through failure and on to university
A listener parenting a teen son wrote to say both of them felt pretty stunned when he was rejected from the university he'd set his heart on. She asked for the best way to help our teenagers cope with this sort of disappointment. I ...
Parenting Teen Boys In The Age of the Manosphere - Vintage
Parenting teen boys wrote three years ago asking us to discuss how we can talk to boys about influential online figures like Andrew Tate. The 'bros' act both as an inspiration to achieve great things, and a lightning rod for disgruntled men who...
Cutting it as a parent? Parenting teens as a surgeon, author and mother of four with Gabriel Weston
If you’ve ever lain awake at night wondering whether you’re getting this parenting thing horribly wrong, you need to hear this conversation with surgeon and author Gabriel Weston.Gabriel is a mother of four – including tween twins – a pr...
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Parenting teens in an age of AI, Nudes and Online Blackmail
There's been a dramatic increase in reports of grooming, sextortion and AI generated child sexual abuse material in recent years, and most parents believe politicans and tec...
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The Thing Parents, Tweens and Teens Need Most: Mattering with Jennifer Breheny-Wallace
Beneath all of the noise when it comes to parenting teens comes mattering; the deep human need to feel valued beyond achievements. It's something we all need, but are we getting it?The new book by Jennifer Breheney-Wallace focuses on "Ma...
Parenting Teens So They Don't Stop Talking to Us When They're Older
When Brooklyn Beckham publicly announced he didn't want to reconcile with his parents he was joining a painful catalogue of family stories that have gone wrong. Estrangement is reportedly on the rise in Western societies but what's ...
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Tween and teen parenting for a healthy body image, and getting teens to do chores. Vintage
For all of the tips click here:https://teenagersuntangled.substack.com/p/how-to-talk-to-your-teen-about-bodyhttps://open.substack.com/pub/teenagersuntangled/p/how-to-get-your-kids-to-do-their?utm_campaign=post-expanded-shar...
Intense tween and teen friendships and the most important things a parent can say
'Early adolescence is a friendship meat grinder, and your kid will eventually find their people,' according to Megan Saxelby of Wild Feelings. But oh boy it's tough! Megan wants parents to know that using words li...
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Positive Parenting: Using Strengths to Motivate and Understand our Tweens and Teens
We want our kids to do as well as possible, so when they mess up, do dumb things, or seem to be failing, it's easy to focus on their mistakes and what they should do instead. Naomi Glover, a leading applied neuroscientist and brain ...
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Parenting Teens Who're Online: Protecting Them From Predators
While counseling sex offenders, Anna Sonoda, LCSW learned firsthand that grooming, the prelude to child sexual abuse, is intentional, gradual, and observable. Her message to us is, we're not bad parents, we just have a skills gap and she wants ...
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How parents of teens can raise happy, successful adults
Hint: it depends on how you define happy and successful.We all want our kids to be happy and successful but what does that mean? In today's episode, I'm joined by Giselle Goodwin, author of Can Women Really Have it All? to talk ab...
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The One Thing Your Teen Really Needs From a Parent: Emotional Regulation
Updated to correct the music issues at the beginning: This episode will change how you see “bad behaviour” and might just change how you see yourself, too.In this powerful conversation, with Dr Jody Carrington unpack what eve...
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The secrets to real change, and parents breaking negative family cycles
I thought we'd kick off the new year with an episode on how building our own community of people we admire can dramatically change our future and break from a difficult past.In this episode, I talk with Mitchell Osmond, who transformed ...
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Anxious Teens: The vital role we parents can play. Vintage
The anxiety epidemic:In 2020 the UK charity Mental Health Foundation surveyed more than 2,000 children and found 50 per cent of teenagers aged 13-19 were experiencing anxiety they found hard to control.
Parenting Teens Without Overreacting: How to handle emotions calmly - Vintage
None of us likes blowing a fuse when our teen does something that triggers us, but we all do it at some point. Nicky asked us to discuss this topic after she felt she'd overreacted to bad feedback from her son's teachers. We know it...
The Parenting Gap: How Society Is Failing Dads (and Our Kids)
What's the point of fathers? Michael Ray, father and gender equality campaigner says the way they're portrayed in the media and advertising sends the impression that they are either bumbling idiots or not an important part of raising kids.<...
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Top Friendship Tips for Teen Girls: Lessons from Real-Life Sisters.
It's our connections, whether friends or partners, that make us want to get up and face our challenges every day. So when kids start a new school, college or university it's a time when friendships become the most important thing. W...
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