Episode 19: Difficult Teens, Stronger Families

Teenage years often bring conflict, emotional distance, and moments that leave parents wondering if they are doing anything right. In this episode, Jake Fackrell and Dr. Tamara A. Fackrell offer thoughtful guidance for parents navigating the ups and downs of raising teens. They explore how choosing the right battles, staying calm during conflict, and forgiving without waiting for an apology can change the entire dynamic of a home. 

Jake and Tamara emphasize the importance of increasing love during difficult behavior and building connection through small but meaningful habits like play, laughter, and six-second hugs that help teens feel secure. They also share why parents should never face these challenges alone and how leaning on family, friends, and professional guidance can provide strength and perspective. This episode is filled with encouragement for parents who feel overwhelmed and a powerful reminder that no matter how difficult things seem, hope should never be lost.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Mindful Marriage and Family Podcast with Dr. Tamara Fackerell and Jake Fackerell. This is episode 19. We are actually talking about something that I get a lot of calls on, and that is working with difficult teenagers.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Well, we've been through that. We've had six children, and they all went through their teenage years. And yeah, there's a lot of fun ups and downs and things you have to deal with and work on. And so yeah, I'm excited for this episode and to talk about the things that that we did that um that seemed to work.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Yeah. And also I actually worked with the juvenile court and the juvenile jail for 15 years, and I helped their transition at-risk youth from in the jail back into their homes. And we also taught courses and classes, and I had all sorts of experiencing working with really, really hard, hard kids. And I want to say that the number one thing in working with difficult teens is to truly love them. Find like a common ground that you have with them in a genuine way, like a way you really genuinely connect and take that connection and work with it in a genuine way. That is the biggest number one takeaway is find something you can connect on. And it might be that you guys follow the same sports team. It might be that you guys like to boat together or bowl together or you both watercolor or whatever it is. But we want to be finding these connections with each individual child while they are young. And so that way we can connect back when we need to in the times of trouble, that those levels and multiple levels of connection already exist. So that's number one is establishing connection points with your teen.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

I really like that. You know, growing up, we with our own children, we had a hot tub. And it was fun because you kind of have a trapped audience. You get them in the hot tub and you just have that one-on-one time together with your with them or with your family, and you can sit there and you can chat and you can talk and ask questions and really dive deep into their lives at that time. And they're there, they're kind of trapped in the hot tub with you. So it's kind of fun.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah. And when you're working with difficult teens, I also say, hey, use a zero to ten scale and don't sweat the small stuff. If you have a nine or a ten, you know, yeah, head it go head on. But for the small, tiny little things, don't worry about it. Just let it go. Stop only having the problem in common with the teen. So when I did the parent teen clinics and I ran them actually all for the truancy, also in um in half of the state of Utah, we ran all the truancy clinics as well. And I would find that a lot of at-risk teens, the only attention, the only time they felt important or got attention was when their parents were getting after them. And so, hey, if they get the model where, hey, I'm getting attention right now. I mean, it's bad attention, but you know, I'm getting the attention. It's like you really want to be giving the attention when they're doing things right. And so don't sweat the small stuff. I had one case that I remember where they had planned this big event as a family as part of the mediation, and it was something that the child was really looking forward to as like a fun center that they were going to. And then the day of when they were gonna go to the set fun center, the mom basically said, Hey, if you don't get your room all the way clean, you're not going to the fun center. And she made it a reward for the room cleaning, and he refused to clean the room, and so they ended up spoiling it and not going. It's not wise to put all of the rewards and all of the fun in your family into the zone is if you do this, I'll give you good. But if you don't do this, I'll only give you bad. You want to be having fun as a family, don't attach it with certain behaviors. Like you still want to be having fun. And if you make a promise to go to a fun center, don't then later make it conditional and take it away. That makes you not have trust between the parent and child relationship. The next item that we have, number three, is to stay steady. Stay steady, stay steady, stay steady. Stay as a parent, I just tell you stay who you are, stay your normal, happy self. Add positive things in. Don't let the bad acts of your teen explode your life so you can't function. And so I think it's important we want to have kind of that prayerful watchfulness, not anxious concern. Like we want to be watching, we want to be monitoring, we want to be guiding. And when you find out things that are shocking, and we do as parents, you find out shocking information, don't give consequences in that moment. Just let it sink in, talk about it a little bit later. So you want to separate the moment of finding out what's wrong, and then later, if you have to give consequences, put that in a separate session, like in a couple hours after you've had time to think it through and talk with your spouse and or talk with siblings or talk to the teacher or confirm, you know, trust but verify. All of those things can be really important. And as we've already talked about on our last podcast, you want to have the kids to be able to dig out of their consequences. So, hey, I'm not grounded, but I just have to stay home until I complete these small tasks. Like clean your room before you go out, or do your homework before you go out, or whatever it is, but don't do big groundings for things that aren't huge big deals.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Yeah, I think the important takeaway with this one is don't overreact. Stay steady with your things. Like, man, there's gonna be lots of ups and downs and things, but unless it's like a 10 out of 10, stay calm, don't overreact. Like, look, this will we we'll get through this, we'll get by, it'll it'll all kind of pass, but once we overreact, then it could really blow up into something that we never really intended it to get to that state.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Yeah, and the next one, number four, is close the box of conflict. So what that means is don't when you're in today on Thursday, don't say to him, well, last week you and we're a horrible person. You don't want to do that. It's like yesterday's yesterday. The best thing with really difficult teens is to stay in today. A lot of um at-risk youth that I worked with would say, Well, I don't understand why that's a big deal. Like nothing happened. It could have happened, but it didn't happen. You know, it's like you want to just like take it day by day when you're in the hardest parts, and you want to give a lot of love and care. And with the at-risk teens I worked at with, it was really sad because a lot of the teens that I worked with had parents who stopped caring or said, like, I just can't handle you. I don't know what to do. And so they didn't give that unconditional love that can be so important as a parent.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

Yeah, you close the box. And what's really important with that is you don't, yeah, you once you've closed that box, no teenager wants to hear that same lecture again over and over again. Once it's kind of closed, like put it behind you, and and and when you forgive, you forget. You you you you build that trust again, and you don't keep bringing that up over and over and over again. Like you've you've you've issued the punishment, the discipline, whatever it is, the lecture, but don't keep bringing it up over and over again and rehashing it. You know, nobody wants to hear that over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Yeah, and I think the trust is really important. And what I try to teach parents in difficult spots is that you don't have to trust a person a hundred percent wholly, the whole thing of it. It's like, look, you just have strings of trust. Like you trust that maybe your child's gonna get to school on time, and that's something that you can trust. And so you don't have to say, well, I don't trust you. Well, of course, there's all sorts of things people aren't perfect at, like, hey, maybe you're a late person or an early person, you don't trust they're gonna be on time or whatever it is. Like, let's not make that part of it. Try to grab the strings of where you do trust. Like, hey, what can I can trust that you're gonna go to school, that you're gonna attend school. I'm trusting that you're not doing drugs. I'm trusting, you know, certain things. I think you want to have the relationship with your child where you're expressing the things that are working where you are trusting, and that can be really important as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

Yeah, you give them that 1% of that trust and let them earn the rest, right? Little by little, they can keep earning more, but you have to start somewhere. So start with some kind of trust.

SPEAKER_01 8:38

The next one, um, number five, is after you give can correction, it can be really hard, but you need to increase love. You want to increase connection. And actually the studies show you should connect first, then correct, then connect. So connect, correct, connect. So you don't want to, again, be correcting when you're in the anger phase. You want to just be say, hey, what happened? Give me the information and then take that break, then you can correct, and then you can connect again. So giving that increase of love with them. I used to like to do runaway dates with my kids. It's like, hey, we have a minute together. We didn't plan this, but spontaneously, let's go over to the sushi house and have sushi together. Like, let's have time together where we're connecting one-on-one. And the one-on-one connection can be really important because a lot of youth tell me that they don't like being raised in a herd. What that means is they've got that sibling team, and everybody has all the same rules, even though they're individuals. And some siblings will tell me, well, my older brother was really rebellious. And so then my parents got stricter on me as a result of it. So we want to, even though we're gonna have generalized rules, one thing that my mom did really great is I was number six of seven, and she would always say, older people get more privileges, but they also do more work. And so I wasn't always saying, Hey, that's not fair, I'm not getting it because I'm so little. She's like, Hey, when you get to a certain age, you'll get these privileges, but you've got the work load that goes along with the privilege load.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Yeah, that's awesome. And number six is find points of connection. So with every child, they're all different, and you just want to find, okay, what where do you where do we connect? Sometimes it might just be going outside and throwing a baseball together, might be going on a hike or a mountain biking ride or reading a book together. It could be all kinds of things, but you really want to make sure you find those those areas where you both kind of connect and you bot you can bond on those on those areas.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Yeah, it could be something as simple as like you enjoy cooking dinner together. But one thing that my family did is we all love to go out on the boat together. And so no matter who was doing what, when, where, my dad could always convince us on a Saturday to get up at five in the morning and go down to Lake Mead um in Nevada. And so, like having something big where you've got like this family connection, I think that that's something that can be really important as you go through.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

And number seven is tap into their love language. So you want to first know well, what is their love language? What makes them tick that way, and you want to tap into that.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Yeah. And one thing about that is, you know, some kids are what they call kinesthetic, and kinesthetic kids are touch as important to them. So you might like connect with them just by giving them a little back scratch or a foot rub or something like that, and then go, you know, in through other things. They might be a person that really likes gifts. So you might go down to the grocery store and get them their favorite candy bar for$2. Or they might be a person who really likes to be appreciated. So you might sit down and write a letter to them of the appreciation and and the gotchas and the good things that they're adding. And so we're actually next episode gonna go through the praised love languages. So we hope you'll tune in there. And um, they can apply also to children in that venue as well. But you want to kind of tune in and get to know what your child needs to feel loved and know that that's gonna be in a really individual way.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Yeah, that's awesome. And number eight is develop habits of play. And it's fun, you know. Growing up, I I had three brothers, and uh we we love to play. We love to do fun things. My dad would take us camping and we'd play, you know. I remember playing frisbee at the park, remember playing football. I remember wrestling with my dad all the time. Like that was one of the things we would do to play with when we were growing up, and you know, it was in fact, I don't think we ever could beat my dad. Like he would take all four of us on at the same time, you know, and in growing up. So we just had a lot of fun that way with with my dad just kind of wrestling and playing and you know, all those fun things.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

With play, one thing that our family did a lot is my dad loved ice cream. So we would go to Baskin Robbins, or we would um go downtown to Bali's uh because I we were I we were were both raised in Las Vegas, and ice cream was a big deal. And then my dad was also a really great bowler. So he would take us bowling, he would get turkeys bowling, he was so good at bowling, he'd get all the strikes in a row, and it's something that we really enjoyed together, but just getting those happy points, and I don't like it when parents use all of the fun stuff of their home as a reward. It shouldn't be a reward. You get it most of it because you're just part of that family team. And so just making sure what I see with the at-risk parents is they cut off all the good in the family for that person, unless they be a perfect good person, you know, and that approach just doesn't work well. You want to be including them in the play as often as possible, and that comes through the connection and the play that we've talked about. Yeah. The next one I want to talk about is giving forgiveness, even if your child doesn't apologize. Because I think that sometimes kids get really stubborn and prideful and they won't admit that they did something wrong. And so I think that as a parent, you want to be really generous with your forgiveness. And sometimes when I mediate, I'm thinking, what would a mother love about this person? Like, how can I tap into that? Because I think a mother's love goes really wide and is so unconditional. And we all just want to help our kids the best that we can with the best information that we have.

SPEAKER_00 14:29

This is such an important point, right? As as the adults in in this matter, right, with our children, we should be the ones that are offering the olive branch. We should be the ones forgiving without expecting an apology on the other end. If they apologize, great, but it should never be a forced apology. We should never say, you need to say you're sorry to me right now. And that that just that doesn't go very far, right? And it's kind of forced. You you want to just forgive and move along.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Yeah, and it reminds me of a story that I heard from a man, and he was saying that he was at a scout camp that his dad was at, and he got talked into locking the keys in the car, and um and it and it made the honking sound in the car and and locking the keys in so you couldn't get him out. But then he ended up falling in a cactus bush, and his dad had to take all of the cactus bush out of him, out of his skin. And he, you know, you have these big events that happen as teens, and it's like the life-humiliating story that you tell, but the reaction of his dad was so kind and loving, that was the lesson. So you want to just surprise your child with that forgiveness and that unconditional love, even when you've got to pull cactus out of them. So I think that that's something that's really important. And the next one, I think, is that as a parent, you need to get some support people in place. You don't want to be telling all your neighbors and the soccer moms and everything about your problems, but you do want to find, you know, one or two trusted friends to be able to lean on, or professionals, or a counselor to help kind of go through this. In a lot of the cases that I do, it divides parents when you have really difficult teens. And so you might want to advise with a counselor to see. And I was explaining to a co-parenting couple the other day because they have kids that are completely out of control. And I'm like, hey, look, rebellious kids have a divide, right? They find these gaps. But when the parents are divorced and live in two homes, there's more gap defined because the mother doesn't feel 100% responsible for the child and the father doesn't. It's like I'm only responsible on my time, you're responsible on your time. And then when kids are going back and forth and, you know, with friends and different things, they don't have that 100% responsibility feel. And so I think that there's large gaps that can occur. So even if you're co-parents, I really recommend that you turn towards each other, use family systems counseling to get on the same page to decide what we're gonna do to help our youth and teen be the best people possible.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

And remember that support can come from a lot of different areas, right? Use those resources around you, use the auntie, the uncle, the older cousin. Um, bring everybody together, older siblings even, to help and you know that that can offer that kind of support.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Yeah, and so the next one is actually offering the support of the village to the child. So you want to cue in to your best friend and the village person and the best friend's mom, hey, can you help in this way? Just give small things, or hey, we need to check in with each other because they're telling me, you know, the boys are at your house. And when we had a lot of things with our kids, we actually didn't do a lot of sleepovers. They did a few on only special occasions, but we'd always have a parent-to-parent contact. The studies show that sleepovers is where a lot of um bad habits begin. And so we weren't big on that except for, you know, with special exceptions. But making parent-to-parent contact when your child is with an other teens, the parents need to unify. And so just saying, hey, you know, I'm Sterlink's mom, just want to introduce myself, like getting contact of those parents, I think can be really important so that you can figure out where your kids are at. And it's interesting now that phones have locations, you want to just maybe tell your child that they always need to keep their location on. And so there's different ways to track them now that are a little bit easier. But I think it's important to involve the village, the parents of the other children, your favorite people, aunts, uncles, and of course grandparents can be a great resource because they're so good at loving kids.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Yeah. And number 11 is be present at crossroad moments. So there's often crossroads in the life of your teenager or the life of your of your child. And you want to be there for them with those crossroads where maybe they're having a difficult time. They're maybe they have a big test coming up as a crossroad, or they're graduating from junior high and going into high school. There's another crossroad. There's all these sort of crossroad moments where we want to make sure we make special efforts to drop what we're doing and be present and be there for them in those moments.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Yeah, there's the big moments and there's also the small moments. And so that's like, hey, when they get off to school in the morning, be present if possible. When they come home from school, be present if possible. When they're out late, like someone needs to sit and wait up and be the waiting up police. I used to sleep on the living room couch to show the child, like, I'm here, I am waiting for you. Sometimes I'd be up, but when I needed to get some rest, I would just sleep right there on the couch, be there. And I have found that a lot of my teens wanted to talk and spill their guts at like midnight. And so you just have to be ready to be engaged and listen when they want to, when they want to talk about things. And so their time frame sometimes is a really makes a tired parent, but I think it's really important to hear them out and to understand where they're at.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Yeah, because at midnight they're willing to talk. Come, you know, nine o'clock the next day, 9 a.m., they're you know, it's done, it's past its history, and maybe they're not willing to talk about it at that time.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Yeah, I think that that's important. And then seeking um professional guidance is the next one. Sometimes kids get into situations um with pornography addictions or drug addictions where we need to use providers. And just so you guys know, you don't have to wonder if your child does drugs, you can just go down and have them get a drug test done. So you don't have to wonder, like you can just get the test. And I think sometimes as a professional that worked with the juvenile courts, I wondered why parents didn't realize that. I mean, courts use drug tests through for adults for all sorts of things, and they make them take drug tests, you know, weekly, bi-weekly, all of these things. So you can actually buy a kit for the home, or you can just go down and get it professionally tested. And and the drug tests go back, you know, often three months. And so you can see what your your child's up to if you're to that level where you really think that drugs might be involved and you need to get professionals involved. Like it doesn't have to be a mystery, just have them go take a test.

SPEAKER_00 21:09

Yeah, if you're wondering about that, that's this is a really you know huge concern. And with drugs or any, you know, habit like that, it's it's best if you nip it in the butt. If you know about it early on, the earlier, the sooner you know about it, the sooner we can get them help and uh get get through that and get over that.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

Yeah, I think that that's really important. And then the last one is just never lose hope. When parents lose hope, kids lose hope. No matter what. Just know that when they're 26, they're gonna be okay. Like on the back end, it's all gonna be okay. And how you reacted, all of those freeze frames will be there. So I wished when I had some of my bigger kid things that occurred, I would have reacted smaller and just like taking a minute, taken a breath, and not overreacted in the moment. So I think that it's really important to always have hope. And I was really good at always having hope for the kids, telling them, hey, I believe in you. I know the man or woman that you're going to become. Like you're doing things. And I think that that hope is something that is the guiding star, the parent hope is the guiding star of the child's life.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

It's such a beautiful thing, you know, when you when you never lose that hope and you you keep working with that child and you keep working with them and getting them through these hard times and then seeing them as adults and seeing that, okay, yeah, everything worked out. It's it's great. You know, they learned a lot of things, they went through a lot of things, but they're great. They're great kids. Sometimes they just go through some hard challenges, some hard times, and we help them through those things. But the key is love them, love them unconditionally, show them, show them that love and that support, and just never lose hope on them. Keep working with them, keep working with them, make um help help them get through whatever challenges they're they're going through and be that support for them.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

And just remember that parenting success is measured by connection, not by control. All right, guys, that's a wrap on this podcast. We hope that you guys will take a moment to leave us a five star review and talk to your friends about the podcast. We want to get the word out there, just all the great information that we can share with other people.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

See you next time, everybody.