Nina: Hi there, i have such a good episode for you today. I don’t often do ones about teens, but this is going to be one. Well, really, it’s still about the parents in some ways, but it is also about the teenagers. I will be very curious to hear your thoughts. I hope you’ll share. I also want to remind you that I do anonymous friendship questions and other things on my newsletter at dearninasubstackcom, and you could subscribe there And it’s a place you can always write back and I will answer. And finally, it is really helpful, if you have been enjoying the podcast, if you would share it with friends that is the best way for podcasts to grow And if you could leave five stars on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, and leave a review, that also is tremendously helpful. Thank you so much, and on to a little teen drama today.

Nina: Welcome to another episode of Dear Nina Conversations About Friendship. I’d like to remind listeners of the full title, especially the conversations part, because these episodes are not meant to give black and white answers to the friendship dilemmas out there. We’re having conversations And sometimes they start in person, in my own life, sometimes they come from anonymous letters, sometimes from books and sometimes from articles. Today’s conversation with Stephanie Spranger started with a seed in an article of hers in your teen magazine. The article was about Stephanie’s perspective as the mom having to watch her teen daughter handle a traumatic social fallout of being frozen out of a friend group. Coming back to Stephanie for a second, she is someone I have been talking about friendship with on and off since 2014, though we have never met in person.

Nina: Stephanie and her co-founder, jessica Smock, who has also been on the show, are the duo who created the Her Stories Project to highlight women’s stories, including friendship. They brought me on to be the friendship advice columnist on their site way back in 2014. That begot all this. Today, stephanie and I are talking about how tricky it is, when helping our kids and teens sort out friendship, to not project our own friendship histories, impose our own friendship desires and even overly protect them from our own friendship traumas as they make their way in the social world. And before I let Stephanie speak, i gotta tell you a little more about her. Stephanie is a writer, producer, podcaster and music therapist living in Colorado with her husband and two daughters. As I mentioned, she is a co-founder and co-editor of the Her Stories Project, which is a writing and publishing community for Gen X women at Midlife, and she’s a co-producer of Listen to Your Mother in Boulder.

Nina: Okay, Stephanie, welcome.

Stephanie: Hi Nina, i’m so excited to be here.

Nina: I can’t believe, after all these years, that we have never seen each other’s faces in person, and even on video. Nope, think about 2014. There wasn’t Zoom. there might have been, but not the way.

Stephanie: We weren’t using it if it existed. We haven’t talked on the phone. What’s amazing about it is how unweird it is. I saw your face and it was just oh, there’s Nina. I get to talk to Nina when I have never talked to Nina, even though I’ve known her for nine years.

Nina: Okay, you ready to tackle this very difficult topic? I think it’s a hard one.

Stephanie: I think it’s a hard one too, and I’m super ready to dive in And after. The Her Stories Project, like you said, originated with this subject of female friendship, and we’ve since drifted away from that subject, but both Jessica and I are still wildly interested in friendship, and so to follow your column and your newsletters and podcast is something that’s still so interesting to me, and as my children have gotten older, my own interest in friendship has absolutely evolved.

Nina: I was just gonna say something similar that our kids were so young when we first knew each other And when a lot of us were first writing on the internet and the kids were little, watching them have to navigate all this complicated stuff that a lot of it is still things that are issues for adults. The people who write me anonymous letters, they’re writing about issues that in some ways can sound like they’re coming from teenagers And that’s because these things that happen in teen life they don’t end necessarily. They change But they don’t totally end. I’m wondering, especially given some of the experience you talk about in the article do you think it’s possible to not project, impose and protect Those are the three words I use To not overly project, overly impose or overly protect when it comes to helping our kids navigate?

Stephanie: Yeah, i think it is possible, but I think you need to have been doing a lot of therapy for a really long time.

Stephanie: I don’t think that’s something that comes naturally to most people, even after something becomes conscious to us As I was writing the article, when I was like, oh my God, is some of this coming from my own experience with adolescents and not feeling like I truly belonged, even though I had friends. Is that where this is coming from? And even once that was sort of on my conscious radar. It’s not like flipping a switch, but I think that honestly, it takes a really long time to get to the point where it even is conscious, because we can’t help but go through life with all of these unconscious mechanisms happening, having to do with our family of origin or our childhood histories or our temperaments, things that we just don’t realize that we’re bringing to the table. It’s nearly impossible to extricate that when you’re guiding your own children’s friendships, but I think it’s possible. But I think you would have to be super zen, really enlightened, or just basically living in breathing therapy to have the boundaries that are that ethically pure.

Nina: Yeah, i agree that it takes a lot of understanding and probably self-talk, so I’ve definitely had to learn a lot of things on my own. I was talking to a friend who made a great point about how her kid is an introvert. I have this with some of my kids too, where maybe I personally or in this case, my friend personally is worried about her son not having a lot of plans. But he was perfectly happy, he was just fine doing his own thing. She was always like oh, you should make plans, you should make plans, you should make plans And maybe put an idea in his head well, is there something wrong with doing your own thing? And when you said temperament, i thought of that example, this idea that kids are going to do their social lives the way we did. Maybe we weren’t allowed to just be introverts when we wanted to be. Maybe we had a parent that was always like make a plan.

Stephanie: I think there’s some generational elements to that too, because, as Jen Xers, we weren’t necessarily marinating in this culture of self-awareness and therapy or self-help. We didn’t have terminology for attachment styles and what’s your Myers-Briggs type. We went with the flow. If you were, say, a Midwest Scandinavian Lutheran in this community, you were going to act this way. I think that we did have models we were maybe forced into And I think it’s hard not to end up then in turn being a conduit for your own children.

Stephanie: But then I also have this other thought that just came to me when you were talking about the tendency to maybe impose our own social preferences or styles into our kids. But then the other thing is, my kids have always witnessed me prioritizing friendship. So they see my adult friendships as being close and deep and intimate and reliable. They know that my girlfriends and I, when we’re together, we’re not just talking about the weather, we are getting into it. So they’ve watched me have these really deep, meaningful relationships that I prioritize. At the ages of 11 and 16, they feel this sense of lack. Their relationships aren’t like that. But I’m 44. We are adults and we have this long history. It’s almost like my children have seen the depth and value of my friendships and are like. none of my friends are good at this or good at that. It’s kind of backwards. See what I’m saying.

Nina: They have a reality in the way they grow their friendships that we didn’t have, which is social media. And even if I wanted to guide my kids and, believe me, i do want to and I do sometimes and sometimes I don’t But that is one topic where I wouldn’t even begin to know how to. I don’t really get how Snapchat works And, by the way, snapchat is really where it’s at, although there’s a whole nother one that no one talks about that much. But I have discovered it’s really where a lot of the action is happening And that’s a VSCO. What VSCO is really a photo editing thing, but it’s also got a social media element to it, the way Venmo, kind of underrated, has a social media. Vsco is in VSCO girls. I think that there’s a connection between those two.

Stephanie: Because I wrote an article about that for your teen several years ago about can I be a VSCO mom? This sounds awesome, but I had no idea what VSCO even meant. I did learn it had something to do with photo editing, wait. So this is now like a current modern thing.

Nina: Well, it’s yeah, and I don’t even hear the term VSCO girl much anymore.

Stephanie: No, it’s gone.

Nina: Yes, but the app is popular and adults don’t really talk about our use of the group. Chats are happening on Snapchat and the way Snapchat functions, in terms of whether you can drop someone from a group or add them to a group, is very different than how we adults understand it to work in texts. So they make these new groups. I don’t even want to get in the weeds on that, but I’ve witnessed it a little.

Nina: It’s hard right. Whether we think we should guide them or not is more on bigger concepts like kindness. We can parent along these bigger concepts, but even that is impossible to insist on. I answered a question from somebody who was really distraught because her friend she’s an adult. Her friend basically dropped her and told her she was going to. It wasn’t like she ghosted her. She said we cannot be friends. So at least it was direct. But she said we cannot be friends anymore because the teen sons weren’t friends anymore. The one mom felt really hurt that the letter writer’s son had dropped her.

Nina: It’s kind of confusing with all the hers and everything But the one who wrote me the letter was like listen, i feel terrible. I obviously all things equal. I very much wish that the boys were still friends. It would make. This is my words but what? I thought she was saying was it would make my life easier, It would make my life easier.

Stephanie: Yes, because that’s awkward when you have that combo where the moms are friends and the kids are friends. I’ve experienced that too and it’s terrible being on either end of it. Then there’s this line I know we haven’t quite gotten into the dramatic social fallout trauma that there’s kids who choose not to be friends anymore because naturally interests diverge, or maybe you start going to different schools. There are lots of reasons And I firmly believe that that is not a parent’s responsibility on either end, aside from what you said, guiding towards kindness and respect and all of that. But then there’s that different situation where something is cruel and ugly. There’s gradations, And I think one of the things that may be blindside parents of teens is when we are doing this okay project, impose, protect when they’re younger and it’s like no, I’m not comfortable with you sleeping over that friend’s house because she’s in fourth grade and she’s on social media.

Stephanie: There are so many safety concerns that guide our choices when we’re guiding our children towards friendship when they’re younger. And then, all of a sudden, you arrive at this era where it’s not just about do I know your parents, or I’m not comfortable with this, or I know that they have watched rated R movies and you have anxiety or things like that, And then all of a sudden you’re like wait, how did I get here where it’s not about protecting you and reiterating our family values. It’s about something different. And how do I pivot from this era where I can and should be hands on in some capacities and now it’s about something totally different?

Nina: It’s so hard I think about all the work we do when they’re young to do all the protecting you just said. And then there’s a different kind of protection sometimes some parents do when the kids are young, which is making sure kids get invited to things.

Stephanie: The whole class, that kind of a thing.

Nina: Right, i’ve written about that before. as adults, we need to accept that we’re not going to be invited to everything and that it would be great if we also gave that over to our kids, if we from the youngest age, if we actually taught them to be able to deal with it and not Right.

Stephanie: Do you have to be kind and respectful to everyone? Yes, you do not have to be friends with everyone.

Nina: It’s very tricky though, because I think everybody kind of believes that until their kids are the one, until your kid is the one left out.

Stephanie: And then you want to burn villages down. Oh my God, okay.

Nina: Then I made the mistake and now I’ve come around. I don’t think we do our kids any favors by kind of asking our friends to do us favors and get our kids into stuff, because if chemistry really isn’t there, it robs the kid of the chance to actually make a friend with someone that wants to be friends with them. I think most people regret getting too involved.

Nina: I wish I could have worn other parents off, and having four kids has been helpful because I’ve had a chance to do stuff one way for a while and then realize oh, once you’ve been on the other side of things, once you have a kid who is making a decision about who to invite to stuff, and you kind of get why they don’t want 25 kids at a thing and, by the way, you don’t want to host 25 kids then you’re like oh, then you’re maybe not so mad about the homecoming group that came together that one year that didn’t have your kid or something because I didn’t want to host 30 kids.

Stephanie: And I’ve talked to other high school parents who have had hurt feelings about look at this whole group of kids and not my kid. I do get that and I get how painful it is, and when I wrote this article I was writing from an extreme point of pain, but again it was like super ugly blowout. I mean honestly when your kid feels left out and hurt, when your kids are crying and devastated evokes something so raw that it transcends logic and it transcends your past experiences. And if the roles were reversed, i do think there’s a line where it’s just that was completely unacceptable, cruel, inappropriate. Even disciplinary action at school needs to happen And just, oh my god, your best friend doesn’t want to be your best friend anymore. You’re going to date someone who breaks up with you.

Stephanie: But I agree with you that the more we can practice at least degrees of our own detachment it’s not like you go into it with. You know I had this really upsetting experience And so I’ve got this idea in mind to really get involved with my kid. No, that’s not how it works. It’s oh my god. Look what I just accidentally did, or I didn’t realize this connection.

Stephanie: I guess maybe the best not that we’re giving advice out here is have that mindfulness. Even just ask yourself what is being triggered in this one relationship that my kid is having, or you know what is being activated in me with my kid’s emotional response to this. I think the clearer we can get on why we’re responding emotionally. A certain way that even precedes whatever your action or nonaction is to just understand, to just sit with that awareness of oh my god. This reminds me of in the seventh grade, when Emily Peters and I were best friends and we wrote each other these 28 page packets of our Christmas break because we were going to miss each other And then she totally dumped me for the popular kids. Emily Peters, if you were listening to this, i clearly have still not forgiven you.

Nina: Yeah, i think a lot of us carry some of those names of, for real, the person who didn’t include us in the thing, and if we were to really map it out, the end of that one friendship probably led to the next thing that opened the door to the next person. It’s all part of a path. I really believe that And I think, as parents, i mean I have to control myself a lot. It’s nice to have the practice of four kids and a span of ages, to have allowed myself to grow as a person, not just as a parent but as a person, to then be able to have a little more detachment. It’s much harder at first, but I think our instinct and it’s totally natural as a parent is to protect them from pain, and so, by trying to ensure that invitation at birthday party when they’re younger or something like prom group when they’re older or whatever, to try to protect them from pain, because it is painful for us.

Stephanie: I think it’s totally painful for us to watch them have true pain.

Nina: But pain is where I this is my self talk I’m always telling myself pain is where the growth happens. And I listened to Lisa DeMorde you know she is, she’s a therapist And she had an episode that really helped me And it was kind of on this topic of when your kid isn’t included or when your kids drop from a friend group, but please email it to me.

Nina: It’s really a good one. I think it was slightly older kids than your daughter. Lisa pointed out that sometimes these changes in friend groups there might be a good reason for it. Maybe the group is moving faster for example, this was her example. Maybe that group is actually getting into stuff and they don’t want to be with your kid because your kid’s kind of holding them back They’re, they’re pumping the brakes.

Nina: Yeah, yes, your kid doesn’t want to drink, your kid doesn’t want to be doing things sexually Yes, and they might start out as pain and be left out and your kid feels terrible. Actually is a necessary pain to go through so that they don’t end up doing things they don’t want to do.

Stephanie: I think ultimately it is for the best. I think even the kids and the brokenhearted parents acknowledge at some point if this is what happens to you, these are not your people want your opinion on something, because I think that detachment, that appreciation for the larger perspective of in your life path, this is a necessary step to the next thing. One of the things that I’ve talked about and written about that I think is met with some I don’t know.

Nina: Backlash.

Stephanie: Yes, thank you, is the involvement and the sense of the stuff. That went down with my daughter a year ago was really, really ugly, and you know, there’s this big push with let them work this out themselves. When I wrote about it the first time, it was through this lens of we have these toddler boys that live in the neighborhood and the moms were doing something else and the dads were sitting next to me and we were watching the scene between the two boys escalate And you know, the dads were like really got to work it out, work it out, and my toes are curling. Then one of them just knocks the other. They’re on the pavement and the dads rush over like oh, and it’s sort of in that situation, yeah, okay, they do not have the tools to work this out themselves, they’re about to flatten each other.

Stephanie: But in that same vein, do a group of sophomore freshman girls really have the ability?

Stephanie: could there have been, say and this is sounding very utopian a more ethical breakup, right?

Stephanie: I know that schools do mediations and what not, and part of me thinks that as parents were so hands off in the sense of let them work it out, they need to work it out, and I’m like, but they have no tools.

Stephanie: Would it have been so terrible if the two moms and the two girls sat down and were like can we figure out exactly what is happening? And if this friendship has run its course, how can it end without taking down the entire team or whatever? And then, as I’ve pondered this, my 11 year old has a best friend that she’s super close with, like sisters, and so they get really pissy with each other, and a couple of times I’ve intervened, sort of to my daughter’s chagrin, but also I’m like listen, man, you guys are upset about the exact same thing. You think about it from her point of view. Hey, you think about it from her point of view, and part of me is like why are we not giving them some coaching and some assistance with this, rather than just saying they need to work it out themselves and wait until they knock each other on the concrete?

Nina: Oh, that’s a good question. I think usually when the parents get involved, it does not end well. If the coaching were to be the way you described it, where everybody’s helping the other ones, from the other point of view that would be wonderful.

Nina: It is the ideal, and it’s utopian, maybe Yes it might be utopian, because even the sub-stack letter I just brought up, where the one mom dumped the other because their kids are in friends, it’s that’s pretty, unfortunately, normal response, like it’s not normal, meaning that there’s no reason the adults had to end that friendship. But it’s not abnormal for the mom to kind of go all mama bear and assume her kid is 100% the right. It would take a lot of adult maturity, which a lot of adults lack, to just acknowledge that there’s always two sides to a story. And so first you would need all the adults in the room to admit, acknowledge that their kid’s not perfect, that even if their kid is crying, even if their kid is crushed, they may have played some role along the way, because nothing is just so black and white. I mean a person can be bullied.

Stephanie: That’s a different thing I think about, especially with the 11-year-olds. my daughter can see me not siding with her friend, but she does not want me to be like hey, i think that when you said you weren’t going to wait for her at recess, i think that that probably made she does not want me to be neutral. I don’t know, you’re a grammar person, right.

Nina: Like me.

Stephanie: If you see or hear your kid spelling something wrong, you feel itchy under your skin. That’s how I feel about crappy friendship dynamics. It is hurting my soul to watch you be so stupid right now, inner. Personally, it’s like I just read your paper where there were all of these misspelled words and I was just like, yeah, this looks great. No, this is not great. And that’s the control freak in me. I get it. I think for some of us it’s much more natural to just be like. That would never even occur to me to get involved. I’m a laid back person, the tightly wound folks. We are different.

Nina: I am much better at about it, but I’ve had to really work through it. The grammar thing’s an interesting metaphor because in some ways there’s a right or a wrong answer there. So I’m not talking about the subjective essay. It’s harder with the friendships up, because we never have the full story. We don’t trust my kid’s point of view Any kids not just mine.

Stephanie: No, I agree.

Nina: Everything is so filtered. They’re always on a PR mission. We all are So. anytime my kid comes to me with something, I believe they’re pain. I’m not saying I don’t believe that they’re hurt, but I also believe that their story is coming to me to make them look the best possible.

Stephanie: I feel like we should pause on that beautiful thing you just said. I believe they’re pain. If you’re going to take something away, always believe the pain that they’re bringing to you. but you’re right, That might be where the conclusivity ends.

Nina: The pain is real, but the story behind it is given to me in ways, and as they get older, even more so, so that I don’t hear about the part where they asked five other people what they thought about so-and-so and then it got back to so-and-so and all I got was the so-and-so’s answer, not the fact that my kid got five people all involved. There’s always a piece of the story missing, and I’ve seen that enough times.

Nina: And also things come around People my kids were upset with, eventually their friends again. It’s almost like with the dating stuff you have to be careful not to.

Stephanie: Right, burn that bridge, because then it’s oh, we got back together and you’re like oh, i just said all that stuff about him at dinner last night. Let’s pretend that didn’t. No, that’s so interesting. And that PR thing we’re always. I think that is unconscious too, because our kids are for us to really admit something that we brought to the party sucked Ew, what does that mean about me? And so, honestly, i think friendship is just a medium, especially for kids this age, for working out their own stuff about how they feel about themselves. You know, i had a therapist who said something so reassuring to me because I felt really embarrassed about the fact that I’ve been a serial monogamous my whole life, barely ever been single. And she’s like but relationships are your medium, that’s like your canvas for how you live life and learn and figure stuff out. And I think it’s even more pronounced at adolescence that the bigger work isn’t necessarily these interpersonal dynamics, what they’re learning about who they are as people, even the ugly stuff.

Nina: That’s so profound Because if we overly protect them, we rob them of that.

Stephanie: Yes, we do, i just cannot express that enough.

Nina: I really feel it strongly that it’s hard, and this comes back to the imposing of our own things. I think I sometimes get in the way of letting my kid maybe do the wrong thing. It’s like I tried to stop them.

Nina: It might be something subtle And I’ve stopped doing that as much, as much as I want to say perfect, because why did I not want them to do that thing? Yes, i don’t want them to be unkind, but I think one really honest level beyond that is I don’t want people to think I’m a bad mom.

Stephanie: Oh, that’s such a powerful motivator.

Nina: It’s true, and what’s funny is someone who talks a lot about friendship. I think I feel a lot of pressure to be the perfect friend or something, or at least like think that my kids are going to be the perfect friend. Well listen, i was a teenager once and made mistakes. There are natural consequences that your kid’s going to do something kind of jerky. You can’t really control that as they get older And the way the controls come in is through natural consequence.

Nina: eventually their friends are going to get mad at them and not want to hang out with them And they’re going to get left out of something, and that is the best teacher.

Stephanie: Yes, it’s a better teacher than you coaching them through it, because you can see the writing on the wall. I feel like a huge takeaway from this is. as painful as it is, especially if you’re a person who’s justice oriented. This is so terrible and painful and crappy and not right, and yet this is a really important lesson that you need to learn And I can’t deprive you of that Because, again, if they brought something to the table that was not great, love and logic teaches that you want your kids to make all these mistakes when they’re younger, because throwing their toy and breaking it is a small consequence down the road, like crashing the car or something like that.

Stephanie: right, you want them to make mistakes when the stakes are lower. We do want this. when you tell yourself those things like kids want structure and they want boundaries. All of these things that they might rail against are super, super important to their growth, and getting hurt is no different. I don’t know what we need to do to protect our own hearts. Sparing them from those experiences is not the answer. We’re not trying to raise little step for children who don’t have to struggle and who just coast along. That’s not where the learning is.

Nina: That’s right, and other kids are going to make mistakes too towards our children. So the example you wrote about in your article and people can find it in the show notes is much more extreme example.

Stephanie: It was a little more extreme Yeah.

Nina: And the more standard stuff. It’s important to realize, just like our kids are learning and growing and getting better and hopefully kinder, and learning from consequences. Unfortunately, sometimes our kids are the guinea pigs for other kids. That’s part of the process for other people’s children too. We can’t just give grace to our own children. That’s why I think sometimes it’s hard for parents to get involved, to get back to that Many adults really struggle to see any other point of view than their kids. It’s like we give ourselves and our children a lot of grace and we assume the worst of everyone else.

Stephanie: I think you’re right. I’ve really tried to think about things like that, with that mutual giving of grace and whatnot. Do you think it’s hard for me? I tried so hard in this one particular situation. I think there are going to be times when you’re like you know what. That kid behaved horribly. You might not have been perfect, but that is completely unacceptable. And maybe they are a horrible person, maybe maybe they’re not. Maybe we extend them the grace because they’re learning a lesson and their communication. There’s gradations in there.

Stephanie: But there is going to come a time when somebody does something really terrible to your child. Maybe your kid was 15% to blame or maybe zero, but there are going to be those times where it’s just wrong and it just hurts. And even in those times you can’t get around it. You have to go through it and know that there is going to be some value in it.

Stephanie: And I think that, especially when things like truly are wrong, i think we sometimes can talk ourselves out of advocating for our children because we want to keep this decorum, this boundary, and then all of a sudden you’re like wait a minute, something really awful is happening to my child right now And I’m so afraid of getting involved because of all of this bad rap, getting involved, helicopter, parent do-do-do it never ends well that I have failed to go into the school and say, excuse me, something toxic is happening, and so I would argue that there is a flip side to that logic, and the thing that sucks is it is not always super easy to discern when you are being a person who’s not extending grace to a stupid teenager who’s feeling their way through, and when you are on the cusp of throwing your kids into shark infested waters and that’s what’s the most maddening about this.

Stephanie: There’s no real clear barometer of you. Have entered the danger zone and now you need to get involved, versus you were being an uptight, control-free who is projecting her own adolescent issues onto you know, i feel like we could be on the verge of ending this conversation with murkier waters than we do, you know what I mean I just threw a wrench into it with my No, you brought up something that I think is a tool a lot of people don’t think about, and I’m so glad we got here in this conversation.

Nina: Involving the school or, in some cases, an overnight camp or a day camp, the counselors, the staff, is actually the answer. I actually think that is the number one step to take, above involving the other parents, because I think they can be more neutral.

Nina: Whereas the other parents go into protect, protect, protect. The school, i think, is much better equipped to first of all get some answers, feel out the situation. They’re a lot more neutral and they see a lot more, and not just the school, but I think a lot of things go down at camps and overnight camps, and you know your kid that writes a letter home full of all kinds of stuff. Don’t call the mom of the kid, Call the camp. That’s who’s there.

Stephanie: I will say the brief attempt that the other mom and I had. You could see it wasn’t like do you want to take this outside? kind of a situation. It was via text but it was like whoa, the defensiveness was up, whereas at the school the mediation is handled, obviously, with much more neutrality. And I will say we went in and talked to a program head because a lot of this happened in a very insular department that I won’t call out. She said you know, i honestly think that sometimes time passing is the big mediation in the moment. It’s too soon, it’s too close, you need to let things settle down And when you’re in a pain point it’s really hard to not want to pursue some sort of like. Sometimes you do just need to stop and know that the mediation, however it’s conducted, is not appropriate at this time. It’s just too soon.

Nina: It is really natural to want to fix everything, isn’t it Like? that’s what I was just talking about is trying to fix it. Like I said at the beginning, we’re not going to have any answers, but I think giving people a reminder that you can get other professionals involved when your kids having a hard time is smart.

Stephanie: Right, because if you really are at a point where you’re like my child’s mental health is in question or I think bullying is happening, there is an alternative besides just getting your hands in that pot. You can be an advocate without letting it just be like you were a conduit for all of your own unconscious feelings and experiences that are just being vomited out of you in this really untidy way. There’s a way to advocate. There’s just so much nuance involved in all of this that I really do think maybe the most important thing to do is take a beat and be like my God. why am I so fired up right now? What is this all about?

Nina: I find myself equally fired up when I know my kids probably took doing the wrong thing doing the leaving out and you so want to fix it too, because you don’t want people to think badly of them.

Stephanie: Like I said of me Oh yeah, that one’s a trickier one.

Nina: I actually had somebody say to me at one point that they wished my daughter would invite these other kids to this and that the other thing. I kind of brought it to my kid and she was like they don’t invite me to anything. And it was really interesting to get that point of view And I was like, okay, well, that’s fair, am I gonna ask my kid to invite people to something that when she never gets up? I mean, how much can I ask her to push her.

Stephanie: Or what about this? What if the answer is oh my gosh, no, it ruins the dynamic and everyone’s super uncomfortable. Like again, are you allowed to say I only want these four people to be here for our holiday party? I don’t want to include everyone because this person does this and maybe there’s gonna be fallout and maybe there isn’t. But the micromanaging I think isn’t super useful. But I agree that there’s that discomfort as the parent whose child is the one maybe on the I don’t want to use wrong right, okay, so think of it this way When your kids are toddlers and I don’t know if your kids ever went through biting phases It was like a vampire syndrome at daycare, Like one would get bitten and then they’d bite the other Yeah no so.

Stephanie: And also as an early childhood music teacher, i would be working with parents after class who were in tears because their kid got up in the middle of class and bit another child or hit the kid or through something Almost 100% of the time would say. I think it is so much worse when your kid is the one who’s the aggressor rather than being on the receiving end.

Nina: Yes, of course.

Stephanie: Like I was so upset when Izzy got bitten as a toddler. What was far more horrifying is when she went up to my friend’s daughter and bit her left teeth marks, you know.

Nina: It’s really true. Like back to the PR thing, It definitely brings out something in me that makes you wanna be like we don’t stand for this. You need everyone to know This isn’t what we’re about. We, these aren’t our values.

Stephanie: Well then, you get into the performative parenting of. I am talking to you right now in this group, and we are going to go stand outside, oh God.

Nina: Yes, yes.

Stephanie: I know nobody wants to look like that person who doesn’t care about it.

Nina: Yes, I think our final takeaway you’re gonna laugh is we all need a lot of therapy? Yes, i concur, and if everyone doesn’t have time for a lot of therapy. The very least we can acknowledge that our attempts to fix and placate other people’s opinions of us and to make our kids like the kindest best people and impose all these things.

Stephanie: And bypass suffering and struggling.

Nina: It’s just not realistic And there’s gonna be times we do better and times we do worse. But mostly we just can’t control everything. We can’t control everyone’s opinions of us or of our children, and we can’t control every decision our kids make or decisions that get made that affect our kids. I mean, all we can really do is guide. We can’t deny that we are guiding from our own experience.

Stephanie: Because it’s impossible not to, because, again, you’re not setting out to do it. It’s just what’s gonna happen. I think you’re right And I think, for me, one of my biggest takeaways is going to be to notice when I’m feeling like I’m in acute pain, because I’m panicking that my child is about to encounter a struggle or suffer, to just not do anything, to just be like whoa, this is happening right now, and they can tell when we don’t trust that they have the skills and tools to work their way through a situation. So, if nothing else, we give them the gift of being like I’m gonna take my little panic attack here into the bathroom while you work this out, and, sure enough, the next day it’s like oh yeah, we worked it out. I think we have to stop panicking that they’re going to suffer because they are going to suffer.

Nina: Right, there’s no getting out of it. No one gets out.

Stephanie: No one gets out. This is universal. I know how much it hurts. I’m here.

Nina: They do a lot more tools than we think.

Stephanie: There’s been plenty of times I almost interjected and Michael would be like I’ve got this and they do Right they do, and for those of us who, especially, are verbal over-functioners, i feel like dialing it back is probably the right direction to go.

Nina: I love that. I’m gonna put that on a T-shirt.

Stephanie: Verbal over-functioner Yikes.

Nina: I love that.

Stephanie: These are great learning experiences for them and for us And I think, ultimately, knowing they can’t escape pain and we can’t, as their parents, escape pain And it’s just the way it is, and trusting that something is gonna come out of path of endings and awkwardness and messiness, there are lessons to be learned and better fitting relationships, probably on the other side.

Nina: That is the most perfect note to end on, Stephanie.

Stephanie: thank you so much for being here I could talk about this for hours with you, Nina. This is my cup of tea. I can’t thank you enough for having me. I’ve been so excited about this.

Nina: How about thank you for helping launch me on this entire friendship path So seriously?

Stephanie: I’ve got chills.

Nina: There’s no possible way to express it enough.

Stephanie: Thank you, Nina.

Nina: Everybody come back when our friendships are going well And, frankly, when our kids friendships are going well, we are happier all around, although we can’t always control it. Thanks, bye.