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Hey, squids, Welcome to Season Two. Episode Six. This isn’t Build A Bear, aka When Teens Feel Ignored By Parents. 

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In today’s episode, we’re discussing teens who feel ignored by their parents, and I’m not talking about occasional loneliness, which is normal. Go back to season two, Episode Five, the episode just before this one. This is different. This is within the parent child relationship, feeling like your parents don’t know you as a person, or don’t see you. And note, just for me, okay, to me, a good parent is one who actively tries to improve even while screwing up, because we all screw up

  0:55  

As always. Don’t forget to use these episodes as an icebreaker. Play it for your parents, and let’s start having real conversations. Here we go.

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My favorite speaking gigs are for students. Yeah, I do adult events, but you guys are the reason I do what I do, and the reason I’ll continue to travel around the country until I’m too old to even stand up and end up drooling into the microphone, which, by the looks of it, could be next week, given the hours I’m on the road. I’m often asked how I keep up on the latest cooties. What’s new, what’s on fire? 

  1:34  

I learn it all from you my student audiences, because at the end of each student presentation, there will be squids lined up waiting to speak with me privately. I know what I know about risks, predators, apps, mental health challenges, because you’ve been brave enough to trust me with your secrets and your experiences – sometimes asking for help out of an unimaginable hellscape of online threats and predators, sometimes offering your experiences to help other kids. In addition, I also had millions of lines of data gathered from over 15 years of students completing my anonymous survey, including one question asking students what they want their parents to know.

  2:39  

It’ll be no surprise to you, squid squad that society consistently misreads the motivations and perspectives of teens. I know this to be true, because when I ask you what you most want your parents to know, freedom, money, clothes, stuff almost never come up, except for that 1/11 grade kid who said he wanted a Dodge Charger for his birthday, which look, fair play, right? If you don’t ask, you don’t get!

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So if teens aren’t asking for complete anarchy that’s of cash and unlimited shopping, then what my dearest squid squad, do you want from your parents? 

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And are there any parents listening? Pay attention, because it’s not what you think. Over and over and over the answers are the same, teens, 

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* Teens, you ask that parents stop posting about you on their social media without your permission. First of all, it’s disrespectful. There could be 1000 reasons why you don’t want that posted. And secondly, it could be a safety issue when your parents reveal too much information on their Facebook about something that they didn’t even clear with you in the first place. 

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* Teens, you ask that parents put down their devices when you’re trying to talk to them, huh? Funny that. 

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* Teens, you ask for help with your screen addiction via screen time limits.

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* Teens, you ask to have real conversations with your parents, like real, honest conversations. 

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* And you ask, and to me, this is the most heartbreaking. You ask that your parents spend more time with you, that parents pay more attention to you, play more, listen more, be present more. There’s a never ending loop of survey results that would show clearly that teens and young adults want to feel more connected with their parents, and for whatever reason, do not feel that level of connection.

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Note to parents, connection does not mean simply showing up at the lacrosse game, although obviously you should go as much as you can, but showing up at the game isn’t what they mean. And if you want to know what they mean, listen to this episode with your teen and ask them. And don’t be weird. It isn’t like, what do you need to talk about like today? It’s more a pattern of talking as a habit, of being interested as a habit, not a one off. Get to know your child, like, as a person.

  5:00  

And now back to my teens. Look in defense of parents, I feel like I’m playing both sides here before we throw all parents under the bus, here’s the truth. When you have a child, there’s no manual, there’s no Read Me file, which comes in the folder with your software install when you’re born, we’ll have to wing it, and your parents ability to deal comes almost largely from how they were raised. Have fun researching that one. 

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But regardless of where we started, every parent at some point thinks I’ll do better raising my child than my parents did raising me. So that’s a good sign, I suppose. 

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And when I’m describing parents in a general sense. I’m talking about the 80% of parents who actually try to be the best parents they can be. And yes, you’ll always have 20% who don’t care and should never breed. As for me, my mother was at the very top of the best of the 80% and my father was sort of a middling 20. I guess that makes me the child of a 50% on average, which actually, actually tracks. And look in the great poker game of life, I’ll see your general crazy and raise you my particular crazy, because that’s just how this goes. 

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 life tip: there’s always someone better off than you, and always someone worse off than you, no matter where you are.

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I presented to a large high school in Illinois, which resulted in the most mature and astute survey comments I’ve ever read since the school was so massive and I had so many surveys to process, it was 1000s. Literally, I decided to sit by the hotel pool to work, rather than, like, binge watching the entire Seinfeld and or Soprano’s series again and yet another maddeningly monochromatic gray and teal colored hotel room.

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A woman in her mid 30s, looking down at her phone, walked through the pool gate near the kind that swing, and didn’t think to hold the gate from nearly swinging into the face of a little girl, maybe five years old, following right behind her by the physical distance between them and the complete emotional lack of connection between them, it would be easy to assume that they weren’t together, let alone mother and child. So immediately I was irritated, not because the woman blanked on like the gate. We all make mistakes. This lady ignored the child because she was on her phone, but in my own like screaming brain, I was still trying to give this woman the benefit of the doubt, right? I thought, okay, maybe she’s just the babysitter. And then, as if reading my mind, the child’s like, Mommy, are you coming in the pool with me? Okay, well, crap, that’s out, not the babysitter. Then I thought, maybe the woman’s having some work crisis. And although work is not an excuse for ignoring your child, it can be a reason to be like temporarily distracted. But the woman didn’t answer the little girl who we now know as her daughter, and she tossed her bags down two chairs away from me. She continued to not respond to the child asking in five second intervals, Mommy, are you coming in with me? Mommy, mommy, Mom, mommy, you know that clip from Family Guy with Stewie going, Mom, mommy, mommy. The entire time mom said nothing, not even like shut the hell up, which the child might have found preferable to feeling completely invisible. 

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So here’s another life tip:The opposite of love isn’t hate. The opposite of love is indifference.

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Finally, Mom half heartedly put those arm wingy safety thingies on the kids arms. Okay, so she cared that the kid didn’t get dead. Fine. Check that box off. But I was still white knuckle shuffling through my brain for reasons why mama might be distracted. I’m trying. I really am trying. Maybe her best friend is sick or, you know, on death’s door. Maybe her mother just died, maybe her marriage is about to break up. I don’t know. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe lots of reasons why this woman could be behaving this way. But look, she wasn’t typing furiously. She wasn’t watching a video like for a class or taking notes. She wasn’t taking part in a zoom call. She wasn’t like shooting off work emails because she wasn’t typing or even angry responses to her spouse. There was no speaking, there was no listening. There was just no typing, just swiping and swiping and swiping. Remember Dora the Explorer, Swiper, no swiping. Well, finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, and pretending to get something out of my bag, I looked over her shoulder and saw that she was literally just swiping through Instagram. That’s all. Meanwhile in the background, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, Mom, mom, mom, nothing. Just swipe and swipe and swipe and each swipe felt like nails on a chalkboard until I put on my headphones and tried to ignore what was happening in front of me, half tempted to get into the pool and play with this sweet little girl who was so obviously desperate for attention.

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Disgusted, I decided to regroup. I pulled on my headphones and cranked up my go to punching-people-in-the-smoosh album, which is, by the way, U2’s Rattle and Hum. I picked up the next student survey, and like a bolt from above, it hit me.

  10:28  

Here was this random 11th grade girl’s advice for parents. You ready for it? “Don’t give kids tablets because you’re tired of being a parent. You had kids for a reason. This isn’t Build A Bear.”

  10:45  

First of all, holy crap. I mean, talk about gobsmacked.

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Then I had a light bulb moment. I decided to do the very thing that I loathe. I decided to have a very loud, so called personal conversation on my cell phone in public. So sitting there next to Insta mom, I called my husband and began loudly explaining about the Build A Bear comment about how kids just need their parents to be active participants, rather than addicted, Instagram slaves, that kids don’t get a second childhood, and that no one should have to beg for their parent’s attention. I laid it on super thick. Guess who got off her butt and into the pool with her kid? Success!

  11:37  

Thank you. Anonymous 11th grade girl (“it’s not build a bear”). It’s genius. And like actual parenting, Build A Bear isn’t cheap. Requires specific planning and decisions, and is an involved process the child commits to a particular shell. I remember when my son was little, he chose an elephant. They insert a little heart. They watch the animal come to life. They get to choose a name for it. They’re even given a birth certificate and during the building of the bear, and immediately after that toy is treasured, maybe for a long time until it isn’t.  Many squids listening right now may be having a, oh yeah, I remember doing that. I think that bunny is around here somewhere. Kind of moment

  12:20  

This is, I think, what that 11th grader was trying to say with her survey to parents.

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So here’s why the Build A Bear metaphor is so perfect, and frankly, why I wish I’d come up with it. 

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* Number one, I think what she was trying to say is that some adults, what I guess we’ll call the 20 percenters, approach parenting in the same way that a consumer approaches, Build A Bear, right? It’s good, in theory, and it is good. It looks good. It sounds good to have a bear slash kid all dressed up and cute. You get to show off your stuffed elephant slash baby, then cast it aside when dad gets bored, or mom goes on Instagram, or when parenting gets hard, and parenting gets hard, kind of a lot.

  13:02  

Here’s the second reason why the Build A Bear metaphor is so perfect. The appearance of Love does not always equal the presence of love. Just because you’ve gifted your child great stuff, clothing, toys, etc, that tangible, so called Evidence of love, and even bigger and more important things like safety and housing and nutrition, which are necessary and wonderful, that still doesn’t necessarily equal the presence of Love. The presence of Love requires time and attention, looking and seeing your child for who they are as an individual, and taking the time to connect to them like as a human you so let’s switch gears now to another student presentation at a different school in Illinois. I’m very big in Illinois, obviously, a 12th grade girl asked to speak with me privately. Given my experience, I sort of read her nervousness as a sign that she was going to ask for help with something heartbreaking, and it was heartbreaking, but not in the way that I

  14:01  

* Here’s the second reason why the Build A Bear metaphor is so perfect. The appearance of Love does not always equal the presence of love. Just because you’ve gifted your child great stuff, clothing, toys, etc, that tangible, so called Evidence of love, and even bigger and more important things like safety and housing and nutrition, which are necessary and wonderful, that still doesn’t necessarily equal the presence of Love. The presence of Love requires time and attention, looking and seeing your child for who they are as an individual, and taking the time to connect to them like as a human. 

13:39  

So let’s switch gears now to another student presentation at a different school in Illinois. I’m very big in Illinois, obviously, a 12th grade girl asked to speak with me privately. Given my experience, I sort of read her nervousness as a sign that she was going to ask for help with something heartbreaking, and it was heartbreaking, but not in the way that I thought it was going to be. 

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Here’s what she said… “Everything I tell you, I want you to use it in your presentations. I’m an only child, and when I was eight years old, instead of trying to play with me, my parents gave me a tablet. They never played with me, not one time. I think that they found it difficult to connect with me. I’m very smart…” and when she said the word smart, she glanced at me to see my reaction, and then she continued. 

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“I know how that sounds, but I’m actually really smart. I’m on the autism spectrum. I have trouble connecting to people socially, and I don’t express myself very well. I’m probably talking too fast right now.”

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So I stopped her there, and I said, “First of all, I don’t agree with your assessment. Like at all, you’ve just walked up to someone you don’t know. You’ve drawn me in. You’ve made me feel connected to you. Secondly, you’ve expressed yourself incredibly well. So unless something changes radically in the next 10 seconds, I’d say you express yourself and communicate beautifully.”

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She ducked her head, a little embarrassed, and said, “Thank you. What you just said about me communicating? Well, my parents have never said that to me. Well, they don’t know how I communicate, because I don’t have a relationship with my parents. Not that it’s a bad relationship. There’s just no relationship. When kids at school talked about like playing board games with their families, I thought they were making it up. I thought only TV families played board games from my first tablet at eight years old, I’ve never had any parental controls or supervision of any kind. I saw horrible stuff young and had to deal with scary situations without anyone to tell. My parents never asked about my interests. I’ve never experienced a family dinner, and with the exception of two family vacations, I’ve never spent any time with either of my parents. I give you permission to tell kids all of this that I’ve spent a long time blaming myself for why my parents didn’t want to spend time with me, and it’s not my fault. Tell parents that they have to try to connect with their children, even if it’s hard, you have to try, otherwise your kids grow up feeling worthless.”

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Wowza, even though I was there in real life and she said it to me, saying it out loud again now hits me like all over again.

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If you find that, you’ll be unstoppable. And hey, someday you might even earn special I mean, probably not relax. But look, here’s to trying. 

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Okay, squids, don’t forget to use these episodes as an icebreaker, and let’s start having real conversations. If you have a story you’d like to add to this or any other topic, send us an email info at s house podcast.com Well, that’s it for today. Thanks for listening, and remember, eat more dirt and avoid moist dudes in basements.