753. Getting Warmer
3. Getting Warmer
Everyday Steps That Build Withing
The Powell family abides by this general principle: if our kids are capable of doing something themselves, we want them to do it themselves. For us, parenting usually includes empowering our kids to take care of—and be responsible for—as many slices of their lives as is developmentally appropriate and possible.
Around age eight, each of our kids became capable of packing a simple school lunch, usually consisting of a bagel, cheese stick, fruit, and a granola bar. When their friends Charlie, Tyler, Abby, and Tori opened their lunchboxes at noon and were surprised at the contents inside, our kids realized that most second graders don’t make their own lunches. But they also felt pride and accomplishment that they were cobbling together their own food.
Right around that same age, our kids also became adept at making their own breakfast. Toast with peanut butter and jelly. Cereal with nuts and fruit. These were not elaborate breakfasts, but our kids benefited from an early morning sense of achievement. Dave and I benefited from a few extra minutes in the morning to exercise or check email. These specific strategies for building competence won’t work in every family, and you might focus your efforts on different areas of competence, but “make your own breakfast and lunch” became a pretty normal phrase for our clan.
Fast-forward eight years. Nathan, our oldest, was a sophomore in high school facing a rigorous week of midterm exams. Even busier than usual, Nathan was holed away in his room, and we saw him only a few minutes here and there for meals. Motivated by a desire to lessen my learner son’s stress and increase his healthy caloric intake, I shook up our family routine and made breakfast for all three kids.
When they walked into the kitchen and saw pancakes and sliced apples, they looked at me—and then at each other—with puzzled faces.
“Mom, why are you making breakfast for us? Is something wrong?”
“Yeah, are we in trouble or something?”
“Don’t you normally just make breakfast on the weekend?”
No, nothing was wrong. No, they weren’t in trouble. And yes, it was still Monday.
The next morning, my French toast evoked the same bewildered looks and questions.
So did lemon muffins and eggs on the third day.
By the time Nathan had wrapped up his midterms week, the kids were no longer confused. And I had one of those Growing With flashes of parenting insight. Long touted as “the most important meal of the day,” breakfast might also be one of my most important times with my son in this season of his life.
Driver’s license fresh in hand, Nathan had begun driving himself to school in the morning. After school he headed to soccer or volleyball practice, and then often directly to youth group or worship practice. He was home for our family dinners less than half of the time. I loved having a son who could drive to his own activities (and also occasionally drive his sisters to theirs). But I missed our time together in the car and around the kitchen table. I didn’t feel like I was with him enough for our relationship to keep growing.
So for the rest of that busy year, breakfast was the new dinner. Those daily 15 minutes over waffles and grapes were often my best conversations with my son. Sure, we chatted about logistics of the day, but we also talked about what was going on in his classes, in his friendships, and in his soul. Thankfully, he was a teenager who had the capacity to hold a conversation at 7:00 a.m. And I woke up to see a parenting pattern that no longer served its purpose in our family, sucked up my pride that my kids made their own breakfast, and changed.
Nathan was 16, and I needed new rhythms to grow with him.
Withing: A New Goal for Your Family Relationships
From ages 13 to 29, one critical goal in our family relationships is to figure out the rhythms and rituals that propel our families toward withing. The goal of withing is a family’s growth in supporting each other as children grow more independent.
Withing beats at the heart of Growing With parenting. One of the most important phrases in our definition of Growing With is that it is a “mutual journey.” It’s impossible, not to mention unpleasant, to try to embark on a journey alongside someone else if you’re not willing to walk with them.
The patterns of withing change as your child changes. Now that Nathan is 18 and transitioning to college, a 15-minute breakfast together is no longer possible. Withing during college is more about connecting over text and a screen than over toast and scrambled eggs.
Steve’s twentysomething daughter moved home for a while after college. Even though her bedroom is ten feet away, her teenage life is years ago. Any inclination Steve or Jen feels to default to old parent-child roles doesn’t work anymore. It can’t work anymore. Forging an ever-evolving relationship of support and challenge means respecting her space and schedule, clarifying each other’s expectations, sharing domestic responsibilities, and negotiating her financial commitments. All of which must be done mutually.
Some of you are in this same resourcer role with focuser young adults, but your kids are married and may have children of their own. You’re expanding your withing circle to grow with your child’s new family—in-laws and all.
In all three stages of teacher, guide, and resourcer parenting, as you think about the type of relationship you want with your maturing child, we hope you choose the on-ramp of withing. Even though the traffic jams of your child’s indecision or your own frustrations over the timing of their life and faith choices might slow you down, withing leads not only to the best destination but also to the most enjoyable road trip along the way.
Withing Insights
True withing requires us to align with the particular pace and progress of our own family, but we can lean on research and the experiences of other families to inform our first and next steps.
Warm Is the New Cool . . . and a Primary Faith Conduit
The fuel that powers your withing journey is your family’s closeness. As we studied worship services and ministry programs at Growing Young churches, we quickly realized that today’s teenagers and young adults aren’t necessarily attracted to fog machines, laser lights, and loud music. In many of our nation’s most effective congregations, it’s not about hype or being hip. Given the relational hunger of today’s young people, one senior pastor summarized in a simple phrase what we had seen in church after church: “Warm is the new cool.”
As another pastor confessed, “We can hire and buy cool, but we can’t hire—or fake—warmth.”
While this data emerged during our study of churches, the best literature confirms that family warmth is just as important, just as impossible to fake, and just as vital in a young person’s faith journey.
Warmth and withing go hand in hand. As your family gets warmer, you will get better at withing (and vice versa).
A recently completed 35-year longitudinal study of 3,500 family members from 358 three-generation families has convinced us that few attributes are more important in our own families than warmth.
The team conducting this massive research project, led by Vern L. Bengtson, described families as “warm” when the child perceives a close relationship with one or usually both parents. In looking at the relationship between family warmth and young people’s faith, Bengtson’s team concludes, “When children perceive their relationship with parents as close, affirming, and accepting, they are more likely to identify with their parents’ religious practices and beliefs, while relationships marked by coldness, ambivalence, or preoccupation are likely to result in religious differences.”
Across multiple measures of religiosity (including religious intensity and participation), and across multiple faith traditions ranging from Mormonism and Judaism to Christianity and atheism, there are greater parent-child faith similarities in families who maintain close relationships. It seems that when a child feels close to a parent, they are more likely to follow in the faith footsteps of that parent. When a child feels distant from a parent, they tend to walk away not only from that parent but also from what is important to the parent, including faith.
Of course, there are never any guarantees. Lots of warm families have kids who are not currently following Jesus. Faith may come much later, and along the way you will still have a good relationship because of warmth. The arcs of both our relationships and our faith formation are long, and withing can continue to grow over time.
It turns out that rearranging my morning schedule to make breakfast and connect with my kids over French toast isn’t just good for our relationship, it may be good for my kids’ faith too.
Adolescents and Young Adults Need Withing Dads
While both mothers and fathers are important in maintaining a balanced atmosphere of warmth and challenge, fathers or other male role models may be the more important barometer. In evangelical Protestant families, 46 percent of young adult children who feel “not close” to their fathers maintain the same faith as their parents. When young adult evangelicals feel “close” to their fathers, that rate jumps to 71 percent. That 25 percent difference in faith adoption towers over the 1 percent gain in faith adoption between evangelical children who feel “close” (versus “not close”) to their mothers.
Of course moms matter, and of course kids need more than just warmth from dads. But it’s worth paying attention to this finding. Too often we lay the responsibility for the emotional climate of the home on moms; this research challenges us to reconsider our assumptions. The bottom line is this: dads and moms, your kids need the unique relational warmth you each bring to your family. In families where a dad is not present, it’s all the more important to seek male role models who can build withing bonds with your learner, explorer, or focuser.
It’s Your Child’s Perception of Warmth That Counts, Not Yours
As is the case in most research on family relationships, when it comes to detecting warmth and withing in our family, our child’s radar is more definitive than our own. The same 35-year longitudinal study of families and faith highlighting warmth found that our child’s perceptions of closeness matter more than our own perceptions. Interestingly, children tend to rank the quality of their emotional bonds lower than their parents do. So not only do learners, explorers, and focusers tend to give their family warmth a lower grade, their grade also counts more than that of their parents.
What makes this extra challenging is that as our kids grow, their experiences—and perceptions—of our family warmth change. Our learner adolescents may have fond memories of feeling closer to us when they were in elementary school now that our conversations are punctuated with conflict over curfews and clothing choices. Our explorer and focuser young adults who have moved away from home might remember feeling more family warmth when we were all living in one space for family meals, spontaneous burrito runs, or long conversations in the car. Our kids’ experiences and perceptions are not static, which means we have to continually pay attention to—and ask our kids how they are feeling about—our family rhythms and relationships.
Empathy Helps Us Journey With, Not Judge
Currently in academic, philanthropic, and for-profit fields, there is a fresh awakening to the power of empathy. By empathy, we mean “feeling with” young people. As defined by research professor Brené Brown, empathy is “simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You’re not alone.’”
As we conducted interviews and visited worship services in Growing Young churches, we quickly noticed their commitment to empathize with learners, explorers, and focusers. In a world that patronizes young people, or greets them with judgmentalism cloaked in helpful suggestions (e.g., “Instead of being on social media all day, why don’t you actually go and talk with real friends?”), Growing Young churches recognize that for today’s young people, the starting line is earlier, the finish line is later, and the race in between is better when young people trek with supportive peers and adults.
“In our family, there is no conversation topic that is taboo. We talk about everything as a family. Topics that are gross or sometimes socially unacceptable—none of that is off the table.” —Coby, an Indiana dad of an explorer and a focuser
When we as parents can take that same supportive posture, our teenagers and young adults benefit. Parental empathy has been found to be associated not only with more harmonious family interactions, but also with a host of positive outcomes in our kids, including:
Getting Warmer with Age . . . and Effort
Our success in finding the right withing synergy between support and challenge is especially complicated in adolescence when we are our child’s teacher. During the high school season, we inherently take a more instructive posture that can feel like “nagging” to our learner kids. Our teaching-oriented responses to our teenagers’ missing homework, dented cars, and broken curfews are needed but can eat away at the relational glue between us.
Good news: as our kids age, our relationships with them typically improve. Three-quarters of parents report that their relationship with their kids improved after age 15. And about that many agree that there is less parent-child conflict once their kids are no longer teenagers.
“Well, I feel like we’re most connected when we insist on family time or create opportunities for family time. We tell them that we expect that you’ll be there and hope that you’ll be there, and usually they do show up.” —Keiko, a California mom of two explorers and one focuser
Largely thanks to digital technology, over 50 percent of emerging adults connect with their parents on a daily basis. Parents of young adults report that their kids seem to have greater appreciation for them than when they were teenagers, as well as a more nuanced view of them as complex people who face highs and lows just like they do. (Parents as people? How crazy is that!) As Jeffrey Arnett observed during over 300 in-depth interviews with 20- to 29-year-olds, “They begin to realize that their parents are neither the demigods they adored as children nor the clueless goofs they scorned as adolescents, but simply people who, like themselves, have a mix of qualities, merits as well as faults.”
Compared with high school, 18- to 23-year-olds report that they and their parents find it easier to talk, get stuck in fewer conflicts, and show each other greater mutual affection and understanding. Yet in the midst of these glowing relational report cards, some explorers resign themselves to mediocre or even failing family relationships. Often feeling emotionally or physically abandoned by one or more parents, many young adults are forced to confront the reality that the relationship is standing still or moving backward, and they have to salvage what they can from their parents while continuing to build life-giving relationships with those outside of their family.
Sibling Relationships Also Warm Up after High School
Typically some of the longest relationships they will ever have, our kids’ relationships with their brothers and sisters change significantly as they move out of the family home or apartment. While in some families moving out exacerbates the distance, it’s common for explorers’ and focusers’ relationships with their siblings and stepsiblings to grow warmer when relationships become more voluntary.
Your emerging adult’s growing relationship with their siblings is associated with higher levels of well-being, competence, life satisfaction, and self-esteem as well as lower rates of drug use, loneliness, and depression. Without the seeds of dissent that come from sharing a bathroom, a chore list, and the family car, your explorers and focusers are likely to share more intimate information with their siblings, enabling their relationship to blossom into a true friendship laced with authentic support and advice.
Since your child was in elementary school, you’ve probably rubbed shoulders with grandparents volunteering in the art room and picking up kids after school. Across ethnicities, now that your child is a learner, explorer, or focuser, you’re likely still seeing the tracks of grandparents crisscrossing this generation for a host of reasons.
First, grandparents are in overall better health than their predecessors.
Second, thanks to technology, grandparents have new and expanding ways to connect with their grandkids via text, video, and social media.
Third, grandparents are providing more financial assistance, not only through childhood gifts but also aiding with college tuition, wedding expenses, rent, or the purchase of a first home.
Fourth, with more dual-income parenting and an increase in single-parent households, grandparents are also providing more direct care. In some cases, adult children are unable to parent, making grandparents the primary caretakers for 2.5 million children.
In the midst of the wide variety of grandparents’ experiences and backgrounds, researchers suggest that your teenage and young adult children will have greater involvement with their grandparents (and sometimes even their great-grandparents) than any previous generation in the history of the US.
This expanded support translates into expanded influence. Paralleling the research on parental empathy described earlier in this chapter, emotional closeness with grandparents is linked with a host of positive outcomes for emerging adults, including lower levels of social isolation, stress, depression, and loneliness. Many of the benefits of a warm grandparent relationship are more evident for explorers and focusers from divorced or single-parent families, suggesting that extended family relationships are especially advantageous for emerging adults whose parents don’t live together.
When it comes to faith impact, grandparents tend to follow one of four possible paths:
Whether our kids spend time with biological grandparents or adopted or “functional” grandparents (meaning they are not genetically related to our family but play the same role), senior adults often hold untapped potential to grow with our family. Many senior adults are discovering that beyond merely nurturing their own family tree, they are able to branch out and care for families like yours.
Withing Ideas
As much as we love research, we love research even more when it can be translated into practical ideas and applied. We hope you pick one or two ideas from the following menu and adapt them as needed in order to maximize your family’s withing.
Time Talking: A Portal for Withing
One common withing habit in the moms and dads we interviewed was prioritizing time for conversations. In fact, time talking was ranked as the best way for parents to connect with their learners, explorers, and focusers.
Until each of my (Kara’s) kids turned 16, one of my withing habits was to maximize my conversation time in the car with them, especially when I only had one kid along for the drive. The Powell family is not alone in cherishing conversation time on the road. Of all daily routines that our Growing With parents mentioned, the habit most frequently mentioned was taking advantage of car time.
When each of my kids received their driver’s licenses, I had to find new ways to pursue conversation. In addition to the weekday breakfasts I described earlier, I came to prioritize weekend time with my kids. Usually on Thursday or Friday, I looked at our weekend schedule with an eye for possible one-on-one hangout and conversational time with my kids—whether it was having a leisurely Saturday lunch together, grabbing a coffee after church, or sitting on our couch and watching a game together on TV.
Instead of being discarded, some withing conversation habits have the potential to grow with your family as your learners, explorers, and focusers transition into new life stages. One Growing With family with daughters in high school valued Sunday night dinners at their favorite local Chinese restaurant. As each girl has moved out during college, the family still carves out time together every Sunday night, but now they connect over video instead of egg rolls.
One Texas dad who responded to our Growing With family interviews developed a creative strategy to prioritize conversation with his family members. He summarized, “As much as we would all love to sit down at dinner every night, my wife and three kids are too busy for that. So I have three dinners: one with my wife, one with my two elementary-aged kids, and one later when my teenager gets home. It’s not about the eating. It’s more about trying to find that time together when we are in the same space at the same time.”
As we learned in our interviews with Growing With families, there is no one-size-fits-all list of withing conversation habits. Each family needs to find their own best warm routines, some of which might use technology instead of—or in addition to—face-to-face discussions. For many families, withing in particular seasons may be less about all being in the same place and more about giving our best time.
What to Do If You Don’t Share Interests
In the midst of seeking to increase your family’s withing, many of you may wonder what to do if your learner, explorer, or focuser doesn’t seem to want to spend time with you.
When parents ask me (Kara) what to do when their relationship with their teenager or young adult is rocky, my favorite answer is to share the story of Nora, a mom who has creatively built a withing bridge with her son. The only time 17-year-old Sam leaves his room to interact with the family is when he’s hungry (which, luckily for Nora, is often). But when she tries to start up a conversation while Sam’s standing in front of the refrigerator or microwave, she’s greeted with one-syllable answers: “Fine,” “Nope,” or “Uh-uh.”
Longing for a deeper withing relationship, Nora has tried to connect with Sam. Every time she offers to take him out for a meal or to do something fun, he refuses. He would rather shut himself in his room and go online or play video games than be with her.
But Sam does love going to movies.
So Nora has become a student of film. She tracks movie release dates, visits movie websites, and has learned the fine nuances of various directors and actors.
The only time Sam says yes to Nora’s invitations to do something with her is when she asks Sam to a movie. The round-trip conversation is Nora’s best withing window into her son’s life and heart.
Because of this, Nora wisely tries to pick theaters that are far away so they have more time in the car together.
Nora doesn’t really like movies all that much, but she likes her son. As with many Growing With parents we interviewed, Nora is willing to leave the well-worn path of her own comfort and preferences to journey with her child.
Whether your child lives across the hall like Sam or lives a plane trip away, we recommend Nora’s strategy in sparking a withing relationship: start with your child’s personality and preferences. As one Connecticut mom of two explorers recommended, “Find out what really interests your kids and just do it, regardless of whether it interests you or not. If they want to play video games, go play video games with them. If they want to go for a bike ride, just do that, as opposed to thinking, ‘That’s not really what I want to do.’”
As is the case with one of Steve’s daughters, is your child an active explorer who would rather go for a hike than sit and watch movies with you? Or, as with my 18-year-old son, is food helpful in unlocking the door to withing in your relationship? Pay attention to your child’s predilections and intentionally create time for those shared activities. The older your child, the more you’re going to need to offer those activities as suggestions for how your family can spend time together, and then be open and willing to accept your child’s counterproposals.
Be a Library
One of the wise Growing With moms we met during our interviews painted a compelling vision for how she tries to grow with her maturing kids. She summarized, “As my kids turn 18, I tell them, ‘You are an adult, you can start making your own decisions. I am here as support. I am here for feedback. I am here for direction. I am here as your library. That is what I am here for, but I want you to start making the decisions on your own.’” As a result, her explorer and focuser children have sought her library-like advice in moments when they needed outside information and experience, like when they navigated a new tax situation or considered buying a home.
As you reflect on your teacher, guide, or resourcer role in your child’s current life stage, what support can they “check out” from you that prepares them for their next stage? For example, even though you are a teacher for your high schooler, your goal is to help them prepare for greater independence and your corresponding shift to a new role as their guide. The same holds true as you move from being a guide for your college-aged young adult to becoming a resourcer for your twentysomething.
“I ask them all the time, ‘How do I need to love you?’ And there is absolutely no judgment on however they answer. Whatever it is, I will do my best to come through. If I want to be close to them, they need to know that I am there for them in the way that they need.” —Sharla, the single parent of a learner and an explorer
When your growing kids ask you questions about life and faith that fall outside of your “card catalog,” how can you best point them to other resources that can help them? Our time with remarkable Growing With parents has convinced us of the power of good questions in preparing learners, explorers, and focusers for what lies ahead. Instead of offering your best advice to your teenager about taking public transportation to their doctor’s appointment or who to invite to prom, ask questions that enable them to figure it out themselves. Follow the example of Growing With parents who consistently replace “how to” and “I think” statements with “how would you” and “I wonder” questions. While it’s tempting to give your 20-year-old your stellar guidance about how to find a church near their college or military base, instead ask them questions like, “How would you go about making a first step?” or “I wonder what you can do next to explore some possibilities?”
When Withing Loses Momentum: Five Cooling Words to Avoid
If your child is like most, there is one five-word phrase they hate: “When I was your age . . .”
We parents use that expression to try to empathize with our kids, but given the cultural differences between today and when we were younger, those five words trigger warning signals in our kids. They think either we are trying too hard to relate (a cardinal sin few kids tolerate), or perhaps even worse, we are underestimating the differences between today and decades ago.
It’s not that our learners, explorers, and focusers don’t want us to talk about our past. Most young people want to hear their parents talk about the roller-coaster ride of their own adolescence and young adulthood. But we have to share those experiences in subtler ways, never prefacing them with “When I was your age . . .”
As our 19-year-old rents their first apartment, we look for indirect opportunities to volunteer mistakes we made with our own first landlord.
As our 21-year-old is preparing their résumé, we sneak into the conversation some glimmers of our own nervousness before past job interviews.
To help our single 29-year-old know we can relate to any angst they may feel about the likelihood of a future marriage, we circuitously share humorous (as well as not-so-humorous) memories about our own attempts to find—and impress—potential romantic interests.
Even though they don’t always show it, most of our kids are open to hearing about our past. Our task is to find the less obvious back door (or maybe even trapdoor) that opens up the right conversation at the right time.
Withing Gains Traction with These Three Warm Words
In my (Steve’s) home, Jen and I have mounted a simple sign that reminds all five of us of one of our family mottos: “Tell me more.” Jen and I chose this family mantra when our oldest was in high school and our youngest was in elementary school because in the midst of a society that is relentlessly self-focused, we want to fight for conversational momentum in our family.
Prior to adopting this motto, our typical conversation with our daughters often started with Jen or me asking, “How was your cross-country meet?”
We would respond, “Cool.”
That’s as far as we got. So we added a new follow-up question: “Oh yeah? Tell me more!”
I remember walking past one of my daughters who was sitting on the couch and looking distraught. We caught each other’s eyes and my daughter said, “I think I’m going to break up with my boyfriend.” In that moment, my first instinct as a dad was to cheer. My second instinct was to worry and be inclined to ask her, “What’s-wrong-what-did-he-do?” Instead, I managed to pause long enough for a “tell me more” moment and asked, “What’s up?” She shared that her anxiety wasn’t about her decision to break up but how to break up in a way that was kind, because she still valued his friendship. We talked about different approaches, and I had a chance to offer support in the way she really needed it. I still remember the hug she gave me that day and her whispered, “Thanks, Dad.” But if I had followed my initial impulse, I could have blown the opportunity.
No matter how close you feel to your kids, you are likely getting an edited version of their lives. They often present a (very!) abridged version of their “fine” day at school, their killer Saturday night out with friends, or their rising credit card debt. Remember that there’s so much more to the story, but fear of your lectures or your increased anxiety may prevent them from sharing. Strategically asking your child to “tell me more” might open up some conversational doors that are otherwise locked tight.
Warming Up Birthdays and Other Milestones
Fuel the fires of warmth in your family by leveraging upcoming special birthdays and other developmental landmarks. Your child’s 18th birthday may be one of their last at home. Take advantage of it. Capitalize on this birthday to look both backward and forward. Either with your own immediate family or with other adults who have significantly shaped your 18-year-old, share your favorite qualities about your child. Invite all family attending, as well as your child’s close friends, to write down memories, wishes, or funny stories. Sign a soccer ball, a musical score, or a sweatshirt.
Three years later, use your explorer’s 21st birthday as another catalyst to warm up your relationship. If your family drinks alcohol responsibly and occasionally, this may be a moment to take your child out and treat them to a first official drink together. At this cultural transitional moment, double down your withing commitment and say to them, “I see you growing up, and we can share this moment as peers.”
If drinking alcohol is not appropriate or contrasts with your religious tradition, develop an alternative that holds special appeal with your emerging adult. Book a night in a downtown hotel. Surprise them with a movie marathon at home. Spend all or part of a day taking your 21-year-old to their favorite coffeehouses, restaurants, and hangouts. Invite your explorer to bring along a few friends for part of your celebration as a bonus chance that helps you get to know those closest to them.
Beyond birthdays, make a special effort to celebrate your child’s graduation from school, military boot camp, or vocational training programs. One-on-one over coffee or perhaps during a dinner with family and close friends, ask questions like:
Warm families pair honoring what their young people have graduated from with anticipation for what they are graduating to. Try weaving prayer and reflection together as you invite your child to answer questions such as:
Graduation and other inevitable transitions provide a plethora of Growing With opportunities to follow this pattern of remembering the past and celebrating the future. Moving into a first apartment. Getting a first job. Getting a first “real” job. Getting a first real job they love. Finding a new church on their own. Getting engaged. Getting married. Having a baby. If and when your child turns these corners, look for warm moments to remind your young person that you are there for them no matter what, and that you have growing confidence they can handle what comes their way.
Withing on Their Terms: Asking Your Kids What Would Warm Up Your Relationship
To improve our family’s withing, one of my (Kara’s) favorite questions to ask each of my kids is, “If you could change anything about our relationship, what would it be?” It’s scary and sometimes a bit nerve-wracking to wait those few moments for their responses, but I have been glad every time I’ve asked the question. Even if I can’t—or won’t—change what they wish I would, I’m glad I know what they find annoying or even hurtful.
Even these last six months, my teenagers’ honest answers have prompted me to make some changes. “Mom, you give us too many chores to remember. When we forget to do something, you get frustrated with us and we don’t think that’s fair.” As a result, I bought a whiteboard and now write a separate list of family chores for each day or week. Problem solved!
“Mom, your texts are too long. You text like an old person.” Yes, I am someone who likes to express complete thoughts. And yes, no one ever accused me of being too concise. So that’s something I’m still working on.
“Mom, you ask too many questions.” This is a tough one for me to change. I’m inherently a curious person, and when it comes to my kids and their friends, my curiosity dial is turned to high. But I’m trying to edit my questions and raise only the ones that are most important.
Why? Even though I don’t believe longish texts or asking one too many questions is a big deal, my kids do. And while I think far more about our relationship than they do, their perception of our warmth matters far more than mine.
“There is a fine line between wanting to be their friend and still having to be their parent. I struggle with where that line is sometimes.” —Romero, a Nebraska dad of an explorer and a focuser
iWithing: Using Technology to Increase Your Family’s Warmth
One single mom we interviewed was pleasantly surprised by how frequently her college freshman daughter, Kanesha, called and texted her during the first few weeks of the fall semester. The fact that her daughter was initiating so much contact became a little less meaningful when Raquel realized that her daughter reached out to her whenever she was walking to class or the cafeteria. Kanesha didn’t want to seem like a loner, so she tried to project the image of having a busy social life. And who could Kanesha count on to pick up the phone or reply immediately to her texts? No one was more responsive than Mom!
Regardless of the motivation, many parents find that technology uploads warmth into their relationships. The Growing With parents we interviewed used texting and phone calls with their learners, explorers, and focusers as their primary technological withing strategies. Slightly behind these two channels was parents’ use of social media and video calls to foster warm relationships with their tech-savvy young people.
In restaurants or during long car drives, Growing With parents use word puzzles and game apps to strengthen family withing. Parents and kids alike send pictures or funny short videos to each other that help the family build up their warmth muscles.
While the majority of my (Kara’s) texts with my kids revolve around logistical needs or questions, I’ve found my kids more likely to affirm me via text than face-to-face. To be honest, sometimes the same is true when I text them. From simple “You’re the best” phrases to emojis that capture inside jokes, many Growing With parents find technology adds kindling to the warm fires burning in their families.
Clarifying Technology Expectations, Especially in the Learner Stage
Despite the fuel technology adds to the flames of family warmth, our interviews with exemplar parents confirm that families often grow closer when we limit our kids’ use of technology, especially before and throughout high school.
Some families create rules for their learners’ devices that prohibit all family members (including parents!) from using technology during dinner or in certain rooms of the house. With my (Kara’s) teenage kids, it works well to give them a few minutes to text their friends once we get in the car together. But then I usually ask them to put away their devices so we can talk with each other. Some families even find it helpful to outline these practices in a “technology contract” they develop with their child to ensure that the family’s devices strengthen withing instead of erode it.
Withing’s Perpetual Welcome Mat
Whether their home was a small urban apartment, a suburban two-story tract house, or a rural property with lots of acres to roam, the Growing With parents we interviewed wanted their kids and their kids’ friends to feel welcome. In the midst of often-tight family budgets, parents created warm spaces and offered appetizing snacks to make their home one of their kids’ main hangouts.
I (Kara) have found that my face-to-face time with my kids’ friends has evolved based on their life stage and my role in their life. When our kids have been teenagers, my husband and I have been quick to offer our home as a hangout hub. We keep brownie mix in the pantry and bought a firepit for our patio so the gang had a place to sit. Our kids and their friends like that we are usually inside the house and can’t hear their outside conversations. We like that even though we can’t hear them, thanks to our family room windows we can still see them.
Now that I (Steve) am more of a guide and resourcer to my college-aged and twentysomething daughters, I find that we spend more time hosting our daughters’ friends when they come to visit or need a ride to the airport. In addition, while we don’t have the consistent visits of the teenage years, we find that our girls’ friends are hungry for a home-cooked meal and are eager to talk about what they’ve been doing or what they’re planning to do next. Our role as guides is to take an interest in their life trajectories, listening to their hopes as well as disappointments, so we can learn about their journey and walk part of it with them. As an extra blessing, these discussions with friends often surface conversations with our daughters about their own hopes and disappointments. We are reminded that our kids aren’t the only ones on a journey. Their friends are too, and so are we.
Withing over Family Vacations
When my (Kara’s) younger brother got married right after college, I handwrote a list of 40 of my favorite memories with him. We had grown up together. Our bedrooms were next door to each other. Since we were only two grades apart, we had many of the same friends in our youth group. We had navigated our parents’ divorce and later remarriages (to great stepparents we quickly came to both love and like). We shared a bathroom. To my brother’s chagrin, we also shared his clothes.
To my surprise, despite our daily interactions, over half of my favorite memories were from the one or two weeks each year we were on family vacations. Whether our family was camping locally or had scraped together enough money to head out of state, the highlights of our relationship were playing cards late at night, making up songs during long car trips, and lots and lots of water fights (that still continue now that we have kids of our own).
My experience with my brother is not uncommon, and the family warmth stoked by vacations is not limited to siblings. In our interviews with parents who were growing with their children, one-fourth said they felt most connected to their learners, explorers, and focusers when they were on vacation.
So Dave and I try to look ahead and find the weekends and rare unoccupied week or two per year that enable the five of us to get away. As our kids have become teenagers and young adults, we have warmed up family vacations by letting them choose and plan more of what we do together. Usually that means fewer museums than Dave would wish and more movies than I would choose, but giving our kids greater ownership of our schedule increases their willingness to be gone from their friends and focus on our family.
As aging kids have less flexible jobs and school schedules that don’t align with those of their siblings, it is harder to prioritize family vacations. So like a lot of other Growing With families, we focus less on weeklong adventures and more on extended days enjoying Los Angeles, as well as overnights or weekends away. Even a 45-minute drive to a campground at the beach gives us the chance for long dinners and even longer card games that we wouldn’t have otherwise. Getting away and removing the distracting pull of local friends, work, and household tasks helps us do withing better.
Withing Siblings: Encouraging Brothers and Sisters to Build Friendships
I’m not proud of it, but when my (Steve’s) daughters were younger and embroiled in a massive sister fight, I stormed into their bedroom, sat them down, and told them, “Someday you’ll be older. Your mom and I won’t live forever, and all you’ll have for family is each other. So you’d better learn to support each other now.” While my statement was logically correct, evoking the image of their parents dying in order to get them to stop fighting was admittedly over the top. My girls still remember that moment and (thankfully) laugh about it.
As parents, we easily think about our own warm relationship with our kids while forgetting to help our kids develop warm relationships with each other and how those relationships change as our kids grow. When our kids were in elementary school, we acted as the relational catalysts for activities that included all siblings (e.g., dinner, ice cream, family outings, etc.). As our kids move into their more autonomous learner, explorer, and focuser stages, our role in fanning the flames for sibling relationships changes.
I (Kara) try to spark those blazes by removing obstacles that might keep our kids from spending time together. Like money. We live three blocks from a coffeehouse, and our kids know that if they ever want to walk there with one of their siblings, we will pay for them to get a small treat. So once or twice a month our kids take us up on this standing offer. But they know they have to focus on each other—not their phones—or we aren’t buying.
In my (Steve’s) own parenting evolution, as a teacher parent, I’ve encouraged my daughters to reach out to each other. As a guide parent, I’ve had to watch and learn from the ways they nurture their own relationships with each other. Some moments are more encouraging than others, but it’s fun to see them grow their own connections. And they seem to know deep down that they need each other.
Withing Grandparents
In my (Steve’s) face-to-face interviews with college students, I was surprised by the number who spoke warmly of their grandparents and feared losing them when they would someday pass away. There’s often a special tenderness between senior adults and young people, but just as with all withing connections, the relationships between grandparents and grandchildren need to be developed intentionally.
That’s why I’m so impressed with an idea from one of my mentors who has 13 grandchildren. He sends out a monthly email to his grandchildren called “Papa’s Monthly Roundup.” In the email, he asks his grandkids to share something they did, read, or experienced (their “doings”) and something they’re excited about, thinking about, or disappointed about (their “beings”). He reminds his grandkids that an answer like “Nothing much” is unacceptable, and that he’s expecting not just a one-sentence reply but a paragraph.
Stuart then compiles the monthly “doings” and “beings” and sends out the summary to all the grandkids. None of the parents (i.e., his kids and their spouses) are involved, and all the parents want to see the list—but he won’t give it to them, because it’s Papa’s Monthly Roundup! While Stuart says that some grandchildren are better at responding than others, all of them tell him, “Don’t stop doing it, Papa!”
That’s extraordinary warmth those teenagers and young adults will never forget . . . and may just repeat with their own grandkids. After all, every relationship can always get a little bit warmer.