Episode 147: Parenting A Tween With Special Guest Milo Anderson
Introduction
Welcome back to Live Free Creative podcast. I am your host Miranda Anderson. I have a special guest with me here today for Episode 147.
Milo: “Hello!”
That’s my son, Milo. My oldest. He is joining me on today’s episode because we’re talking all about parenting tweenagers. And this guy is between age.
How old are you, Milo?
Milo: I am in my second year of tween age. I am 12.
He is 12 years old as of the beginning of the month. So I thought that he would be a fun participant in the conversation. I actually have some tips that I’ve come up with just over the last couple years of getting into this new chapter of motherhood.
I thought it’d be fun for Milo to both listen in on the ideas that I have to share and give me his input as well as to share some thoughts that he has about being parented as a teenager.
So we are going to dive in and today’s Peaks of the Week is going to be by Milo.
Peaks Of The Week
Milo: I am doing five things that I’ve enjoyed.
1. SELENA
Milo: One of them is a Netflix show called Selena, which is about a Mexican-American singer and basically from childhood to sadly passing away in 1995.
Yeah. You’ve been watching that a lot. What do you like about it?
Milo: I don’t know. I love Selena’s personality when she’s like 20 years old. And it’s really fun to watch to see how she gained from making lights out of peach cans to winning five awards at some award show. She’s super talented, but also worked really hard.
Yeah. That’s awesome. What else?
2. MOUNTAIN DEW BAJA BLAST
Milo: Mountain Dew Baja Blast from Taco Bell.
That’s your new favorite drink, right?
Milo: That is my new favorite drink, yes. It is very Mountain Dew-y, very Mountain Dew-y.
It’s kind of a special treat, right?
Milo: Yeah.
It’s a special treat for when we go to Taco Bell, which is not super often. We try to keep the caffeine fairly low, especially for the kiddos, but tweenagers kinda want to walk that line.
3. SIMON AND OLIVE
Milo: Okay, number three is we just got our kittens, Simon and Olive. I’ve been really liked to use my phone, which is a Gab Wireless phone, to take videos and pictures of them when they’re doing their cutest stuff.
You have big dreams of being like a cat film YouTuber, right?
Milo: That would be so fun.
He’s been loving using his phone for that. And you love your gab phone just generally, right?
Milo: Yeah. Also, if you guys want to watch cool animal videos like that, we can put a link to Aaron’s Animals in the show notes.
Sounds good. We’ll link Gab phones and Aaron’s Animals perfect.
4. COVID VACCINE
Milo: Number four is there’s a new Pfizer vaccine for 12 to 15 year olds. And I got my first dose a couple of weeks ago.
How do you feel about that?
Milo: I feel good.
How did it affect you? How’d you feel after you got the vaccine?
Milo: When I got the vaccine, my arm was sore and I slept the rest of the day.
That wore you out a little bit?
Milo: Yeah. But it didn’t hurt at all. And it was just, it was a great experience.
A really good nurse must have given it to you if it didn’t hurt, right?
Milo: Yeah. Yeah. It was you. That was pretty cool.
5. EATING VEGETARIAN
Milo: My aunt is in town for the summer and she’s been vegetarian for like three years. So I thought I’ll be vegetarian for the time that she’s here. So now I’m being vegetarian for three months. So peak number five is being vegetarian.
How have you felt about it?
Milo: Honestly, I haven’t really felt a difference. I mean, there has been some things where like, I can’t eat cheeseburgers anymore, which is pretty sad. Or Chick-fil-A, which is also really sad. But it’s also really good because I know I’m being more healthy than I have been.
So you had a butternut squash panini the other day, instead of like a turkey panini. We don’t eat a ton of meat anyway, as a family. So like tonight we had shrimp tacos and you were good with that. It wasn’t like red meat.
And the other day where you might’ve normally had like a meat on your sandwich, you did cheese instead of a.
Milo: Yeah, basically just did a grilled cheese and substituting stuff. It’s not too tricky. Hasn’t been too bad. I actually like some of the, like, the Impossible Burger and stuff that we’ve tried before. Those were amazing. I don’t know how they do it.
Yeah. So, okay. Awesome. Give us a quick one, two, three, four, five of your picks of the week, and we’ll make sure everything that we can link is linked in the show notes:
Okay. Awesome. Peaks of the week. Yeah.
Main Topic: Parenting a Tween
This show is going to be about parenting a tween. And technically I think we looked it up the other day and a tween is considered ages 10 to 13. So emerging from true childhood into teenager-hood.
I think we hear a lot about teenagers. I was unprepared, I think a little bit, in my parenting for this precursor to the teen years, which is the tween years.
My nine-year-old turned into a ten-year-old, which all of a sudden was a little bit older, a little bit bolder, a little bit more independent.
Of course I am not at all a parenting expert. I do try to be a good parent. I’m trying to be an intentional parent. I’ve realized that this chapter of parenthood feels a little bit different. My expectations need to be adjusted.
The way that I approach parenting my tween feels a little different than how I have parented my younger kids. And so I thought that it’d be fun to share a little bit about it.
The first thing that I want to share is that parenting a tween is super fun. I think that’s something that I didn’t expect.
Do we have fun hanging out with each other?
Milo: I think we have so much fun because I think I understand bigger things that you think about, and we have the same sense of humor now.
Yeah. You turn into a little bit more of a friend and a sidekick. And like you said, you’re interested in bigger topics. Your development mentally is a little bit more advanced, so you can figure things out and look at things a little bit more critically.
And you in particular are really fun. As a child, as a kid, as a tween, you do have this sort of interest in lots of things, you’re interested in people, you’re interested in the world, you’re interested in the news, and that’s super fun.
So where a lot of parenting advice that I’ve heard is sort of like grit and survive the teen years, I have found that, so far, these last couple of years of parenting a tween that has been really, really fun.
Now, it is a new challenge. It is a different chapter. And I have tried to be really clear with myself about my own expectations, which are really helpful.
Helpful Books and Podcasts
1. The Self Driven Child
I wanted to share a couple quick books and or podcasts that have been particularly helpful for me in this last couple of years. So the first one I’ve talked about before it’s The Self-Driven Child, and I will make sure that it’s linked again in the show notes.
The show notes are always found at livefreecreative.co/podcast. And that gives you the directory of all of the shows and you can find the episode number.
The Self-Driven Child is a book geared for a little bit older teenagers, but the principles are really important for even this younger group, because it’s all about releasing that grip on what you want to happen and how you want your child to behave and allowing them to step more into some independence.
Milo, do you feel like you’ve had a little bit more independence in the last couple of years? A little bit more responsibility maybe, or that you have a little bit more choices?
Milo: Yeah, I think so. I feel like with each age comes more independence. I feel like I don’t need to spend every single second with you, even though I love to hang out with you. You kind of find some space to be yourself, to like, hang out with yourself or with friends or other things.
Yeah, totally.
2. The Life Coach School, Episode 270
The next resource that’s been really helpful for me is this podcast episode by Brooke Castillo, The Life Coach School. It is episode number 270. And I thought it was hilarious.
Brooke interviews her college senior, maybe, anyway, she interviews her son in either late high school or early college. So definitely a lot older than a tween. He’s a teenager when she interviews him. But the show is called Kids Will Do What They Want, or something like that.
It’s an interview with her son. And I thought it was really just eye-opening because it was helpful to shift my perspective from wanting to make my kids do what I want them to do, to recognizing that kids are going to do what they want in a lot of occasions.
Milo is starting to laugh about that. What do you think about that?
Milo: I think that that is true. There comes a time where you just don’t really care, and you kind of do what you want anyway.
So what is helpful? Like what would you tell a parent who wants their kids to do a certain thing, but the kid doesn’t want to do that certain thing?
Milo: I would say to make it fun for them. For the kid. So Just try to figure out what they like, and then maybe there could be like a reward or you could like play a game. Like you’re doing the thing, then you win by doing the thing.
Yeah. So make it fun. Don’t like make it hard.
Milo: Yeah. Like, instead of saying, uh, like clean up your room right now, uh, you say, clean up your room, and we can go and get ice cream after. That gives them something to look forward to. That gives motivation. And then they clean up the room because they want to, it becomes what they want to do because of some other motivation.
I like that idea. One of the things that they talk about in this show is that even if your kids tell you what you want to hear, they’re probably doing what they want to do.
Anyway, that is 100000% true. Tell me what you think about that.
Milo: I think that when you’re older and you did something wrong and your parents are asking you, did you do that? You don’t want them to know or you’ll get a punishment, then they’ll obviously lie. But if you make it so you won’t really get a punishment, just don’t lie. You’re not telling me this for you to get in trouble. You’re telling me this so I can help you.
Yeah, totally. That’s a good piece of advice for parents about open communication. I’m going to share a little bit more about that later. We’re on the same page because that’s one of the points that I have to talk about.
From this podcast episode from the Life Coach School, I think what was really helpful for me as a mom–and I listened to this a couple of years ago, so it was before I even had a tween–was the idea that I needed to adjust my expectation that my kids would do what I wanted them to do all the time.
Of course I wasn’t under the illusion that that was the way it was going to be. But I think we often believe that we have more control than we do. And just coming to a place of acceptance that like my kids are independent people. They’re going to make the choices they want to make, regardless of what I think.
It is a really helpful perspective to have to kind of detach from those outcomes. And that doesn’t mean that you like give up or that you think like, oh, my kids are going to do all terrible things, because they’re not, they’re going to do great things a lot of the time. You make good decisions and bad decisions.
And all of that is just part of parenting.
Milo: What tweens want to do, what they all want to do, their number one goal, is to make their parents happy. So if they do lie to you, then they think about it all night. All they want to do is tell you, but the fear of them getting in trouble overrides the happiness of telling that you lied. It’s tricky. It’s very interesting.
Miranda: Being a tween is kind of tricky.
3. Armchair Expert Podcast, Experts on Expert by Wendy Mogel
The third of these four pieces of resources that I wanted to share is a podcast from Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. Armchair Expert doesn’t have show numbers. They just have titles. So it’s an Experts on Expert show by Wendy Mogel, who is a child psychologist and a therapist.
This really awesome woman and the show was super entertaining. She interviews some parents and gives them some advice. And one of the pieces of advice that she shares, I’m going to talk about later in the show that just cracked me up, and I’ve talked about it with several of my friends and family members who also have teenagers.
4. The Child Whisperer
And the last resource that I wanted to share is the book, The Child Whisperer. This is a book that I read when my kids were much younger and the principles of understanding our kids’ motivations and their different personalities have been really interesting for me.
Take all of these with a grain of salt, as they may apply, and they may not apply. I thought they were interesting. I don’t try to bury myself in parenting books because I think so much of it is independence and really being intuitive about our own families.
However, it is nice to hear relatable stories and there’s never a right way to parent.
Milo: Yeah. You should never override yourself with parenting books. Because I think that if you’re a parent, you’ll always do what you need to do to, whatever you feel is right for your children.
Miranda: I like that. Thanks for that.
Okay. We are, are now going to each share three tips or three pieces of advice from our own perspectives about parenting a tween. So mine will be tips from a parent on parenting between, and Milo’s will be tips from a tween for parents of a tween.
Miranda’s Tip #1: Be Clear About Your Main Objective
So I’m going to start with my first one, which is to be clear about your main objective when parenting and my main objective is unconditional love. So I want to make sure that I go into all of my interactions every day over these next three to six years until Milo graduates and potentially is out on his own, with the thought that this relationship is ongoing.
My relationship with this amazing kid tween is something that persists beyond the tween and teen years. So I want to be clear that our relationship stays in first priority that I love unconditionally and that I can make these years harder or easier depending on how I react to them.
So I’m going to adjust my expectations. I’m going to be clear that the tween years are going to be full of mood swings. There’s going to be some lying. There’s going to be lots of experimenting. There’s going to be many times when there is stubbornness, when we butt heads, when there’s things going on that I don’t expect, or that I don’t really desire to be happening.
The number one rule is unconditional love. It’s an ongoing process, but I try to remind myself day after day, week after week, that I’m not going to be shocked by the changes. I’m not going to be shocked by what’s going on. I’m going to be open and accepting to whatever comes, whatever challenges we face, I’m going to expect it as totally normal tween behavior that things are a little bit of a roller coaster. And that’s okay.
I mentioned that podcast with Wendy Mogel and one of the pieces of the podcast that I’ve shared with friends and family over the last couple months is a story about these parents that are really concerned because their 11 year old has started telling stories.
She started lying to them and they express all of this concern. They say she never lied before. She’s lying to our faces. She’s telling us that she didn’t do things, but we saw her do them. And they’re so concerned.
But Wendy just starts laughing and she says, oh, 11 year olds are liars. They’re all little liars, every single 11 year old is a liar. They lie about everything.
And I thought this was so funny because something that I had been a little bit concerned about what turns out to be a totally normal, developmental, healthy behavior. And just having that awareness brings down my anxiety level of raises my patience and tolerance and helps me to have patience.
Milo: It is so funny because it is so true.
Miranda: So you acknowledge that you’re a little liar sometimes.
Milo: I 100% am guilty.
Miranda: I love it. And the straight from the mouth. There we have it. So my number one tip is to make sure that you’re clear about how you want to emerge from these tweenager years and that you maintain unconditional love.
Milo’s Tip #1: Take Time To Listen
Miranda: Milo what’s your first tip?
Milo: My first tip is take time to listen.
Miranda: So what does it look like to you for a parent to listen to you?
Milo: It’s very helpful. Because there’s just something about parents taking time out of their busy schedule to just you be the number one priority.
Miranda: Okay. And what types of things do you want to tell your parents when they’re listening to you?
Milo: Well, we’ll probably tell you just anything that’s going hard in our life because we feel comfortable talking to you because we know that you have such a busy schedule and we know that that makes it makes us feel, um, it makes us feel special.
It feels special because a lot of times that maybe we get ignored. Like if we’re trying to tell you something, but like you’re doing the dishes or on social media, it might seem like just like a small thing, but for tweens, that’s a huge thing; you really want to be paid attention to.
Miranda: Yeah, I think that’s good advice in general for everyone taking time to listen, making sure those relationships are important.
Milo: If you have like an interest in something and you’re like, look at my drawing. If you probably, if you don’t look at the drawing, the chances are the tween will take it as inspiration to keep drawing and get better, or they might just scrap the idea of drawing.
Miranda: So listening and paying attention kind of serves as like support and encouragement. I love that. Thank you.
Miranda’s Tip #2: Be A Safe Place
Number two from me from the parent is about being a safe place and similar to yours. I kind of echo your first one. I also wrote down making sure you have open conversation. So very important.
Yeah. Being a safe place to me means showing emotional control it. I feel like it’s even more important to be to parent yourself as a parent, when your kids get older. When they’re younger, they may be a little bit oblivious and think that all of the like yelling and stomping around and, and being super frustrated all the time that those are like normal parenting behaviors, but the older a kid gets, the more kind of wise they get to this, like you’re behaving like a child mom, or that like the way that you’re yelling or the way that you’re talking to me, that’s not very respectful.
And that in and of itself can be a little bit frustrating. But I think the idea of like making sure that you are mentoring. Emotional control and emotional stability, separating and detaching so that you can vibrate evenly. Holding space like that idea of holding space that Ralphie talked about in, I think it’s episode 86 about parenting on purpose.
This idea that you hold emotional space. And if you’re vibrating at a low peaceful frequency, that you can invite others into that peaceful frequency, but if you blow up and you engage and you get frustrated and annoyed and yell and, and. You know, shout and punish that your child will also maintain that high level of volatile frequency.
So the more, the more space that you can hold, the more peace that you can maintain, the easier it will be to maintain the relationship. We also have to, uh, think that parents make mistakes too. But, uh, the, I mean, and the biggest, uh, and twins will hold a grudge. Like, they might think if you are, if you’re not listening to me now, then I will listen to you when you’re talking, when you’re talking to me about like the pasta you made or something.
Yeah. I’m trying to show you my drawing and you’d rather look at something else. It makes the tween feel bad. Right? Like I don’t, I don’t like you won’t take time. You won’t spend time of your time for me. Yeah, exactly. So trying to be a safe place where your, your tweens can come, that they know that. Even if they’re making mistakes, even if they’re experimenting, even if they’re they’re angry or they’re frustrated that they can come back and that you won’t hold that against them.
That’s really, I think that’s really positive and really helpful then experience we had just a couple days ago with. My tween here was that he got angry about something at dinner. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he went to his room and we, Dave and I looked at each other and we just simply called out to him and said, Hey, Milo, we’d love to have you come back to the table whenever you’re ready.
We miss you. We let you know, we love you whenever you’re ready, come on back. And it probably took 10 or 15 minutes for you to calm down and, and kind of work through the, the frustration of whatever had happened. It was something small. You probably don’t. Do you remember? When this happened, um, was just a couple of days ago, but I don’t remember exactly what the, the instigator was of that.
Oh, I know what happened. What happened was I was trying to talk to you for like so long, but I think, I don’t know what was that I was talking to you, but you weren’t listening and then. Um, when you asked them, when Ellie asked you a question, you immediately went to him. So it just made me feel so bad because I was like, you’d rather talk to him.
That’s what you got. Yeah. I was probably talking to someone else or listening to something else and distracted. And then I just like the first thing that I noticed was he, when he asked a question, but I can see how that would be frustrating for you, but you left. And then we said, come back whenever you’re ready, we didn’t go.
How would you feel if we like ran into your room and said, come back to the table right now? Or it wouldn’t. It would just be me at the table with my hood on, for the rest of the dinner. But if you, but if you give a tween time to just like, just think, think they, and then you say like, we still love you.
There’s like, okay, this is fine. I’m hungry. Yeah, exactly. I’m hungry. I’m going to come back. So the second part of this one for me is to maintain the open conversation. And like my low mentioned, listen to your tween, right? We also in our family really believe strongly in, in speaking to our kids about.
Important and sometimes taboo topics. So we talk about bodies and body image. We talk about sex. We talk about drugs. We talk about politics, social justice. We talk about the rules and the questions we talk about. Video games about porn. Uh, nothing is off limits in our family for discussion. Everything in our home, in our safe place is open for discussion and is so important to be open to everything and like, If something happened with porn, um, don’t be like, no, don’t do it ever again.
You’d be like, I understand what happened. Can you tell me what happened? What did you see? What did you learn? And then tell them how’d you feel about it? Yeah, we, we try to do a lot of these open conversations, so that then when you have questions about things, you know, you can come talk to us about something your friend said or about something you heard on the news or, and then feel like you have it.
Like an open spirit space to talk about it and say, this is what happened. Can you tell me? Yeah. Think of your parents as a safe place. So yeah. My number two is to work really hard. At being a safe place and maintaining those open conversations. And I’ll try to find in a link in the show notes, a couple resources for this.
I know that there’s Kristin Hodson has a great program about speaking to your kids about sexuality and about pornography. Um, I know the whole first name basis podcast. Uh, Jasmine Bradshaw is all about amazing podcasts. Yeah. You love it. And we’ve listened to it with our kids. It’s all about, you know, teaching your kids about social justice.
And about racism and diversity. So the more you can include these types of conversations in your home, the more comfortable it is for everyone to be able to have questions and, and not feel like anything’s taboo or off limits.
Milo’s Tip #2: Be A Parent And A Friend
Miranda: Okay, Milo, what is your number 2?
Milo: My number 2 is be more of a friend, but still be a parent.
Miranda: Okay. So what does that mean?
Milo: That means if your kid has an interest, you take time from your time to do stuff special for their interests. A couple of days ago–on my birthday I got a scooter and I got interested into doing tricks. So then, uh, a couple of days ago, we went to the skate park and it made me feel special because I was like, my mom is listening.
Miranda: Yeah, like listening, like you said, your first one take time to listen. So when you listen, you kind of actually get to know your kid. So you know what they’re interested in and then making time to actually do some of those things with them.
Milo: Yeah, it’s kind of fun. I’m doing a rock band camp, which is basically you get to learn the basics of a bunch of instruments and how to write songs and how to play in a band. I’ve just been interested with music, basically my whole life. So it made me feel like really, it made me feel so amazing. And I was like, oh yes, I get to do this. This sounds so fun.
Miranda: Being a friend where you can like do things together that you support each other and like cool stuff that you want to learn and do.
Milo: Yeah. Like a a hundred percent. I feel, I feel like, uh, I talked to my friend maybe about, uh, stuff more than I do to my parents. Because I know that I don’t know. It’s just something about them not being in the family. It makes it more relatable, maybe talking to your friends.
Miranda: So you think that it’s helpful when parents can get a little bit more like that, be their friends. So then they’re like, oh, I’m used to this, talking to my friend, so we’ll talk to you because you’re my friend.
Milo: Yeah. But also you should still be a parent. Uh, that’s very important. You should be a friend, but being a parent, like that’s your job, you need to make sure that they go to sleep on time, get healthy meals for them, be a responsible parent, but be a good friend.
Miranda: So what do you think, like how do you–what if you don’t want to go to bed? How do I be a friend and a parent?
Milo: Well, you could say, first one to go–you could do like a first one to put their pajamas on wins or like a first one to go to bed wins.
Miranda: What if you’re like, I don’t care, I don’t want to go to bed.
Milo: That’s a hard one. But what usually happens is my dad comes in and he just, and he just lays on my bed and just talks to me. And then I’m just, and then it’s just. It’s just so fun to talk to him. And that just makes me go to bed, but I don’t know what exactly to do if they’re just like, I don’t care.
Miranda: Can you see how that’s kind of, that’s kind of the in-between right. That you want to be a parent and a friend. I think that, especially for tween ages, and just maybe throughout life, I would say that like parent is probably really important. That the primary role of a parent is like safety and health and like general guidelines of like making sure that you have the opportunity to sleep, that you have a safe place to be, that you, like you said, have options for healthy meals, but then also knowing that you get to make the choices that you want.
So the friend piece is like getting to know you so that you can set your kids up for success. So if you know that your kids have a hard time wanting to go to sleep, like trying to talk to them about it, and maybe this goes back to like, number one, like talk to them about it and make a plan together.
Milo: Maybe like work on it together where you do like a sheet, like if you go to bed, these things, we can go and like do something that has to do with their interests.
Miranda: Yeah. Yeah. So just be like adding a little bit of creativity, a little bit of fun to it, like helping kids understand why things are important.
So we had an example from today that you had a dentist appointment that you were not excited about. You really don’t like going to the dentist.
Milo: Oh my gosh. That’s the worst thing it’s like. Yeah. So, um, uh, okay. I’m going to be honest about this. I probably, I cried for five minutes. I did not want to go, but of course my parents, they got me to go and it was the easiest dentist appointment in my life.
Miranda: So, but one of the things that helped I think is that we didn’t just say, you have to go, we’re going right now. We said, okay. If you go, we’re doing this procedure with sealants is what he got on his teeth, where if you get these sealants on your teeth, it protects them. So you don’t get cavities in the future.
And so if you go right now, you know, in a half hour, it’s going to be maybe a little scary, but you get it done. But that means you’ll be protected in the future from having to go through even harder, sometimes painful dental procedures. So I think helping you understand the reason why something is important, helped you then make the decision because we didn’t like drag you out to the car and force you to go. You decided to go.
Milo: Yeah, you were, I know you were saying like, you’ll have to trust me. You will want to do this a lot more than getting a cavity filled with the drill. And that is the worst sound.
Miranda: Exactly. So being a friend and also being a parent.
Miranda’s Tip #3: Celebrate Exploring Their Identity
My number three is to celebrate your child, your tween, exploring their identity.
Adolescence is a huge developmental time when kids are figuring out who they are. I mean, I think that this extends for a lot of us into our adult years. Think of how transformative those first few years of middle school and high school were when you were just figuring out what you liked, what you didn’t like, who you wanted to be, how you felt around other people.
I really think it’s important. And I’ve been trying to focus on this in our relationship that I’m supportive of changes and experimentation with new styles, new ideas, some examples are with. New clothes and shoes. We shop for our kids twice a year. For their capsule wardrobes. And this last spring, summer Milo, before we went out for our, our shopping trip said, mom, I have kind of a new style that I want to try out.
And we looked at some pictures and some ideas and he was like, okay. I just like, I have some new ideas about the way that I want to dress in the style that I have. And rather than first asserting all of my own thoughts and ideas about it, I. Tried to ask Milo first, what do you like, what are you interested in?
What do you see in the store that you like? Because if I told him first, what I liked, what would happen, and I would just go with you, like, if you asked me, like, what’s your, do you like? And then I pick a shirt and then you say, I kind of liked this other one. That’d be like, okay, get the other one. Yeah.
Making sure that I’m leaving some space for him to choose. The things that he likes. We got some shoes that I was like, those are cool, but they’re not what I would choose. And they’re kind of expensive. And he was like, it’s cool. I like him. I gave him a budget. And so he knew he was making choices. You know, you got to decide how you spent the different amounts of money on different stores and different things.
And, um, another example is with music, Milo is super into beatboxing. He loves heavy beats. He loves rap music. He. Loves video editing. He’s interested in being a DJ. You heard he’s going to rock band camp this summer. This is all a little bit foreign to me. And I think it’s awesome. And I don’t know a lot about it.
And so I just am kind of learning along with him about some of the culture. That piece of music that he’s interested in and he, he’s always the DJ in the car. He’ll take over my phone and play songs on Spotify. And he’s always playing songs. You do a great job. Yeah. He chooses some awesome songs that we have a lot of fun listening to.
He made up a rap the other week. That was super fun that we actually came in and recorded in my recording studio that we’re in today. So be supportive in the different experimentation of identities, that’s happening with your, with your kids. Along with that? I think one way that we’ve tried to be supportive in development in, but while also maintaining guidelines as a parent is through safe phone use.
So we gave my lo a phone for his 11th birthday and. We gave, we decided to give him a gab wireless phone, which I’ve shared a little bit on Instagram. I may have mentioned it on the podcast before, but we love the concept of gap. It’s a, it’s a starter phone that looks just like an iPhone. So it’s a full screen.
It’s got, you know, like touch, screen buttons and everything, and it doesn’t have a browser. So there’s no apps. There’s no social media. It doesn’t have the internet on the phone, but has all the capabilities of GPS. You know, triangulation so that when Milo walks down to seven 11 to get a drink and walks home, I can track him if I need to, to, you know, make sure that he’s okay.
I, we, it has texting, it has unlimited texting and calling. You can do group texting. It has a photo, like a camera and a video recorder, which we, you mentioned, you love doing cat videos on, you also take a lot of pictures and then like use the on camera editing to like draw over them and kind of edit them really fun.
So fun. Yeah. So it’s been, it’s been great and we haven’t had to worry. About constant social media use about some of the dangers of being online all the time. It is something that he carries around with him. He can stay in touch with friends. He can stay in touch with us. It makes him a great date night babysitter, and we are able to more slowly enter the world of social media.
As he gets older rather than all at once when he’s young, the average, uh, use of, uh, like an iPhone for 10 to 12 year olds is seven and a half hours a day. Oh, that’s a lot. I know. Yeah. That’s probably smart that you don’t have that. You’re not using your phone though. Probably. Yeah. I’d probably use it only like two hours a day.
And I’ll yeah. Calling, texting, being able to like take videos and photos on it and still have a cool phone that you have a number that people can get in touch with you. And. It’s not. Too much, too soon. Right. Um, another thing that I want to say with this last tip is I think that it’s really important as a parent to celebrate growing, like physical, growing, eating, more, getting a strong, you know, bigger body.
Our kids are, I mean, bodies are changing and adolescents Milo’s in bigger clothes that, you know, every year we’re like, oh my gosh, the clothes are getting bigger. His shoes we went to what’s it called the kids. We went to the Footlocker. Yeah. We went to a kid’s food locker and we went to the kid’s food locker, ate at impossible burger and then went to adult.
But like, yeah. So he said, just keep going. We went to kids, foot locker and asked for the shoes you wanted and they didn’t have them. Right. Why? Okay. So we went to a. So we went to kids Footlocker and there were like, there, there was a shoe, there were shoes that I like, like a bunch of shoes that I liked.
Um, And we like, okay. Yeah. He was like a six the last time. So like, well get them into like a size six and a half. So I got up and it didn’t fit at all. Okay. We’ll go up to seven, seven didn’t work. We went up to a eight. So then we went cause that’s like the limit for kids foot locker. So we went to adult foot locker and we got, we got an eight.
Still didn’t fit. So we went to an eight and a half and then finally I found the shoes. Yeah. So that was like, oh, not only do you have bigger feet, but we jumped into adult shoes at an adult shoe store in one of the clothing stores. We were like, oh, kids clothes. Like they don’t go up to your size anymore.
I think it’s just fun and important to celebrate the changes, the growing, the friends, like having friends over, being excited about that, about cultivating their social group and being supportive of this new phase of life. It’s a challenging time to, you know, they’re trying to figure stuff out. I have written down create space for a new and changing human.
You may think that you know your kid because you’ve raised him to 10, 11, 12, What if that person is going to be different now than you thought they were, what if your expectation for who they are? Isn’t the way they feel that they are. And although it may be controversial, I think that it’s really important to be open to their own identity, whether that is gender identity, whether it’s sexual orientation that you didn’t expect being open and listening as your children discover.
Their true selves, as they’re learning about themselves and being open to who they are rather than who you think they should be. B that’s very important.
Milo’s Tip #3: Consider A Counselor
Miranda: Okay. So let’s go on to your final piece of advice.
Milo: My final piece of advice is consider a counselor.
Miranda: Consider a counselor. Why do you think that talking to someone else outside of a parent could be helpful?
Milo: It’s kind of like having a friend, someone that’s not in the family that you feel like you can talk to, and that can also help. Cause chances are your friend isn’t a licensed therapist that can talk to you about your feelings.
Miranda: Yeah, it’s kind of nice to have a third party for accountability to help navigate different things in the relationship. We have been going to a counselor, not necessarily to navigate our relationship, but just to help our family and Milo, as he’s an adolescent, have the tools that he might need, like emotional and developmental tools, to handle being a teenager.
Next year, you’re going to go into middle school for the first time. And what are some of the things, are you worried about anything or anything that you’re kind of nervous about?
Milo: Yes. A lot of things actually.
Miranda: Like what?
Milo: Uh, like I’m not going to have one teacher, like six teachers. Luckily it’s going to be the same amount of time. There’s going to be an hour difference between when I went to elementary school and when I went to middle school. So we’ll have to wake up earlier. Which is hard for me to do.
I’ll have to go to different classes. I’ll have a lot of assignments to organize. Like it won’t just be one homework. It’ll be like six homeworks, which all add up to the amount of homework that you got in elementary school. Maybe each class will be like, I mean, it’s gonna be a lot more work.
Miranda: Yeah. It might be a little harder. So having a counselor that we’ve been able to chat with about some of the changes and about, really about like getting the tools that we need to be able to navigate some of the changes has been really helpful, right?
Milo: That’s been helpful. Yeah.
Miranda: So it may not be right for every single family, but definitely if you are a parent who is feeling challenged by parenting your tween, or if you recognize that your tween is feeling very challenged by the changes of being a tween, then considering talking to a counselor, talking to a therapist, getting some outside help is really important.
And there’s no shame in that. You don’t have to feel bad about that, right?
Milo: Yeah. It helps you feel better as a family.
Miranda: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a great one.
Recap
Okay. So we’re quickly going to recap our one, two, three.
So Milo, go ahead. What are your one, two, three, just like one sentence.
- Take time to listen.
- Be more of a friend, but still be a parent.
- Consider a counselor.
I love it. And mine are:
- Remember the main objective is to love unconditionally.
- Be a safe place and maintain open lines of conversation, even on taboo topics.
- Help your tween celebrate exploring their own unique identity.
I think we did an okay job here today. Hopefully those of you who are listening, who have tweens right now feel like you learned something new or that you were inspired by something that we shared today.
If you don’t yet have a tween, if you don’t yet have any kids or you have little kids. Know that it’s really fun.
Is it fun being a tween?
Milo: It’s really fun to feel like you’re getting older. Growing up, getting to learn lots of new things and yes, it’s always the best to know earlier.
Miranda: Yeah. It’s fun to know that the years ahead are great that this next chapter, it’s not like a drag. It’s not the hardest thing ever. Yes, there are challenges and there are such amazing pieces about gaining this new relationship.
Also, if your kids are all grown up and gone and you are an empty nester, I think that all of these tips really apply to any relationship, listening to someone, being a friend, loving unconditionally, having open conversations, celebrating other people’s identities, and employing help from a third party as needed in relationships and friendships.
I think that that’s helpful. All of these tips work for everything, but especially for this interesting time of having a tweenager.
Conclusion
Okay. Any final thoughts, bud? Um, do you have any beatboxing or raps for us really is a little bit,
ah, okay. Yoga. If I be boxing with guitar rapping. Sure. Okay.
We are here to tell you about life,
How to have a tween and have a good life.
I just said life twice, which is why I’m not good at rhymes.
Milo is the coolest tween around.
I sometimes feel like a clown.
It’s cool. We’re just laughing now. No. Okay. There you go.
