It’s time to open the door to an area that is unique and key to ACT: your parenting values. As mentioned in chapter 1, traditional parenting classes or even self-help books often ask you to identify your goals. Often these goals are to make concrete changes in your teen’s behavior, making sure your teen cleans his bedroom every weekend or stopping him from screaming, to name a couple of examples. While establishing goals may look initially useful, an exclusive focus on them won’t improve the relationship with your highly sensitive teen, and these goals all fall short in helping you to keep the larger picture of your parenting role.
ACT takes parenting to a very different level by asking: Who do you want to be as a parent, and what’s really important to you? Do you remember the last time you asked yourself this question: What type of parent do I want to be? Parenting a teen with intense emotional vulnerabilities is challenging, and parents usually don’t have a chance to pause and figure out what really drives them as parents. Do you relate to that? Parenting becomes another task you perform as you go throughout the day, like piloting a ship on a vast ocean without a compass.
Parenting values are like the compass for the ship; they’re qualities that you want to be remembered for by your teen; they give you a sense of purpose and direction; they are chosen ways of being as a parent. And fundamentally, they make your parenting job worth living.
Before you start, let’s distinguish what parenting values are and what they are not, and let’s take a look at a few misconceptions about them.
This is a very important distinction, since most people frantically come up with a laundry list of actions to take, which may look good on paper but don’t necessarily add meaning, fulfillment, and direction to their lives. Goals are specific actions or behaviors you take to move toward your values, your chosen destination. For instance, being married is not a value but a goal toward becoming the partner you want to be in a relationship; getting pregnant is a goal or a step toward becoming a loving mother. There is a large difference between doing things “just because” and doing things because they matter to you.
Exercise: Distinguishing Values from Goals
Here is a mini exercise for you to distinguish values from goals. After reading the items on the list below, see if you can determine whether the item is a value or a goal:
The only three values in the list above are “being caring,” “being active,” and “teaching responsibility to your son.” Again, goals help you move toward your values, your destination.
Choosing your values has nothing to do with religious or spiritual beliefs, societal rules, or legal codes of conduct. Within ACT, your parenting values are chosen qualities of being what you want to stand up for as a parent and are personal only to you.
Values are not the same as wants, needs, and desires about your teen’s behavior. For example, I want my teen to be more appreciative of all the money I’m spending on him is clearly a wish. Although it’s understandable that parents want to feel appreciated for what they do for their teens, wishing a teen to behave in one way or another is not a value; it’s a wishful thought. Wanting to be treated by your teen in a certain way is a want.
Sometimes when initiating a conversation about values with the parents I work with, I hear them saying things like, “I really value feeling good about the relationship with my teen. That’s important to me.” The challenge with this statement is that values are not feelings and you don’t have control over how you feel in a given moment; feelings come and go like waves in the ocean. You, I, and everyone around us are wired to experience a full range of emotions—that’s our natural makeup—but experiencing one feeling versus another does not mean you’re living your values; you’re just feeling.
Now that you know what values are and are not, let’s figure out what really matters to you as a parent, shall we? Being clear about your parenting values will allow you to be clear about how to respond to parenting in general and, in particular, to those rocky moments when dealing with your highly sensitive teen. For instance, your parenting values will help you to decide whether to scream back at your teen when he’s yelling or to verbally appreciate his struggle; or whether you work longer hours for more money or you spend extra time with your teen even though you make less money.
Here is an exercise that will help you reflect on what is really important to you as a parent; make sure you have your parenting journal next to you, so you can jot down your responses after completing this exercise.
Exercise: Your Final Days on Earth
Read the directions below slowly and see what you come up with at the end of it.
Imagine you have lived your life the best you could up to this point. Some things went as you wanted them to go, some things were difficult, but here you are today. You have had to face ongoing difficulties with your dysregulated teen, and you have certainly done your best to manage this struggle. You have tried talking to him, talking to others, medication, therapy, you name it, but the outcome has remained the same. Things with your teen are how they are right now. You didn’t plan for it; it just happened. However, things take a new course for you in this moment, and you’re notified that you’re going to die. Read that last sentence again, and confirm what it says: You’re going to die within the next twenty-four hours. Suddenly you start breathing fast and realize you only have a short amount of time to be alive and prepare for your final departure. You are also invited to ask yourself this question: Given how things are with my teen right now, what type of parent do I want to be? You’re living your last day on earth. You’re running out of time. There is no turning back. This is it. Please reflect on this, and instead of rushing to answer, breathe, and look again inside for your response.
Write down what you came up with at the end of this exercise, and see if you can identify your parenting values. Values are usually stated with verbs because they show ongoing continuity for the parent you want to be: for example, a parenting value is being loving, or teaching responsibility.
After completing the exercise, Marcia stated that raising her teen has been a beautiful journey and also a scary one because she became a mother when she was twenty-one years old and didn’t know what it meant to raise a kid at that time. Over the years, she did her best when her teen’s emotional switch went on and off, sometimes daily, other times sporadically. Moving forward, Marcia wants to be an “accepting mother.”
Here is another exercise for you to identify your parenting values while reflecting on different moments in your parenting. This exercise was adapted from the Sweet Spot exercise (Wilson 2008). You’re advised to find a comfortable position for yourself to get the most out of it. I suggest you read the script below slowly, record it on your cell phone or another recording device, and then listen to it.
Exercise: Pure Moments of Purpose
Take out your parenting journal and write down the different reactions you had to the three images of those moments of experiencing purpose in your role as parent when he was a baby, a child, and then a teen. After writing, read your responses to each one of these images and see if you can identify any important quality of parenting that may have been revealed to you. Is there a parenting value there for you? Is there more than one parenting value that is important to you?
When Wanda completed this values exercise, she paused, and after a long breath, she said, “I forgot how important it is for me to be a trustworthy parent for my teen.”
Now that you have clarified your values, let’s move on to another important ACT skill: living your values. Remember that, like a compass, your chosen parenting values give you a sense of the direction you want to take as a parent. However, keep in mind that reading the compass and seeing the direction in which you want to go is not the same as moving in the direction of your parenting values. Choosing and living a parenting value are two different things. Let’s zoom in on this idea in the next section.
Choosing the parent you want to be is simply the beginning of your new journey as parent; it’s the beginning of a 180-degree shift. I was struck, years ago, by something Kelly Wilson (one of the ACT founders) said in a workshop I attended: “Talking about values without actions is like talking about beautiful words taken by the wind.” This is a great statement to introduce you to a fundamental ACT skill: values-based behaviors. Values-based behaviors in respect to parenting are exactly that: behaviors driven by your parenting values. Throughout this book, the terms values-based behaviors and values-based actions will be used interchangeably.
Values-based behaviors are very specific actions you take to live your parenting values; within ACT you are invited to live your values not with your thoughts, memories, sensations, or feelings but with your feet. Specific actions are actions that state exactly what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, how you’re going to do it, and where you’re going to do it. You can come up with specific values-driven behaviors by remembering to answer the what, when, how, and where questions.
Exercise: Your Parenting Values-Based Behaviors
Pull out your parenting journal, choose a single parenting value you want to work on, and then write down your answers to these questions:
Vivian, the mother of a sixteen-year-old daughter struggling with emotional sensitivity, found “being compassionate” extremely important, and she came up with the following responses: “I’m going to schedule one-on-one time with my daughter every weekend, ask her what she would like to do for an hour, and then listen intentionally to her while trying to put myself in her shoes.”
Now it’s quite likely that even after identifying your parenting values and after stating specific actions you want to take within the relationship with your teen, things may not go well. Most of the parents I work with, like anyone would in their shoes, encounter different types of difficulties when putting their parenting values into action. You’re not alone. As it happens to you, it happens to all of us. It’s called life.
Vivian noticed that when thinking about spending time with her daughter, Loretta, one-on-one, because of her value of connecting, her mind machine got activated and came up with thoughts like Loretta is so rejecting of me. She is very selfish and self-absorbed almost all the time. I tried before, and it didn’t go well.
Vivian’s situation is a natural one for almost every parent. No matter how hard you try, things don’t always go as you hope or wish. And please keep in mind that when things go wrong, it’s not about controlling how your teen responds, because you don’t have control of it, but it’s really about how you handle that rocky moment when things just went south with your vulnerable teen.
When moving toward your values, you may actually find yourself fused with old judgments, rules, past or future thoughts, or stories about yourself or your teen. You may also go through uncomfortable emotions that urge you to use old avoidance strategies, such as the surrenderer, externalizer, pusher, disconnector, or distracter. You may even go to the classic responses of questioning whether those thoughts, memories, urges, and feelings are accurate or not, real or not, or whether you’re right and your teen is wrong. Getting hooked on that mind noise, going back to those tricky emotion management strategies, or checking whether what you’re thinking or feeling is true or not will quite likely make things worse for you when dealing with your dysregulated teen. So let’s do an exercise to figure out those unique blocks you may encounter when taking steps toward your parenting values.
Exercise: What’s Stopping You?
Grab your parenting journal and see if you can identify the potential internal barriers that may show up for you when taking action toward your parenting values. Here is what Vivian came up with when completing this exercise:
Every time you identify a value and specific goals for it, make sure you also honestly check with yourself about those internal barriers that may get in your way.
Taking a values-based step is an invitation not only to identify the potential obstacles that may show up under your skin but also to pause and choose an ACT response you can rely on when dealing with your teen. Following with our example, Vivian came up with the following
At this point, like Vivian, you’re equipped with different ACT skills to handle the internal noise you go through when parenting your vulnerable teen and moving toward your parenting values.
However, putting in action your parenting values to be the best parent possible for your highly sensitive teen requires on extra ingredient: willingness.
Willingness is the core ingredient to stop the struggle with those sticky feelings, thoughts, sensations, or memories you go through when dealing with your dysregulated teen; the key is to actually have them without acting on them, notice them without pushing them, and name them without denying them. When putting your parenting values in action, willingness is asking yourself the question: Am I willing to have all types of uncomfortable thoughts, images, memories, feelings, urges, and sensations and still do what matters to me as parent in a given moment with my highly sensitive teen?
Making this shift may feel counterintuitive in the beginning, because naturally we try to protect ourselves from being in discomfort, and we try to fix our struggle as quickly as possible. The challenge here is that there is no fixing to do when you are having all types of internal experiences when parenting your vulnerable teen, because all the sticky internal noise will come and go, not only once but multiple times, as long as you’re moving toward your parenting values. There is only a choice for you to make every time this happens: ask yourself, Am I willing to have all this internal noise and still choose to do what matters to me as a parent? The choice is yours.
In this chapter, you have stepped back from your daily parenting life and identified important qualities you want to cultivate as a parent: your parenting values. You’ve distinguished them from goals, morals, wishes, and feelings and learned that you live your values with your feet and by taking specific actions. Naturally, when taking steps toward being the parent you want to be, there are going to be all types of internal barriers, such as getting fused with judgmental thoughts, rules, past and future thoughts, and stories or narratives about yourself or your teen, or natural impulses to avoid as much as you can uncomfortable emotions, such as disappointment, powerlessness, and frustration, to name a few. All that internal noise is going to be present, and at the end, it’s an invitation to willingly have it and still move toward what matters to you. Change is possible, if you’re willing to try.
In your journal, create a parenting-values action plan for the week that includes your values, actions, barriers, willingness, ACT skills to handle your barriers, and outcomes. Under “outcome,” you are invited to write down the result of engaging in a parenting values-based action. Doing this exercise on an ongoing basis will help you monitor the direction of your parenting journey so that you can check in with yourself daily whether you’re behaving as the parent you want to be.
Keep in mind that keeping track of the behavioral steps you will be taking while working with this book is not about engaging in perfect parenting behaviors but about choosing the type of parent you want to be from moment to moment, especially in moments of conflict with your teen.
You have chosen to read this book because you’re raising a teen with emotional vulnerability, and this is not an easy task. If you have read up to this point, you’re doing your best to make a difference, but even giving your best doesn’t necessarily mean you will get the ideal outcome. Parenting based on your values is not about being a perfect parent but rather about staying committed to striving to be the parent you want to be even when things get rocky. You’re going to need more skills than you’ve learned in this first part. Part 3 is going to teach you the extra skills you need to continue to move toward becoming the parent you want to be. The choice to continue learning new parenting skills is always yours. The choice to become the parent you want to be is always yours too.