Checking in with our children and helping them understand who they are—what their core values and beliefs are—is difficult to do when we haven’t figured out what our own core values and beliefs are. All too often I see parents who are distraught over a choice their child has made—quitting a sport, joining an activity, ending a friendship—without reflecting on why they are attached to their child’s choice.
When my eldest child tried—and was indifferent toward—basketball, I was sad. I knew he was bound to be pretty tall—over six feet—and basketball has a long legacy in my family. I tried for a bit to ignite the passion for basketball in him—we played at open gym, would shoot around outside when we got the chance, and talked about the fundamentals of the game. He engaged in all those activities with gusto, and he was pretty good, too! But when I signed him up for a basketball camp or asked if he wanted to join the rec team, the most enthusiasm I got was an indifferent shrug. He would do it if I made him, but he certainly wasn’t excited about it. When I finally gave in and asked what made him like basketball but not want to do basketball, he said, “The people. The other boys on the team aren’t very kind and make me feel bad when I make mistakes. I don’t want to be with them.”
Well, crud. Now I was at a crossroads. I didn’t want him to internalize that you should quit what you enjoy just because other people suck, but I also didn’t want him to learn that Mom was going to force him to be around people he didn’t like just because he kind of liked basketball (and Mom really liked basketball). We had a heart-to-heart, and as we talked, I had to keep this one question central in my mind: What is right for him? He talked to me about what he liked: He liked dribbling with Mom. He liked shooting with Mom. He liked open gym … with Mom. When it came to activities he enjoyed without Mom, he said he loved swimming, theater, and playing D&D with his friends. He had a clear head on what he valued, and I needed to honor that he could make decisions for himself about his free time. I needed to realize that my attachment to basketball was rooted in my own passion for the sport, and in some fantasy I had about cheering for him in a “traditional” sport. I hadn’t recognized that I could cheer for him in countless other arenas that would make him so much happier than basketball ever could. I was a little bit sad that I might not have anyone to cheer for from the bleachers in a packed gymnasium, but I was significantly more proud that I had a child who was not only aware of what he wanted, but willing to advocate for himself to the most powerful adult he knew at the time—his mom.
As he’s grown, we’ve continued touching base about how his core values intersect with his physical and developmental needs. He hasn’t been allowed to ditch all sports, even though he doesn’t love to compete, because it’s good for his development to remain physically active and learn how to operate in a team environment. But rather than a sport like basketball, he has chosen the swim team as his “I’m going to learn about being a high school athlete” home. And as the results of his other decisions—both good and bad—play out, he can use the discussions we’ve had about his values and needs as an ever-evolving manual to help him become the adult he wants to be.
Checking in and making these conversations intentional has also helped me understand him so much better than I would have otherwise. I know the answers to questions like “What makes you happy?” I could list what he would say if I asked him “How do you like to spend your time?” He is prepped and ready to answer when I ask “What makes you feel appreciated? What makes you feel safe? When do you feel the best? What makes you sad? What do you do when you’re feeling scared?” Though there have been times when he has made choices in direct contrast to his core values—everyone makes mistakes—when the consequences of those choices came back around, ultimately, it was those values and his sense of safety in coming to me for help that navigated him back to the course he wanted for himself.
My hope for my children—and for all children—is that as they leave childhood and enter the adult world they have a sense of what matters to them, and a willingness to pause and check in with themselves as they grow. Because those skills will be paramount in maintaining healthy, happy relationships with their friends, coworkers, family, partners, and, ultimately, their own children.
What Makes a Good Relationship? (ages 11+)
The world is full of people—gross, right? Just all these people with their own dreams and goals and wants and needs and agendas and flaws. I mean, it makes sense that we have all of those things, but when you zoom out and think about how there are literally eight billion other people on this planet who are just like that? It’s almost too much to consider. Because that means that beyond knowing themselves, our children need interpersonal skills. They need to be able to not only assert their core values but understand and react to other people’s core values. Thankfully, we can teach our kids these interpersonal skills, and also impress upon them how valuable these skills are in a partner.
Research on relationships is varied in type and scope, but most researchers, clinicians, and coaches agree on some fundamental building blocks of a healthy relationship. These blocks include communication, respect, trust, safety, honesty, responsibility, boundaries, and compatibility. As you read that list, you probably nodded to yourself and thought, Heck yes, that’s exactly my list. Same! I agree—those are all essential concepts to have in a healthy relationship. Now … define them.
I’ll wait.
This is where things get sticky. It might be easy enough to define safety—your partner doesn’t hurt you. But safety also means that in addition to not hurting your body, they don’t hurt you emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually. Your all of you has to be safe. Now we’re edging from a definition into a conversation—of course. It’s always a conversation with these dang kids.
Here are some examples of how you can start a conversation with your child about each of the aforementioned aspects of a healthy relationship. None of these scripts are exhaustive—as you know, these conversations are going to be ongoing—but they are a reasonable place to start.
Communication: “In a relationship, communication means that no one is expected to guess what the other person is thinking, feeling, or needing. The people in the relationship talk about what they expect—how much they will talk to each other, how much they will see each other, who will take care of shared responsibilities, and a lot of other things. Communication also means that if a mistake is made or someone doesn’t hold up their end of the relationship, the people in the relationship will talk about it, not hold it in and let it bubble up later.”
Respect: “A very basic definition of respect is that a person cares about the rights, feelings, desires, and core aspects of another person. You can also respect a person based on how they do their job or participate in activities. In a relationship, respect means that you care about another person’s rights, feelings, desires, and core values and think about how your actions, thoughts, and values might impact them.”
Trust: “When you trust someone, you know in your heart and in your mind that they care about you—that they will behave in a way that will not hurt you. You know that they will be reliable, tell you the truth, and be there for you within their own boundaries.”
Safety: “A relationship needs to be safe, and that doesn’t just mean that no one hurts each other’s body. Obviously, I don’t want you to be with someone who hits, pinches, slaps, punches, kicks, or does anything else that causes you physical harm. I also don’t want you to be in a relationship with someone who hurts your mind—this is someone who makes you question if you’re right all the time or makes you feel like you don’t understand how the world works. They might make you think that you’re always wrong or that people who do love you actually might not love you. You also need to have a relationship that is emotionally safe—you should not have to guess or wonder how your partner feels about you. You should be responsible for your actions and not be hurtful to your partner, and you should not be responsible for your partner’s emotions or actions. And you need someone who is safe for you spiritually—someone who respects your spiritual beliefs and doesn’t expect you to change in order to be with them.”
Honesty: “We’ve talked a lot about what honesty means, right? How it means telling the truth when you’re asked directly, but it also means making choices that are honest even if you’re not going to be questioned about them. Remember when we went to the store and the clerk forgot to scan the soda under the cart? What did we do? We went back in and we paid for it—that’s honesty, and it’s also integrity. Honesty in a relationship means that the partners tell each other important things, silly things, interesting things, and even things that might be sad or might contribute to the other person having strong emotions, like bad news, or that one person might have changed how they feel about the other. Honesty isn’t always easy, but it is almost always easier than dishonesty, especially in relationships.”
Responsibility: “Responsibility in relationships is almost exactly like what responsibility is in our family—it’s being willing to say ‘I did that’ or ‘I didn’t do that’ or ‘I should have done that.’ It’s knowing what you need to do to maintain the relationship, and being willing to ask if you don’t know. It’s also important to be responsible in other parts of your life, because if you are irresponsible in one part of your life, like work, it can make being responsible in your relationship harder.”
Boundaries: “Boundaries in a relationship get portrayed incorrectly a lot. People sometimes think that boundaries are about what each person in the relationship can or can’t do—‘My girlfriend can’t wear those kinds of clothes’ or ‘My boyfriend can’t talk to other girls—but those are not boundaries. Those kinds of statements are controlling behavior, and they are not part of a healthy relationship. Instead, boundaries are about what an individual person is comfortable with and will accept in a relationship—for example, a boundary might be ‘I am not comfortable with a partner who wants to hide that we are dating, so if you are unwilling to acknowledge that we are partners, I can’t be with you right now.’ The person is saying, ‘This is what I can accept, and if it doesn’t happen, then I will make this change.’ If the partner wants to change their behavior, they can, but they do not have to. People can have boundaries about lots of things, but many healthy relationships have boundaries about how disagreements get handled, personal space, identity, and expectations or goals. For example, your dad and I agree that we will not yell at each other even if we are really mad. This is because neither of us will listen to people yelling at us. We made it a rule in our relationship that we talk, not yell. And if we feel like we cannot talk right then, we tell the other person so and take a five-minute break.”
Compatibility: “Most of the other parts of what make a good relationship feel really serious, right? They feel like big ideas that take practice and that people can screw up—and you’re right. They’re all pretty in-depth, and yes, people do screw them up, even when they have a lot of practice. You’ll get better as you get bigger. But the cool thing is that the last feature of a healthy relationship is actually pretty easy—it’s compatibility! Compatibility is how people in relationships get along. Do they have similar goals? Do they care about what the other person likes? For me and your dad, one of the things that made us really compatible was that we both loved to laugh, but we also loved to talk about big ideas. We used to read interesting articles and scientific literature and spend lots of time talking about what we learned. We were compatible intellectually. We also shared a similar approach to emotions and communication—how we talked to each other about our feelings worked well. We had our own identities—we both had interests that the other person didn’t share—but since we both valued learning, we were able to hear about the thing we weren’t necessarily invested in ourselves because we invested in learning.”
What Do You Need from Your Relationship? (ages 11+)
So now that we’ve set up the expectations about what a healthy relationship looks like, it’s time for our kiddos to reflect on what they themselves need, rather than what they think they’re supposed to need. How many of us can think back on an early relationship where we were less than in tune with our own needs, and it ended up being at best unsatisfactory, or at worst harmful? From my own early dating experiences, I can remember being shamed for “calling too much,” being told I was a “prude” for not wanting to try things sexually, and thinking that I needed to keep my “nerdy” thoughts to myself because they were boring or embarrassing. As I got older, I realized that most of those feelings came from the fact that I was not prioritizing or even really thinking about what I needed. The only “need” I had identified in the relationship was for it to exist—for someone to want me.
I encourage my children and the children I work with to think about communication, space, time, affection, commitment, and any other attributes of a relationship that they can identify: “How much do you think a happy couple talks to each other? How much time do you think a teenager should spend talking to their partner instead of doing other activities? How do you feel about holding hands in public? What about hugging? How about kissing? Would you stop being friends with Sam if your new partner said that they weren’t comfortable with you being friends with them? How would you respond to that? We talk when you’re mad—how do you think you and a partner should handle conflict?” I discussed earlier that children learn a lot from what is modeled to them, both in their lives and in media, and that particularly in the case of media, the modeling isn’t spectacular. As a caregiver, you have the power to encourage your kids to challenge the narratives they’ve been shown. If kids can spend time reflecting on these ideas and discover where their personal values and morals turn into preferences and boundaries, they can spend time practicing how to communicate these boundaries to their future partners. As with everything, these conversations will evolve as your child grows—a twelve-year-old is unlikely to have the same attitude about public displays of affection as a seventeen-year-old. And as these conversations evolve, so will your child’s understanding of their boundaries and ability to maintain them.
Hide Your Flaws Until After the Wedding! (ages 11+)
I’m sure several of you reading this book read the last passage and thought, Oh jeez, I absolutely had crappy early relationships like that—I don’t even recognize the person I was back then. So many of us Gen X and millennial parents were fed narratives that included the Dramatic Metamorphosis: Some perfectly fine character would have a makeover—of their appearance, their personality, their self-expression—and suddenly, they were “hot” and “datable.” They also made it seem like the primary goal of high school should be graduating … and getting laid. The messaging was clear: There is a right way to be attractive, and the result of that attractiveness is to get some. The truth is that most teens in the US wait until seventeen to have sex, and that only about half of teenagers have had sex during their high school years, which flies in the face of what media told us was the norm. Thankfully, many of us figured out as we got older that we did not need to change ourselves to be with someone. This was great, but we also figured out that we might never find our someone.
This can be really difficult for young people to stomach. We have biological drives toward partnership—we want to find someone to be with, even if it’s not forever. For those of us who are … unconventional … in our presentation, whether that’s being an incredibly tall woman or having an eclectic sense of style (or both … hi, yes, I’m describing myself), it can be so hard to watch your more conventional peers partner up and at least get to practice being someone’s love interest. This feeling of envy can become jealousy and resentment—people who feel like their singleness is involuntary and that they are somehow “owed” the attention of the people they are attracted to. (We definitely want to nip those feelings in the bud, because they are not healthy—no one owes you attention.) But the feeling of envy can swing another direction and become the feeling that if you just changed these few things about yourself, you’d be loveable. Just get skinnier. Just wear the right clothes. Just agree to have sex.
Danger zone. Pump the brakes, kiddo. It is so hard to become content with being single, I won’t deny it. It took me a long time. Eventually, though, I came to understand the truth: that many of us may not find our people until we’re older, especially if we’re coming from somewhere with a limited pool of potential partners. But staying true to ourselves—our interests, our goals, and our values—is so much more satisfying than compromising and settling for someone who doesn’t actually know us. And even if we never find our forever partner—if we don’t happen to cross paths—being true to ourselves means we can surround ourselves with people who appreciate us for who we are. Friends who value us for our communication, respect, trust, safety, honesty, responsibility, and boundaries, and who are compatible with the real us.
How Do I Know If I Like Someone? (ages 11+)
Having this talk with a kid can feel a bit like trying to walk through a hall of mirrors wearing those anti-drunk-driving goggles—it’s disorienting and complicated and you might end up smashing your face. The honest truth is that our kids’ preferences grow and change along with our kids, so rather than helping them identify exactly what they’re looking for in a person and saying “you will feel like this when you have a crush on someone,” we should be letting them know that understanding their own attraction depends on knowing themselves. For some people, initial attraction is almost solely based on appearance: “That man is literally the hottest human being I’ve ever seen, I’m going to ask him out.” Some folks do not feel initial attraction until they get to know someone: “It’s so interesting, she got more and more attractive the more time we spent together.” Some people never really find themselves attracted to anyone: “I like to hang out, but the idea of making out with any of them is just … It just seems like there are better things to do than mushing our faces together.” As caregivers, we must allow our kids space to figure out how they make decisions about relationships, and support them as they make those decisions, even if those decisions lead to tears and the realization that they need to do something different next time.
“Dating when you’re a young person is mostly about figuring out what you might want in a partner, and what you absolutely can’t work with. So long as you are being true to yourself, respecting boundaries, and being safe, I think dating can be a great thing. You don’t have to date—you can choose to focus on other things—but you can date if you want.”
“Just … ignore all the shows that paint dating as some sort of fraught, melodramatic, super-serious thing when you’re a teenager. It doesn’t have to look like that—most of that drama is from people not communicating well at all. If you and the person you’re dating are talking about boundaries and expectations, you won’t avoid all conflict, but it’s not going to look like an episode of Euphoria.”
“Some media portrays high school relationships as really dramatic—all cheating and two-timing and dumping people in dramatic fashion. They do not have to be that way—it’s not a necessary or expected part of having a relationship, it’s literally just to make ‘interesting’ watching. Please remember when you are dating people that they are people, not characters in media, and that if they are leaning into more drama than you are comfortable with, you can set boundaries and protect your heart.”
Playing Dress Up (ages 11+)
I have been over six feet tall (193 centimeters, to be exact) since I was eleven years old. I went from looking very much like a little girl to looking almost like an adult in the span of a summer. This has been true for many of the children in my family—they grow tall and physically mature very quickly, while their preteen brains try valiantly to keep up. This genetic trait is part of what has shaped my opinion on how I talk to my kids about clothing and appearance.
When kids are small, clothes are almost entirely practical—they are used for self-expression, yes, but they are mostly chosen by how functional they are for play. I don’t do short shorts, because it’s impossible to go down a slide effectively when your legs are sticking to it; I don’t do tank tops or crop tops because they mean more surface area to which I have to apply sunscreen; I don’t do dry-clean-only clothes because there’s no way I’m taking stuff to the cleaners. But as my kids have gotten older and their opinions on clothes have gotten louder, I’ve had to reflect on what I will buy and allow my children to wear, and where I’ll draw the line.
I wish that all children could wear whatever they wanted and not have any unsolicited attention paid to them. In my dream world, dating, relationships, and courting would be driven much more by verbal communication and much less by how we present ourselves. But that’s not the world we live in—we live in a world where, good or bad, what we wear sends messages. I know that if I’m looking to bolster my self-esteem a bit, I can post a “thirst trap” online and be told I’m pretty. I know that if I want to avoid being hit on, I can wear sweats and a high bun when I go to the grocery store. I want to be very clear here—there is no style of dress that ever “asks for” or “encourages” sexual harassment or sexual assault. Period. But to say that we can’t or don’t manipulate our appearance to get more or less attention is disingenuous.
But that level of understanding—knowing that changing what I look like influences the attention I get from the outside world—wasn’t something I understood fully when I started looking more like an adult. And that, again, was true for many of the kids in my family—they looked much more like a grown-up than they were, and they didn’t fully understand the messages their appearance might be sending. If the same physical development timeline holds true for my kid, how should I, as their parent, navigate the way I dress them? How can I help them express themselves as they grow into their adult bodies, while still protecting their kid brains? Like most of the decisions I make in parenting, I look to developmental science, in addition to my own lived experience and personal values, to help shape my opinion. What I’ve landed on is this: My children will dress for the world we live in, not for the one I wish they did, and they will do so until they understand self-expression and attention. Though I wish I could change the world so my children could wear whatever they want and get no unwanted attention whatsoever, I recognize that’s not the world we live in, and I know my children are not the cudgel that will bring about that change.
“I love back to school shopping with you! You know my favorites are the office supplies, but clothes are so fun, too. Hey, we should pop over there and check out the bras and camisoles. You’re getting to the age where those are going to become staples when you’re out and about. You don’t have to wear a bra if we can’t find one that’s comfy, but you do have to make sure you have something to support your growing body, like a camisole or tank top. We can go check out what feels best.”
“Oofda, those pants are getting short on you! We’re going to have to go pick out different ones this year now that you’re growing so much. Let’s check out a different style this time—those ones were comfy, but now that you’re growing, we gotta make sure we pick something that doesn’t bind up or chafe around your penis, and also something that lays reasonably when you’re standing up. I bet we can find some pants that are comfy and cut just right if we look!”
“I know you love rainbows, and I’m glad you do. You also have both of your ears pierced, which is fantastic. Those choices in accessories are part of expressing who you are, and that’s lovely. You might not know this, but now that you look more mature, those accessories might be interpreted as you being part of the queer community. You know I’m going to love you and support you always, so if you are a member of the community—cool. You never have to stop wearing the things you like but know that you might get some high fives or appreciative nods from people because your accessories tell them you’re a safe human. And given that you don’t exactly like to ‘people,’ that might be more human interaction than you’re anticipating. Just thought you ought to know!”
