No one ever said adolescence was easy.

It is not an easy stage for a young person to pass through, nor is it easy on the parent. But it can be rewarding for both the parents and teens if connection is the priority. Recognizing the ups and downs, the struggles and triumphs, as well as the perceptions and tendencies of this stage will help us as parents to remain connected and supportive.

Parents, I am writing this book for you. I am writing this book from one parent to another, to affect as much positive change in the world as possible, starting first with you and your family. I am writing this book so you will have the tools to support your teens with confidence in a rapidly changing world. I am writing this book so you will have the tools to become a supportive partner in your teens' lives. The intention of this book is to help you recognize how your internal reactions, beliefs, and expectations affect the relationship you wish to create with your teen and to provide tools to help you become accountable to your teen and to yourself.

This book is written during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic when the world around us looks very different than it did pre-2020. It is important to note that as a result of lockdowns, restrictions, social divisiveness, education disruptions, and radical changes within every area of our society, adolescents around the world have felt the repercussions in countless and unforeseen ways. Numerous psychological studies are starting to reveal that due to the social effects of the pandemic, there has been an exponential increase in adolescent suicide, anxiety, depression, and various other consequences. The timing of this book couldn't be more welcome, and even if your teen is not experiencing psychological disruptions, they are living in a world where this reality is ever increasing.

There was no book like this available for me when I started to parent an adolescent. I was terrified to make the same mistakes my parents did and wasn't sure how to handle the big changes we know as the teenage years. My hope is to connect with other parents, so they know they are not alone on their journey, and they are supported by someone who took the path of self-healing and cares deeply about empowering youth through this stage of their life. I wrote this book to help you build your confidence in knowing you can do this too.

I want to share with you the insights I've learned from working with hundreds of teens and help you to conceptualize what the partnership journey can look like. I wrote this book to develop a culture of greater emotional intelligence and to help heal families' generational wounds. I wrote this book because it is especially needed in the world right now.

I recognize how trite it sounds when someone says, “If I can do it, you can do it.” But you can because you've got skin in the game. If the sanity and mental health of your teen is at stake, then you need to show up for them in a way they can relate to. I wrote this book so you can do just that. I'm going to say it…

“You can do this!”

It is just as important to be clear about what this book won't do. This book will not teach you how to modify your teen's behavior to better suit your comfort or desires. This book will not teach you how to manipulate your teen into being more of something or less of something else just because it's what you think is best for them. On the flip side, this book will challenge you to be accountable for your own agendas and help you to release those expectations, empowering you to see your teen for who they actually are in this very moment, rather than who you think they should be or once were.

I was born into what I thought was a typical American family. At the time, I thought my childhood was normal and everyone experienced the world as I did. Growing up, I had not been granted the gift of kindness, tenderness, or connection and thought everyone's journey looked the same as mine. Later, I was shocked to realize my childhood was filled with countless traumas, attachment wounds, emotional neglect, and abuse. 

Of course, the effects played out through my adolescence and well into my adulthood. My predominant experience throughout my teen years was that I was invisible and I didn't matter to my family, myself, or the world. Never once in my teen years did I feel seen, heard, or understood by any family member or any adult in my life.

Years of unpacking, self-inquiry, healing, and integrating these core wounds propelled me into a journey deep into myself. I recognized the most self-destructive period of my journey was my own adolescence. I often reflect on how different my life could have been had I been supported, had tools to process my emotions and challenge my beliefs about myself, or had I simply been “seen.”

I wrote this book to help more teens be seen, heard, and understood. I wrote this book to help their parents who love them to have the tools to do this with ease and grace. What qualifies me to write a book of this nature? 

I don’t have a formal degree in psychology, parenting, childhood development, or therapy. However, I was born with the insatiable desire to learn and have always dived deep into the topics I was interested in. 

In my childhood, I discovered the wealth of knowledge in libraries, where I spent a great portion of my time. I was exposed to a world of imagination, where I discovered and loved everything about creativity and art. During my early years, I immersed myself in modern art and art history. I explored many contemporary art movements like surrealism, dadaism, conceptual, and performance art, and the modern art movement. I studied in the library and explored the local art museums and regional galleries. I started making art myself, and by the time I enrolled in college to study art, I already had the equivalent of an art history degree based on the feedback and conversations I had with my professors. 

Later, I changed career paths and started working as a graphic designer in commercial advertising and marketing. However, the discipline of branding caught my interest after a few years. I studied the principles, concepts, theories, and practices of branding. I read every book and case study I could get my hands on. Although I had no official training in the field, I was knowledgeable enough after a few years to open my own successful branding agency in Los Angeles, which I owned, operated, and directed for over eight years. 

During my late twenties and early thirties, I started to recognize many significant patterns showing up in my interpersonal relationships. My fierce independence was something I always considered to be one of my superpowers, but I soon recognized it was masking my fear of intimacy and the limiting beliefs I had about myself. Then, at thirty-two, I found myself pregnant. I knew the greatest gift I could give my unborn son was to uncover and heal some of my early traumas and learn how to be the parent to him I never had. 

I always felt empowered to learn things through research and identified as an autodidact. This gave me the confidence to set out on a journey to heal while learning everything I could absorb about psychology, trauma, neuroscience and brain biology, parenting, and self-healing techniques. So that’s what I did. I learned through acquiring knowledge, and I learned through experience.  Over the next twenty years, my priority had become to learn, to go deeper, to explore, and heal myself, my relationships, and my soul. This book is a testament to that journey. You will find many of the resources I used along the way at the end of this book. 

For those who have been following me over the years, this part of my story will be of no surprise, but it’s important to include in this book’s intro for those who don’t know me.

By 2008, I had been running my own branding agency for eight years. My client list had grown as I developed a wonderful reputation for uniquely serving green-eco companies and a handful of well-known nonprofits. But as 2008 came to a close, the California economy was in collapse, and I saw the majority of my clients drop away one by one. I knew change was coming, but I didn’t know exactly what.

From the time my son was born, I have been a single parent. My son’s father was in his life until he passed away, but he struggled with health issues and was not often available as a result.  I was the custodial parent and responsible for my son Miro’s everything: education, health decisions, and emotional and social well-being. 

As you can imagine, I worked a lot. In fact, as a business owner and the agency’s creative director, I worked upwards of 60 hours per week. One of the most common phrases I heard come out of my son’s mouth was, “Mom, you are always working. You never spend any time with me.” As a parent, my heart broke into a million tiny pieces every time he spoke those words. 

One night, late in 2008, nine-year-old Miro and I were sitting in the office. I was feeling stressed, overworked, and completely burned out. Knowing I wasn’t going to bring my staff back in 2009, I looked over at Miro, who was playing video games on one of the office computers. I turned to him and said, “Miro, let’s get rid of all our stuff. Let’s go have an adventure!” He looked up from his games and said, “Ok! Let’s do it!” 

And that was that. It took us six months to sell or give away most of our possessions. Then we shoved the remainder of our belongings into two very heavy backpacks and set out for what was meant to be one year of travel. 

As usual, I researched, learned, and prepared. I read books like The 4-Hour Workweek, Vagabonding, and The Power of Now. I studied guides for Central and South America and off we went. 

That one-year trip turned into fourteen years (and counting). 

Throughout our years of travel, we adapted “unschooling” or “self-directed learning” as our form of education. As a parent, I took my role in the process seriously, further adapting a partnership paradigm in learning and life, being the best facilitator for my son, listening to his cues, offering support, providing resources, and committing to learning right alongside him. We were conscious of this choice and took on the task of learning intentionally.

From the start of our journey, we made joint decisions about our lives, deciding where to go, when to go, and how to live. We opted for living in true partnership, and both of our needs were being met as we learned to collaborate and adjust along the way.

Years later, we spearheaded the growing “worldschooling” movement through our advocacy and community organization. 

Over the years, Miro and I slow-traveled through dozens of countries. We lived like visiting locals, deeply immersing ourselves in the cultures we lived in, volunteering, exploring, and living life together. We even spoke about our lives on the TEDx Edu stage in Amsterdam in 2016 in front of a live audience of 400 people. We spoke about our unique way of being in the world and learning through travel. 

We practiced partnership as the key to our family culture and approached learning as a fluid experience we were both responsible for. We became equal partners in all decisions including travel, budgeting, and life. We even launched a company together called Project World School. 

Project World School was born in 2012. The idea was to create inspiring temporary learning communities around the world for teens, by providing a safe space to be in a community, have an adventure, and learn from the world. I designed a program, a way of being in a community focused on extending secure attachment principles to the adolescent experience. Project World School retreats empower teens to step out of their comfort zones in safety (risk-taking), question everything (rebellion), work in collaboration (social learning), and strive for consensus within a community setting. 

Once again, I studied, read, listened, and learned everything I could; this time focusing on community building, facilitation, team building, social learning, and conflict resolution. I also expanded my knowledge about psychology and adolescent development, learning more about the teen brain. This body of information was distilled into a program combining experiential learning in a space where teens were seen, heard, and understood. Early on, I recognized that facilitating teens in community is a nuanced challenge and realized that the healing tools I learned and practiced in my own life would certainly come in handy. 

For the first several years of Project World School, Miro participated as one of the teens and thrived within a community of his peers, something he craved deeply. Over the years, Miro stepped into greater roles of responsibility within the retreats as he became more comfortable co-facilitating with me. 

Since 2012, we have facilitated more than twenty international retreats in countries like Thailand, Greece, Wales, Peru, Japan, Mexico, and South Africa for almost one-hundred teens. Living and working in community with teens has been tremendously healing for me, as I’ve been able to create the very thing I did not have growing up, a safe space to be a teen. These experiences have empowered me to recognize the challenges of adolescence and have given me the opportunity to connect with teens in spaces where they needed connection. This is the space and the spirit in which I write this book for you. 

I am not a doctor.  There are no strings of letters behind my name. I am writing this book as a self-educated, passionate student of this topic. I have spent countless hours diving into the nature of the adolescent brain through my novice lens and have spent as many hours distilling the information I've absorbed into practical applications and tools to help myself and others demystify and befriend the inner workings of oneself.​​

I was born a little over 50 years ago, raised by hippies who were born into the Boomer generation. This generation came of age in the 60s and 70s and was oftentimes referred to as the “me generation.” 

The “me generation” often ascribed higher importance to exploring and achieving self-realization over social responsibility, or in my case, family responsibility. I was raised by an absent father, who was out of the house most days working to support his family, and a young mother, whose highest pursuit and priority was to find herself.

Being born to parents of the “me generation” certainly impacted my emotional development and likely affected an entire generation. Latchkey kids were on the rise, and my generation was the first to be raised through television programming and with less human connection than the generations before.

My mother was introduced to yoga in the 1970s, and she studied with vigor, eventually becoming a yoga teacher. Throughout my childhood, I was dragged to her gurus' talks, ashrams, and classes, and even dragged off to spend time with her yoga friends, some of whom she was romantically involved with.

Although I don't believe my mother was formally diagnosed as being a narcissist, upon reflection, I experienced her as such. Many things pointed to this, and it wasn't until adulthood that I made that connection. For example, my mother had commissioned a portrait artist to paint an eight-foot oil painting of herself posing nude, kneeling, as if she was an omnipotent ruler. This painting hung prominently in her bedroom, and throughout my childhood, I saw her as a kneeling god I was born to please. But she never found any joy in my presence. My mother-god's needs, wishes, and desires were always the most dominant priority in our family, and my or my brother’s interests were never considered.

Even though my mother's pursuit to find herself was her priority, she still had a highly controlling approach to her home. There were protocols for behavior, daily chores, and distinct rules about cleaning. There were punishments associated with doing chores incorrectly. Most rules were arbitrary, like learning the differences between 'garbage' and 'trash.' I assumed everyone knew that garbage was ALWAYS to be thrown outside in the garbage can on the side of the house. On the other hand, trash could be left in the house, until the waste-paper baskets were emptied. If I was caught putting 'garbage' into the trash can, I could expect (and received on multiple occasions) the entire contents of the trash to be emptied out on my bedroom floor. Then, I was made to clean it up.

I was yelled at almost on a daily basis, as I always did something wrong. I recall the feeling of my tiny body shaking in proximity to her violent screams. Throughout my childhood and into my adolescence, I often slept with all my blankets completely covering my head. This was my bastion of security and one of the only safe spaces I felt I could cry.

As an adult, I cannot recall any tender moments with my mother, nor do I remember any acts of kindness from her as a child. For many years, I simply thought all of this was normal.

Although this is only one of the volumes of the formative experiences I had, I wanted to give you an idea of the type of wounds I had to overcome. Learning to face these wounds and heal them has been one of my greatest gifts. Learning how my early childhood experiences informed the adolescent and the adult I grew into provided me with much insight into the healing of the human psyche.  

“An environment that is not safe to disagree in is not an environment focused on growth

- it’s an environment focused on control.”

~ Wendi Jade

Since the beginning of 2020, I've heard from parents of teens and tweens around the world that this pandemic has served up challenges and changes that they (and their teens) were just not equipped to handle.

Many of the teens I've been working with have shared their frustrations too, that the only choice they have is to just move through it. Many have shared the feelings of just shutting down, not really caring about the things they used to be passionate about, as a way to handle the deeper sense of loss. These feelings oftentimes are internalized without any natural outlet, leaving them bubbling just beneath the surface.

I get it. I really do. It's so difficult in a time when teens should be expressing their independence.

Many parents see this emotion below the surface become expressed through their teen's behavior, which can look like anger, withdrawal, rebellion, depression, self-sabotage, self-harm, or anxiety. Justifiably so, most parents must navigate a new way of being in the world too, often with financial and logistic implications and tend to react to what's directly in front of them: their teen’s behavior.

What will you find in this book?

This book aims to provide a basic understanding of two main things. First, is the nature of adolescent development including brain, emotional, psychological, and mental changes. The second is a basic idea of how to support and facilitate teens by using the powerful tools provided in the last half of this book.

This book is written specifically for you, the parent of adolescents, and I will especially be addressing your part of the equation. But be warned, for some, the material in this book will trigger your unresolved childhood wounds as you uncover limiting beliefs developed in your own youth. With that said, please approach this journey as a path to your own healing. There is a robust reference section at the end of this book, so if you wish to go deeper into your own personal development journey, you will have the necessary support and resources to start that process.

Also, throughout this book, I will share many stories from my own childhood, adolescence, self-directed learning, and my healing journey. Wherever you are starting from, let's begin from there.  Your teen is counting on you!

How do you use this book?

The tools in this book will not only allow you to facilitate your teen's mental health journey but also take time to check in first and be accountable for your own mental health. For example, it is impossible to facilitate emotional intelligence without developing your own emotional intelligence. It's difficult to facilitate a teen through questioning and reprogramming their own limiting beliefs without first doing it yourself. I invite you to use this book as a reference to be the healthiest version of you as possible, in order for you to have the insight to facilitate the mental health journey with your teen. My recommendation for you is to first read through this book, dog-ear, bookmark, highlight passages, do the exercises, use the tools, and journal your experiences. 

Note on the use of the terms “adolescence” and “teens” throughout this book:

Adolescence is the stage of development in a person’s life, ranging roughly from ages 10 to 25, in which physical and psychological development takes place from the onset of puberty to adulthood.

Throughout this book, I use the term “adolescent” at times, and at others, I use the terms “teen” or “teenager,” in order to make the words more readable and relatable. I understand the term “teen” or “teenager” is not accurate in terms of denoting a numeric age, but I ask you to recognize these words are referencing the median age of adolescence and do not exclude ages 10-12 or 20-25.

Adolescence is a pivotal time in a person's development, and many psychologists specialize in this stage. Because adolescence is a time of rapidly changing emotional states, sexual maturation, puberty, physical growth, and social changes, researchers in this area specialize in issues unique to adolescents like gender, sexual development, and cognitive and behavioral development. For a list of resources, please check the Suggested Reading section for more reading recommendations.