The Coaching Your Family Relationships Podcast

What Your Young Adult Child Wants You to Know

• Tina Gosney • Episode 178

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What Your Young Adult Child Wants You to Know

If you've ever wondered what your young adult child is really thinking—but they're not telling you—this episode is for you. Tina Gosney sits down with two self-aware and deeply insightful young adults, Clarice Paulsen and Caleb Price, to give parents a rare look inside the young adult experience.

You’ll hear honest and vulnerable stories about how parents unintentionally make life harder for their young adult children—and what they actually need instead. Tina also shares reflections and guidance to help you respond with less fear, more compassion, and a stronger emotional foundation.

If you want to foster a deeper relationship with your young adult and learn how to be a soft place for them to land, this conversation is a must-listen.


Links to access the resources in this episode:

(Free Class) How to Heal the Relationship with Your Adult Child without Guilt, Anxiety, or Walking on Eggshells CLICK HERE

 

If you're tired of walking on eggshells or feeling heartbroken over the distance between you and your adult child or anyone else in your family, Bridge to Connection will show you a better way. In just eight short lessons, you'll learn powerful tools to stay grounded, respond with confidence, and create safety in your relationship—without needing your child to change first. You’ll walk away feeling empowered, hopeful, and deeply connected to the person you want to be, no matter what’s happening around you. CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE


Guest Name: Clarice Paulsen & Caleb Price
Bio:

  • Clarice is a coach with Balanced Recovery Coaching, helping people reconnect with their purpose and healing.
  • Caleb is a college coach and podcast host, guiding young adults to manage their minds and create confidence in college and beyond.

Links:


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Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with mothers and parents who are experiencing difficult relationships with their adult children, and they want to work on creating more authentic connected families.
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Connect with us:

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tinagosneycoaching/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tinagosneycoaching

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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Tina Gosney:

Tina, Hey there. Welcome to the coaching your family relationships podcast today. I am Tina Gosney, a certified family conflict coach, and I help parents who are feeling really disconnected in their families, feeling disconnected from their children. They want to heal their family relationships and create more authentic, connected families. That's who I work with. I've coached a lot of parents on their relationships with their children, and, most specifically, their young adult children. I've also coached a lot of young adults. Now it's been a very interesting, a very eye opening perspective to see both sides of these relationships, and I see often how we're really missing each other. There's a lot of misunderstandings going on, there's a lot of stories we're telling ourselves in our heads, we're living with some really unrealistic expectations on both sides of the relationship. This episode today is a replay of an interview I did a couple of years ago with two young adults, and I really wanted to give parents a glimpse into the mind of their young adult child. Now, these two young adults that I chose, they are pretty self aware because they're both coaches, which means they've thought a lot about their experience. They know how to put their thoughts into words. They know what they're feeling, and they know how to express that. And that's what I really wanted for this episode, because these kids have talked a lot about this topic, and they're able to put into words with their experiences when other young adults, who are maybe not as self aware, don't know how to put those things into words. They don't know how to express what they're thinking and what they're feeling. So they're speaking for those kids that that don't have the words for what their experience is. Now before you listen, I want to give you a warning, if you're a parent, you might not like some of the things that these kids say, and that is perfectly fine. That is okay. Give yourself some space to not like their point of view. Give them some space to have a different point of view than you do. When we can start giving each other space, no matter what their relationship is, or who it is, or what the situation is, we can give each other space. That's when we can start seeing our own expectations, going from fear and frustration to understanding a connection. That's when we start making progress in the relationship, because we first need to look inward to see what am I thinking and feeling about, what is happening right now, not pointing a finger at someone else and say you need to think and feel differently about this. So we need to see how we are reacting to our thoughts and our feelings and what that is causing in the relationship. That is always where we start. I hope you gain some insight into the life of your young adult child, because when we can look at a situation from a different perspective than our own. That helps us to expand. It helps us to grow our capacity to handle more difficult things in our lives. If you listen to this podcast and you want to start working on the things that Caleb and Clarice are talking about, the things that they want their parents to be doing, then I want to invite you to attend and listen to my latest class. There's a replay that's available. It's called Healing the relationship with your adult child without guilt, anxiety or walking on eggshells. This class is going to show you what you're missing, how you're not doing things that are helpful, and then it's going to show you what to do instead. So if you're interested in working on these things that you're going to learn today, I want you to click on the link in the show notes to access that class. Now here's that interview that I did with Clarice Paulson and Caleb price. So I want to introduce Clarice Paulson and Caleb price. So Clarice, would you just introduce yourself to the listeners really quick? Yeah.

Unknown:

My name is Clarice. I'm a certified life coach through the Life Coach School, much like Caleb and Tina and I coach specifically with young adults, who are primarily female, and we coach on disordered eating and eating disorders and kind of anything in that realm regarding body image and self esteem.

Tina Gosney:

Hey, do you have, like, a certain age group that you like to focus on?

Unknown:

No, I focus a lot on college students, because that's kind of my that's where I'm at right now, and so I can really relate to them on the journey of recovery, but I do have a lot of high school clients who are struggling right now with the beginning waves of diet culture.

Tina Gosney:

Good. Oh, that's such a needed niche. I'm so glad that you're doing that. Thank you so much. Caleb, what about you? Would you give us an introduction?

Caleb Price:

Hi, yeah, I'm Caleb price, also known as the college coach. That's what I called myself. I got introduced to the world of coaching about two years ago, thanks to my mom and thanks to my own crisis, and now I help people through that same one college when it comes to breaking up with anxiety and establishing basically a character of confidence, of coming into college, being successful in it, knowing how to navigate studying, dating, the whole landscape of it. It's changed my life. It's helped me so much. And so right now, I work as a software developer. Just graduated, will be getting a master's, but I love coaching college students, or basically young adults during this time, when it comes to their anxiety and feeling like they need purpose and aren't good enough, because that was me, and I want to help people through it.

Tina Gosney:

Oh, I'm sure that there are plenty of people that can relate to what you just said about being in college, building that like you're not good enough, and just having anxiety. That's such a huge narrative these days for college kids, well and beyond, too. It's not just college, so to be honest, right? That's

Caleb Price:

I just figured to start now.

Tina Gosney:

Yeah, let's get them, you know, having a better mindset about themselves and about the world around them when they're young, before they hit the real world. So we're going to be talking today about a couple of things. In fact, when I reached out to Clarice and Caleb, I said, Hey, if you were going to say these are the things that I think parents need to know, and what would you say? And immediately they both knew the same thing. Both said pretty much the same thing. So we're going to focus on those few things that came up when I asked you guys that question, which I thought, if I was going to answer that question myself, I would have given the same answers. So I think all three of us are on the same page about what we're going to talk about today, and the first one was, parents really are wanting to exert a lot of control in the life of their young adults. They're not wanting to allow them to make their own decisions and experience failure. So Caleb, why do you think that that is happening today with parents. What do you see happening, and what insights do you have into that?

Caleb Price:

I mean, I think it's just natural to not want our children to fail. I mean, speaking from the mind as if I were as a parent, because it's basically like, it feels like our product, like we have created this human being, we have raised them up, therefore they are a part of us, and they're going to go out there in the world, and we care about them on a deep level. I think almost every emotion, or everything that we do that honestly might feel a little bit negative or come with the not the intended result is always, usually coming from a good place. And so when it comes to the parents, it's always coming from a place of love, but unintentionally holding us back from experiencing the real world. So taking the example of like, going to college and dating and whatnot, like we might be so concerned about how they're doing that we might want to, like, always be checking up on them, always be figuring out where they are in their life, reassuring. Or we might be concerned about, like, what kind of degree that they're getting, where are they like, what are they studying? What is their career path? We want to know their plan. That's why it's just like, from high school onward, we're like, what is your plan? Like, what are you doing? Meanwhile, the kid is just like, I don't know. They're figuring that along the way. And so then all that pressure is put upon them. Of course, this is being created in their mind. But it doesn't help that the parents are kind of reinforcing this narrative that, like, hey, all the chips are on you. You need to perform in order for me to be considered successful, because we love you. And from that place of love, unfortunately, there's this disconnect I feel like, when it comes to then, like not wanting them to fail, because we think failure is bad. We think that if they fail or if they mess up, let's say they need to switch their major let's say they get in a career that they don't like. Let's say that relationship goes bad. Maybe they even get divorced. I don't know all these things that parents worry about, especially when children come to figuring out their identity. In this world, we attach so much pressure on that they need to turn out a certain way, because we have a way that in our mind, that this is the way that it works, this is the way that's successful. This is the way that is not considered a failure. And even when we deviate a little bit from it as children, it can feel like, well, then I messed up. Yeah, and if I messed up, then, like, you know, I'm not good enough. And clearly, like, what's the point at this like, my whole life has led up to this point, and I feel like, I, you know, let this person down.

Tina Gosney:

So when you have that kind of pressure put on you, does that feel, you've mentioned a couple of times, like it's coming from love, right? But does it feel like it's coming from love? Where does it feel like that's coming from?

Caleb Price:

It feels honestly like, I mean, I just want to go to shame or something like that, or just like that. The parents are either, like, frustrated, concerned, and it's just like this idea that we're a problem, that's what I get from it, it's this concern that like we need fixing to be like better to change, that our feelings about ourselves, or our feelings about our career, the choices that we're making, that they're all wrong, and therefore we want to distance ourselves from our parents. Often we want to distance ourselves. One, because we need to become our own person, but two, I think we put extra between us and we or we struggle connecting with our parents, we resist, we like, fight and all these things, because we feel like we just feel bad about ourselves in that moment, because we then have created in our own heads, this habit, this narrative that, Oh, whenever I'm, you know, make a choice, like, I can't bring that up with my parents, because they might think I'm a failure if I messed up in some way, or if I want to change the narrative. I remember the first time that I brought up the idea of not going to BYU to my dad. He was kind of devastated, because he's this big, you know, BYU grad, all my kids are going to go there, that sort of thing. And I was like, I'm I don't want to do that. I wanted to do something different. And it was hard for me to bring that up, even though that's just like a choice, even though there's nothing wrong with, you know, the school that you're going to sometimes parents like to put this idea that my kid must perform in this certain way else I've messed up.

Tina Gosney:

Okay? So as you see the narrative of your parents, they have this story of, this is how our family is, and this is what all my kids will do, and you not fitting into that narrative. And then did you feel pressure from them as you decided not to go to BYU?

Caleb Price:

So, I mean, I did feel pressure. But the nice part is, is my parents, I think obvious, are understanding. It's just that my dad will he still brings it up. Sometimes he just likes to bring up, like, you could have gone here. You could have got this scholarship. Yeah? And I'm like, Okay, it's the same when I decided to be a life coach like my parents. It's different, because I know what other people's parents are like, like, I know that like, for me, I feel very blessed and fortunate, and it was still hard to like, go through this kind of acceptance. And I know there are parents out there who are very strict with this idea of like, you gotta do this thing, or like, if you turn out this certain way, so, like, I don't know, like, when a person decides maybe that they identify a certain different way, either you know, like, sexually or just like to identify a part of a different religion, or just to identify a different political party, or just how they Want to live their life in the future, like all those decisions when they become their own kind of person, it's really hard to then believe that you can, like, be accepted by your family, or at least from their own perspective, for them to accept you.

Tina Gosney:

So that's, yeah, that's really interesting. In fact, it's probably parents trying to to keep their kids where they know that they're safe and feel like they show it, showing them them they loved they love them, but they're actually creating the opposite for their child, in that they're pushing them away have their child is then feeling like they don't love and accept me, I don't fit in here.

Caleb Price:

Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, it's just, I think that's, that's the funny thing is that you the parents think that they're doing a wonderful thing, right, but they're not getting the result that they want. And that's how you know that there's something, something's disconnect there. Yeah, when you, when you notice that, like you're feel like you're doing everything out of love, like I'm accepting them, I'm opening up. But when you see that they're kind of pushing themselves away, you know, and sometimes that just might be the outcome, the choice, unfortunately. But I feel like more often than not, we as, you know, young adults want to connect with our parents, want to be approved, want to get reassurance from them. Yet we don't feel able to do it because of this dynamic that's being created.

Tina Gosney:

Clarice, what do you think about that? Yeah,

Unknown:

I kind of just was jotting down a couple of notes, because I think what Caleb was saying. Where it stems from a place of very real love and concern. I definitely think it comes from parents just wanting it to work out for their kids. And that's that's love, that's care, concern, you know, that's the parents saying, I really want it to work out for you. But what parents kind of fail to see is that it is working out for us. It just might look differently. And I think that is where the disconnect come from, comes from, especially if a I feel like it's a lot of the times if I'm pushing away from my parent and it's because of the really hard reality of feeling like I'm never good enough, not even for my parents. I see Caleb nodding his head, because that's a really hard truth to have sometimes, of presenting an issue to your parents and saying and feeling that disappointment, feeling that shame, feeling that, um, those really hard emotions where all of a sudden the people that are supposed to love me the most, um, are kind of bringing up these hard feelings that are really difficult to kind of confront head on, especially when it's so intimate with family members.

Tina Gosney:

I and you guys both, it sounds like you both coach people who have those thoughts, young people that have those same thoughts, right? Like I'm not good enough. I'm not measuring up. I'm not enough. And it sounds like I'm I know I heard Caleb. I've heard Caleb say that before, and what he was talking about how he helps people, but Clarice, I'm sure that that feeds into the people that you coach as well.

Unknown:

Oh, 100% I think that's the biggest thing that I think that's one of the biggest fears we have in this mortal life, is to never be good enough, or to be enough for the people around us, or for our major for our dating relationships, whatever it may be, we have this weird construct in our head that we have to measure up to something as humans, and especially within a church, I think that sometimes can get skewed even more so because we have more to compare it to. And yet again, I think we talked about this in the very beginning of just coming from a place of love. A place of love, and that can be construed in a way where we want it to work out. We're making pressures happen. But really love as Christ would, or as we as accepting as we can, to the to be as authentic and Christ like as we can in each situation. That's the love that we're trying to get to. It's not the love that is the helicopter parent, or is the parent that's very discouraged on themselves for being imperfect. I mean, young adults know better than anyone.

Clarice Paulson:

Everyone's imperfect, and I think that's part of it too. Is adults are growing. Young adults are growing. We're all still growing, and there needs to be that kind of mercy for each other, of saying like, Hey, I see you where you're at in the face of life that you are, but I'm not going to hold you to that, because I think that love allows us to grow and really blossom and bloom, and we can do that together, instead of having it be where we feel like the parent is stagnant because they're already grown up, or we feel like our child's stagnant because they're not moving forward in the way that we want them to. Neither one of us are stagnant, if we really think about it, in this process, that's life. We're always continually in progress and practice.

Tina Gosney:

I love that, because that's one of the things that I just think of so off. Even though I'm a few decades older than you guys, I still feel like I have so much growth that I've done since I was a grown up, you know, since I did graduate from college and get married and start having kids play, it's just been so much growth. And it would be really sad if we didn't have that growth, if we just stopped growing we, you know, when we got married and became parents. But there's, it's supposed to be like that. So I love the way that you put that Clarice. Something that I was just thinking about as you were talking is that that we do all have this feeling of like I'm not enough. Parents have that feeling too, like I'm not doing enough for my kid. I just, I want to save them from the the heartaches or the mistakes, and they're they get really scared, and they act from fear, right, right? And the world that we live in right now, there's a lot of things that we see other kids going to, or other people going to the seem really scary. And so they're trying to control, trying to manage the people you know that they love most in their lives, to keep them from going into those things that seem so scary. But by trying to control and manage that and putting the pressure on you guys, do you feel like that almost is creating the very thing that they're afraid of, that they're so afraid of. Is there any of that?

Caleb Price:

I mean, I'll interject here and say for sure. Just say 100% because, like, guess what? Pressure is something that builds up and we want. Relieve that. And most of the things that we go to to relieve are the things that our parents don't want us to do. Like, I can just speak from experience, and unfortunately, just from a very real standpoint. Like, I mean, I had a habit of pornography in the past, and I think that came a lot of the times from this expectation of, I gotta be perfect, or I gotta be really good at school. I gotta be doing this. And then at the same time, with this kind of expectation, we can't go to someone to talk about it, let alone our parents. We can't go to talk about it, because that standard is there, that pressure is there, and that would just break everything, even though, vulnerability, openness, talking about it, that is the solution to it all. That's what heals relationships. That's what heals this part of ourselves. And so we're young like we are supposed to experience life and go through these failures or go through these moments, setbacks, whatever we want to call it, without like, kind of being held back from it, without, kind of like, like, of course, as a parent, like, when you're raising your kids, you're going to have rules, you're going to have boundaries. That's totally normal, that's in your household, but once you know they leave, like, without an understanding of why we're doing these things, or just with this idea that like, like, we did it only because our parents told us not to, and now we can, like, do whatever we want without that understanding of there's a reason for this, or maybe we had an experience, and we're able to talk about With our parents beforehand, but in this scenario, we don't, and so then we're kind of just left on our own, and now we can't talk about it with anybody like this is just, it's just fascinating to see how, like, parents don't want their children to go through the things that they did, and so they create situations that ultimately make that happen, they create these situations that that ultimately will allow it to happen. That's not to say that my parents wanted that to happen. Totally wasn't a bad thing that it did.

Tina Gosney:

Right? They're not purposefully creating that, for sure, but by not knowing and being really educated on how they're creating that they're actually creating the very thing that they're very afraid of. Yeah, 100%

Clarice Paulson:

Clarice, what are you gonna say? Yeah, I just had the thought, because just as Caleb was talking, I think it does come from that place. Of like, oh, I don't want them to have to experience this. And I think the parents are trying to come from that place again. Of saying I want the best for my for my children, I don't want them to have to go through it so then, but they already need to learn the lesson. But we can't be selective in life by saying I don't want them to experience whatever it may be. You can't just pick and choose the best parts of life like that's just a given, you have to experience the lows to experience the highs. And that's the human experience is in order to get the final result, you have to undergo the journey. And so that was just something that I thought about as Kayla was talking because we try to, I think that parents are even trying just to be selective and saying, No, I want my children to get the experience without actually experiencing it, which isn't possible, right? It's just not possible.

Tina Gosney:

And before we hit record, where I was telling you guys that I had taught a lesson a couple weeks ago in my ward about the new for strength of the Youth pamphlet, and we had the young women and the Relief Society combined because we wanted them to hear we wanted the moms to hear what the girls were going to be hearing in lessons and the new guidelines for making decisions. And there was so much fear in the parents, so much fear that was expressed about like, now you're not telling my kid exactly what to do, and I don't know how to guide them, and there just was a lot of fear for the future, mostly on the parent side, not on the daughter's side, I got to say. But I brought this scripture in, and this is a scripture that's been really pivotal in my understanding of why we're here on this earth. And it's Abraham 3:25, and it says, and we will prove them here with to see if they will do all things whatsoever, the Lord their God shall command them. Now we need to look at words and scriptures and make sure that we're interpreting them in the way that it was written at the time. And this one was translated in the early 1800s and so if we go back to that Merriam Webster's dictionary from 1820 something, the word prove does not mean test, like we're not being tested and there's like a pass and a fail. The word prove means we're going to let them learn by their own experience. So we're here on this earth having this educative experience. And Clarice, what you just said is, like, I want my kid to have this experience, but only this, this much of it, so that they can get this great blessing, but they're not. I don't want to have I don't want to allow them to have the fullness of that experience, because that's too painful and that's too scary and that's too dangerous. But I think if we are trying to control our kids, if we are trying to eliminate the failures, eliminate choices in their life, we're actually taking we're taking control and not allowing you guys to have as much education as you might have if we were able to release the control, I really experience life.

Unknown:

I mean, I think everyone can go through the same experience and get something different from it, and I think that's what makes us so unique as individuals. That's what you know us as coaches sitting here talking about it, we've all had different backgrounds, and I think that's the beautiful part of life, is just being able to present and say, This is a trial. This is an experience I had that was, yeah, it wasn't great, but these are my results from it. And usually the parents are static when you talk to them about, Hey Mom, this is what I got from the divorce that you and dad had. You know, instead of saying, we don't blame our parents for those mistakes, we don't blame our parents, and we don't say, Why does life have to happen to me like this. But if we can turn around from it and say, This is the experience I got, and that I'm so happy I did, and I think just like offering up our souls fully into that, it's, it's almost like Joseph Smith in the jail, you know, saying, and honestly, Christ on the cross saying, not thy will, but my like yours, that's, that's that's what we're here to do, is really try to fully experience and feel and become as much as we can, with the help of, obviously, the parents around us, the parents in heaven, just being able to turn to them is the bigger task at hand.

Tina Gosney:

Yeah. What great insight that is, Clarice. Caleb, were you? You look like you wanted to say something

Caleb Price:

I actually did. Yeah. So, I mean, I think you nailed it on the head. Clarice, and this understanding that God works this way, like, that's how he works as a parent, is letting us experience everything. He doesn't hold back. He doesn't say, Oh, I'm not going to, like, I don't know, make the air fill up in this tire that's going to blow. You're going to have a flat tire. You're going to learn how to change that. Like, that is a normal, natural part of life, and we learn from it. We get to grow in it, and it's our opportunity, honestly, to experience it. And so I think a lot of the time, you know, from this genuine place of love, parents like to take away hard experiences from their children, the hard experiences of choosing anything in this like, what we call decade of decision, okay, one, what a pressure phrase, I guess, like, let's put all your life on these decisions, because decisions apparently make you happy. None of that is true. Um, but really, just like emphasizing how, like, parents like to take away choice and like to take away, like, the hardship that people are going to feel like this is the way of how you're supposed to do your life. And when you know, we grow up as young adults and we go into the real world, we realize, oh, life doesn't work that way. And so then it's so easy for your brain to, like, look at you and say, Well, you must be the problem, because clearly you're doing things wrong, because clearly if you're experiencing hardship, especially in kind of a culture of religion where we're taught, you know, like, you know, righteousness is happiness and all these sorts of things. And we, one day wake up and we're just depressed because we just don't know how to manage our emotions, or it's just that's how the day feels and like that's just how it's gonna go, and we have to ride through it. We it's so easy to think that something can be wrong with us because of that. And so I think again, you know, it's coming from a great place, but unintentionally, when parents edit the experience of their children, trying to take away hard things rather than, honestly even putting hard things into their life, having them grow, having them make choices, having them become their own person, like then, if that's done earlier, then you know, we might not be so lost, or we might have at least the resources to work through the experiences that do come up, we're ready for the challenge. We understand it's a part of life, and we don't go to the place of something's wrong with us.

Tina Gosney:

Clarice, you were talking about looking back at experiences and saying, Hey, this is what I learned from it, and this is how I grew and this is like it wasn't terrible because you got divorced. I learned so much through it. Do you think and this kind of feeds into what you were also saying? Caleb, like, do you guys think that that's pretty common for kids your age to be able to look at your life experience in a way that that takes a step back and is. Collective and says, Oh, I learned from that. This is what I learned from it, and be able to communicate that to anyone, even a parent or anyone else. Do you think that's, I think that's a really high level skill, Clarice, which so I'm so like admiring you right now you're able to do that level skill. But I honestly think, kind of flipping it back on the parents here, it might be part of the parent's job to let the child have child young adult, have that experience of saying, like, what did you learn? You know, giving them the space, almost like holding space. You know, we say that a lot in the coaching world, of just having that kind of spiritual picture where they can lay it out, and they can draw their own picture and fill it in with whatever colors they want. And as a parent, we can just sit back and I say we like I'm a parent, letting them draw that picture however it may look, because it's going to look different to them than the idea in our minds as parents that we think their experience is going to be, but again, we just have to be able to communicate that space of love saying, Hey, I know this was really difficult for you to go through. Here's the microphone I want. I want to hear your perspective on it. And I think, yeah, 17 year olds, there's some ages where maybe they're a little too young to kind of have that higher level of thinking of like, wow, what did I learn from my parents divorce? What did I learn from my pornography addiction? What did I learn? But at the same point, that is what we're doing as humans continually. And I think communicating that and holding that space, that's how we are able to paint our own lives as well, is just be able to vocally talk about our experiences. I mean, that's what we're doing on this podcast. That's what 100 other podcasts are doing. That's our entire way of feeling connection with one another, is really allowing ourselves to share these experiences and to touch our souls with one another. And I don't think that that type of like sharing and reflection happens just when you become a young adult. Like parents could start that at a very young age, oh, teaching their kids to Okay. There was this experience. Maybe this is like something you didn't want to have happen. This was kind of disappointing. Let's just take a step back and look and see maybe what we could learn from it. I think that parents themselves, though, are often having trouble doing that in their own lives, let alone allowing their kids to do that and teaching their kids to do that. But imagine if we were all able to do that, have that skill of like, yeah, I didn't really love this experience, but I learned so much from it. Here are the things that I learned, this is how I've grown. Imagine if we could do that as parents and then teach that to our kids at a young age, and we just grew up with that kind of reflection in our lives, like things would be totally different. I feel like

Unknown:

we'd have a lot more love on this earth, honestly, because we too, see each other so much more clearly and be able to give, give away to each other, to say, oh, I want to hear your experience and then have the time when it's our time, to share our experience as well, either detracting from either experience or saying one is right or one is wrong or but just being able to more fully understand one another. I love that thought. That's beautiful.

Tina Gosney:

Yeah. Caleb, what were you going to say?

Caleb Price:

I think I would just add that. I mean, I wish this was really something that I, you know, had when I was growing up. I think it is, honestly, you know, my parents were a lot more open, I think, than most. But I still think like we could have had these kinds of conversations, because it would have encouraged me to be open with them of what I was going through, instead of just dealing with everything in my own head. Because, you know, me dealing with my own stuff in my own head. It never usually goes very well. It tends to always go in the train of, oh, I'm not good enough, or clearly something's wrong. And so I love this idea of just like being open in a conversation and not expecting and necessarily anything to come from it other than just like, hey, I'm going to hear this person. Because I think a lot of times, like when we have conversations now with our parents as young adults, like, it can be so easy to like for the parent, I think, to expect like, oh, they need to be ready with advice. They need to be ready to have all the answers. They need to be able to fix and and help their child, like, be at a normal happy level. Because if they're not happy, we can't be happy. Instead of just allowing the child to just show up and be like, yep, like, yeah, you're crying because you failed your final okay. Like, this is an okay space. You can cry with me. I want to hear about it. I want to hear about how the teacher is, like, totally against you. I want to hear about how you don't have any friends or like, I just want to hear your experience. Because, more often than not, we just need to. Be heard rather than given a solution. We need to be validated in our experience, and then we can get the gears turning and begin to say, no, actually, things are better than I think they are. Or no, actually, I know what to do, because now I've learned something from this experience, just like we're talking

Unknown:

about, validation can come from just listening. I love that, because I don't think a lot of parents understand that, because they do jump the jump the gun to try to offer advice or to try to fix it, it's like, no, just listen to me. And that is that is more than enough, usually, to kind of settle a lot of what's going on in my inner turmoil that now is bigger turmoil because I have this conflicting advice or I've got this pressure that's added,

Tina Gosney:

right? And I don't think that that is a thought that most parents have. I think that they think it's their job to fix it, or their job to, like, get you out of the out of the like, feeling like you're a failure, or getting out of the sadness over filling a final or maybe to give you advice, like, well, if you had studied more, then you wouldn't have failed your final you know, like those kinds of things. I think that they think, Oh, it's my job to fix it in some way and to make this not happen again. And if I listen and like, validate you and your experience, that's just going to drive you further into whatever you're feeling right now, but it's actually the opposite happens in that if someone feels including our own children, they feel heard and understood and just validated like this experience is true for you right now. It actually allows you to move through it instead of getting stuck there

Unknown:

and you feel closer to the parent because you feel less like they are pulling you forward or pushing you back, but more like they're just walking with you, holding your hand. Because even if, as a parent, you feel like you're not doing enough, because that might be the case if you just sit there and try to think in your head, I need to No, I'm not. I'm going to suppress my advice. I'm going to suppress my judgment. I think parents, a lot of the times, feel like they're not doing enough, like they're not enough, like they're not being active in that relationship, but many of the times that we don't need it over activity, we just need someone there, and we just, you know, parents to be that sounding board so that we can put everything out on the board and be able to look at it ourselves without anyone tried to move the pieces already,

Tina Gosney:

right? That would be such a gift to your child to be able to do

Clarice Paulson:

that. Be really nice. Yeah.

Tina Gosney:

There's also the second thing that you guys said when I asked you, like, Okay, what do parents need to know? We brought up this feeling of parents think that when their child makes the decision that is like contrary to what they want or what they have expected or the story that they've been telling themselves, they see their child go a different way, that they have all this feeling of failure on themselves, like I have failed as a parent, which is huge in the parenting world. I have to tell you feeling like you have failed. But also, and I tell parents this quite often, it's not like to put your worth. They're they're measuring their own worth as a person on what their child is doing. It's not fair to you, and it's not fair to the parent either. So tell me what your experiences or what do you have, what your thoughts about that idea?

Unknown:

I have a mom who she always whenever I present something and I told her I was going to be on this podcast, she knows I'm not throwing her under the bus. I think she's incredible, but she does have that kind of blatant response, response of saying it's because I'm a terrible mom, or it's because I failed you, which is really hard, because as a young adult, I feel like I am coming to her and asking for reassurance, and instead of getting reassurance from her that I am doing enough, or that something that I'm struggling with can be resolved. I'm asking for reassurance, but having her flip it back on her and say, I take this personally. Instead of asking for reassurance and getting it, I'm asking for reassurance, reassurance, and then having to give it, it puts me in a very difficult position, because there's in no way, shape or form that was anything of what I was implying. It doesn't have to do with my mom in any way, because it's my own personal life. But all of a sudden I'm having to act like I'm more put together than I am on a subject that I was feeling weak in and coming to her to strengthen, and then I'm having to be strong for both of us now. And so that's my relationship with that understanding of I understand where she's coming from, of feeling sort of like what I do is dependent on her parenting, but we take things very personally nowadays. I feel like we take a lot of things as if it's something against us when we fail to notice the people that are around us living and experiencing their own lives. Yeah,

Tina Gosney:

yeah. What do you think, Caleb, you're there, nodding your head,

Caleb Price:

Oh, yeah. Well, because, I mean, I really relate to that, because my mom used to be like that. Like, immensely. I remember growing up in high school before she found coaching just so enthralled with this idea that she wasn't good enough, that if you know, we messed up or things didn't go the way that she'd intended, she's like, Well, I'm a failure. Clearly failed as a mom, and you can't talk to someone about that, like, about what you want, you just feel like you're a burden. And with this idea of being a burden, you're like, Well, clearly I'm causing my mom this amount of pain. One, it teaches us a falsehood about how emotions work. And two, I think primarily, is we just don't want to experience that feeling. We don't want to experience and think that we're a burden. And so we clean things up. We don't talk about how we're really feeling, we aren't authentic, and we become people pleasers like that, like, that's just the truth of it, yeah, like, it's just or we we rebel completely, and we don't want to be in that kind of situation. And so then no wonder when, like, you know, later down the road, our parents might wonder, like, why doesn't this person talk to us? Or why do they feel like? Why do like? All of a sudden they seem entirely different than who they were? It's probably because they are like the this is their first time they get to experience who they want to be as a person. Like, I mean, I got really lucky to experience like. This is a silly example about like music, like I got to practice the violin, and I even had this dream of being a musician and composing music. And my dad, like, let me have that dream. But, like, I can imagine a lot of parents being, like, strict about what a person is. You know, when it comes to the like, small things like career and music and but like big things, like choosing a partner in the future, who you date, where you're going into your life, like religion and all these major beliefs, how you just choose to live your philosophy, like if that is under control or under attack. Because every time you try to bring it up or have an honest conversation about it, you basically are. Have this concept presented before you that, oh, my parents a failure, like, I don't want them to feel that way, or I'm a failure. I'm a burden, and I don't want to feel that way. Then we can't open up, we can't be authentic, we can't be ourselves until we exit that situation, and then that might be the first time that we're actually like, either coming to ourselves, or we might be even motivated to, just like, go as far left as possible, whatever the direction is, like my parents said this, so I'm going this because I just don't want to turn out that way.

Tina Gosney:

Right, right. Hey, Caleb, would you there's some people who won't understand what a people pleaser is? Oh yes. How would you describe a people pleaser?

Caleb Price:

Oh yes. Okay, so a people pleaser, I can say this because I have been this, and I continue to be this in or choose to at least, is that is someone who puts on a front of like in terms of their actions, saying one thing, but feeling something different on the inside. So for example, like, if my sister asks, like, Hey, can you take me to the airport? Like, I can say, like, Sure, I'd love to do that, even though, deep down I don't really like I and I'm kind of hiding that. And you know, that's like, a small thing when it comes to favors and whatnot, but deep down, it might build resentment, it builds passive aggressiveness. It just builds this idea that like we're not being true to ourselves and how we feel. And so when it comes to young adults, it's so easy because they might really want to do something, yet they're afraid to tell their parents about it, because they're afraid of how they'll react, potentially because they might think they're a failure, or potentially they might get really angry, or just say, How could you do that? Just in shock? And so then we choose to hide that, and when we choose to hide that and present a different person, that's a people pleaser,

Tina Gosney:

yeah? And in essence, it's an attempt to control the way that person is thinking about you, right? So you're saying, Yes, I'll take you to the airport, because secretly I want you to think that I'm a good person, but I'm really resentful that I don't want to do it, and so I'm going to be mad about it the whole time, whereas, if Yeah, I'll take you to the airport, not really what I want to do, but it's okay. I'll do it and just letting it go, but it's an attempt to to control how someone is thinking about you. Clarice, what were you going to say? Oh, I just was

Unknown:

going to add that it's kind of trying to live up to the expectations that you believe other people have about you, you know, or the expectations that you have set on a certain thing, just because I'm a people pleaser as well. So I understand where you see, like, feel like i. Expectations that in order to meet them, you have to not suck up, but almost again, put up that front that you may not be truthful to the feelings that you're having in relation to the position that's being asked of you. Yeah,

Tina Gosney:

so when parents are just living into like, I'm such a failure, you've turned out this way. You made this choice. That means I have failed. How is that? I mean, we've, we've kind of got into it already, but tell me, like an overall feeling of that makes me feel

Clarice Paulson:

fill in the blank here, I like that. Kayla brought up resentment, because I think that's the biggest feeling that comes up, is almost a resentment. It's a hard kind of disappointment that you have with your parents. Because again, you you begin to start to hold back a little bit. Because again, if I'm asking for reassurance and having to give it, I'm going to have to give it every time that I show up. And so I'm going to be starting to hold myself back. But I think some thought that just came to me was just how relational beings we are like that's just in our nature. And so it kind of makes sense that a lot of us are people pleasers because and yet, at the same time, we need to understand that we can get validation from other people, and it's okay, Molly Claire, just in her last email that she sent out on her email thread, talked about outside validation and external validation, and I think a lot of the times, that's what we search for, and is in our parents or the people that around us that we feel like we should be getting respect from and being relational beings, like we search for validation, then In other people, and we get it from other people and for them then to feel like we can't find that validation, or that we have to give it to someone else. We have to be able to balance when to give validation and when to kind of keep our mouth shut or hold back from giving advice, or when is it someone else's turn to get that reassurance or that so that there isn't resentment being held or disappointment being held because we are giving each other the validation that we need in the right timing of, okay, I need to validate my mom right now, or my mom needs to validate my experience. Sorry. I know that was off topic with what comes up, but I think and resentment are the are the two main things? I think Caleb mentioned shame before,

Tina Gosney:

yeah, is that how you would feel in that blank too? Caleb,

Caleb Price:

yeah. I mean, I was just gonna say, you just feel ashamed. You feel like, like something. Yeah, it's either wrong with you or you just, like, feel this. You feel hurt because, like, your parent basically has said, like, I'm a failure because of how you turned out. And you're like, that is you're talking about me, about a human being, right? You're talking about the choice that I made, you know, maybe the choice to be a lawyer, the choice to vote the Certain Way, and I wanted to be vocal about it. Maybe, you know, I just started to, you know, be an activist in certain things. Or maybe I wanted to experience, you know, different religions, or, like, just deep down, or, yeah, like, especially, even like, just like who you choose to marry, like when you present that person and your parents, like, well, like, clearly, I failed, you're just like, Ow, because you're saying that I'm the failure. You're saying that I am the reason for that, like, I'm the reason for the hurt. And so of course, you're not going to want to show up or be around or be open about these things, and then, in turn, there's a dialog that's going inside your head, questioning everything, starting to doubt things, and ultimately, just not building a trust with yourself, because that's one of the biggest things that you learn when you're growing up, when you're leading the house for the first time, is that it's All on you, like you know what's best for you. You know what the decisions are, and if you don't, you're gonna figure it out. And so when we come to our parents for advice and reassurance and all these things, it's so easy for I think them to not trust us and not trust that we do know what's best for us, or that they do, and that's where the you know, that's where the hurt comes in. That's where from the idea of failure.

Tina Gosney:

This kind of relates back to what we were saying on the last topic in the like, the very thing that parents are afraid of they're creating because they're feeling like they're a failure expressing or in in some way, maybe they don't say those words, but you always know, even if they're not, the words are not being said. You always get the idea like, right, because that most of our communication is not verbal, so it comes out in one way or another. But. But then they're creating that sense of failure and you you as well. So they're just kind of transferring that same type of beating myself up, not trusting myself, questioning all my decisions and my and the things that I've done, and just transferring that over to you as well. Yeah, as we look at wrapping this up, I want to, I want you to kind of describe like because you guys live in a very different world than we did when we were growing up, and your same age in your young adult years. And I think parents often will think that, Oh, isn't the world just similar? Is when I was that age, people just dated and they got married in their early 20s, and then they had kids, and things are different now. And I don't think parents really realize how different they are, because they think that you should be doing the same things that they did when they were your age. So can you just kind of describe, okay, this is kind of like how my world is a little bit different than you might think that it is. Who wants to go first.

Clarice Paulson:

That's hard, because I feel like we kind of were joking about this because we were talking about dating, and I kind of mentioned that I don't even feel like I can talk about it, because even though I'm living in it, it's constantly moving, and it feels very hard to describe. And yet, there's just a different culture. There's a different the what's normal is completely different. And I think sometimes our parents forget the struggle that they went through in that time, because they're able to look back on it, and kind of, our brain will kind of blot out the parts that maybe were a little bit difficult. But we're in our difficult parts right now, and it just looks a little bit different because things are not the same. You know, dating is a little bit different with cell phones and texting, and there's Tik Tok, and I don't even know, like, it's just a whole nebulous of things that feel like they're constantly changing. Caleb, I don't know if you want to add anything. I think, yeah,

Caleb Price:

no. I mean, I think you're exactly right. You're hitting the nail on the head, and that the landscape of just living your life is entirely different, because one you are now projecting yourself on a stage in front of 1000s of people, and as well as you have access to 1000s of people, versus even extend it even farther, 10s of 1000s, if we need to, because, like before, you just went about and lived your life, and you had your friends, you had your community, you knew some People, you had family, and that's all you knew. That was your world, like that was your bubble, even if you felt like you were going out there and you were out going, you were in a bubble. Now we don't live in a bubble anymore. We live in a world where we're exposed to everything, like everything you can ever want or imagine is on the internet. Humor has taken an entirely crazy, weird scale. It is wild and bewildering, as well as just like how, you know, just like society colliding, especially with religion, I think that is a big thing where there's a lot of conflict over can these things reside, or can I exist in both of these things? One where I think this is right and I also think this is right, and so there's a lot of conflict there. And I think the easiest thing to go to is dating like, instead of going around and talking to people like, it is a different landscape. Yes, I do think we should go out and talk to people, but I also have to put out there that you can also just open up your phone and access any person that you want that is deciding to put yourself out there in a different way. Communication is now through words, written versus speaking most of the time, and so it's just like there's so many different facets. But at the end of the day, I love what Clarice said, is that, like it is different, but at the same time, it's probably not that different, because we just aren't recognizing what we went through in the past. As parents, I imagine we look at the past with some rose tinted glasses, or at least we present that to our children. Like for me, my parents, they met up BYU and like she was at a party that he was at, and his roommate was my mom's cousin. And it just worked out. They didn't talk about how, you know, my dad got the impression to marry her, and was freaked out about it, and doubted that impression, and almost broke up with her several times, to the point that my mom, my grandma, said, You can't marry this person. Basically, like that discussion didn't come up until I went to them and I told them I was talking about, like my second breakup or something like that, thinking I was a failure, thinking. 15, I didn't know what I was doing, and my mom just tells the story casually, and I'm just like, well, where have you been hiding this? Like I just thought you guys knew what you were doing. I thought I was a problem, versus understanding that, yes, we live in a different world. That means we are the ones that are going to have to learn how to navigate it, and parents just get to be along for the ride. Parents get to point out things. If they want to, they get to offer advice. But at the end of the day, I think what we've talked about is listening, listening to what we're going through, and just being there that is what's going to matter without kind of stressing this expectation that, like you have to do a certain thing, you have to be married before you're 23 you have to, you know, be graduated and be making six figures at this age, like you have to, you should be in this religion, and you should have this many kids like those things. I'll put it bluntly. Don't matter, because it's not your life.

Clarice Paulson:

I like that you mentioned it just worked out, because it kind of goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning, of how parents want it to be worked out. And they know everything's going to work out in one way or another, but they don't want their kids to be working working it out through it almost. And we want it to work out without working out our way through it. But there's just different aspects at play. It kind of takes out the whole struggle that we have, the experience that our parents probably had to you know, your experience with your parents and knowing the actual story is like, Oh, those are those rose colored glasses taken off right now? We're living that. We don't. We don't have the privilege of looking through it with rose colored glasses, seeing, Oh, it's gonna work out. We can say that a million times as students, as you know, parents, we can say it's gonna work out, but it doesn't really seem like it until we actually work it out.

Tina Gosney:

Such good insight, you guys, if you had one last thing to tell parents, like I want them to know this, is there something that comes up for you?

Clarice Paulson:

My go to is probably love will always work. And I love that, because love, love works. It really does work, and at the end of the day, it's the reason that we're here. It's how we can always come out of a situation feeling good about ourselves, good about the people that we're surrounding ourselves with. It's if we're able to love them, and if we're able to receive love.

Tina Gosney:

I'm not surprised that you said that, Clarice, because the lot of the discussion today that we've had together has been you talking about love, so I'm not surprised at all that that's the last thing that you said. So thank you so much. Caleb, what do you think is there one thing that, like, I want parents to know this, that maybe that we haven't covered yet?

Caleb Price:

I would say, just quit worrying. We're gonna turn out just fine. Um, I mean, of course, you're allowed to worry, but recognizing that what you're doing might be having an adverse effect that you're not aware of on your children. When you choose to worry, when you choose to try and be controlled, to fix things, to think you're a failure and that you want things to work out perfectly. Like just let it happen, like your kids are going to mess up. They're going to go through this journey. But when we expand the perspective of life and understanding that they have years on this side of the veil and on the next, like they have years to be themselves, to figure out their life, like let it happen, just as you went through it, and just as your parents let it happen to you, they're going to be able to find exactly the job. They're going to be able to find exactly the person they need to be with. They're going to find their path when it comes to either the gospel, even if they vary, even if things don't work out well, even if they truly do fail. So in the end, let's let go a little bit and do what Clarice said, and just love them and enjoy the experience with them, like have some fun. Want to be with your kids and not worry about what the you know, there's no need to have any of this pressure, because they're going to figure it out and it's going to be better this way.

Tina Gosney:

That's awesome. Thank you guys so much for being here today. I really appreciate you letting me pick your brain, giving some advice to parents, just letting us inside like an inside view of the life of a young adult. I hope you enjoyed this interview that I did with these two amazing young adults, Caleb and Clarice. I love how they were so candid about their experience with their parents. I think it's very useful for us to get that kind of insight information. Now, if you are tired of walking on eggshells, you're tired of feeling heartbroken over that distance between you and your adult child, or you and anyone else in your family, I want to invite you to join Bridge to Connection. This is going to show you a better way to operate in your family relationships, there are eight short lessons, and in those eight short lessons, you are going to learn powerful tools to stay grounded, respond with confidence, create safety in your relationship without needing them to change anything. First, you're going to walk away feeling empowered, hopeful and deeply connected to this person that you want to be, no matter what is happening around you. There is a link in the show notes where you can find out more. I hope to see you there.