What Teens Wish Their Parents Knew: Creating Open Dialogues

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Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a speaker, musician, writer and entrepreneur.

Michael Chaison has spent more than 20 years speaking to kids and youth and organizations on the topics of identifying purpose, leadership and personal growth. His book is called Things We Wish Our Parents Knew. Michael is also a father of two. He joins us today from from Calgary.

Thank you so much for taking the time.

You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

Really interesting background that you've amassed over 20 years, largely speaking to youth and young people. Take us through a little bit for those who may not be familiar with some of your work with kids.

Sure. Ever Since I was 14 years old, I started off as a musician originally from Houston, Texas.

Realize that there's always power in moments, creating moments that can change everything, good, bad, whatever that looks like for whatever situation somebody might be in. Over the years, I realized that these gatherings had the ability to do something great.

And so ever since 14, kind of being on the stage, got older, met my wife on one of the tours I was on. And then we realized that there was something that we wanted to offer that would bring a little bit of light to the world. Right.

So it wasn't just maybe an event, something more than that. And we founded a Canadian registered charity. We're 16 years old now. Crazy.

And since then we've been on gymnasium floors, theaters, stages, and spoken to over 500,000 youth and parents and teachers and just using the gift of our story to hopefully create a connection. And I think that's the one thing that we're all searching for, right.

Is that what is that solid connection that's going to help us get through the good times, the hard times, and just the times that everything seems all right.

When you talk about connection and certainly the span of time that you've been doing this over 20 years, so much has changed across the world with youth, with families, with parenting, all of that in really impactful and profound ways.

Ways if you were to try to isolate or summarize some of the key themes around connection and around what teens want from their parents when it comes to their parents understanding them better. Where do you land?

That's a loaded question. It's a great question. I'll give you just a Little background of why I think we have something extremely valuable to offer in this space.

Uh, first of all, I. I don't have a degree. I'm not like a. A doctor or a researcher. Um, I. I'm. I like to create moments. That's my thing now as a speaker that does events.

One of the biggest things for me is, how do you know what you're saying? Is it going to. Is it landing? Is it helpful? Is it actually moving something to whatever the goal might be? Good, hope, hopeful, inspiring, motivating.

Um, and what I did, Leanne, is after one event, you see, the kids would come into the theaters or the gymnasiums, and they didn't pay a ticket to come see me. Right? Like, so, in other words, they didn't really have a choice. And so my job, number one, was to disarm them. Right.

Let's find something right now that would be helpful for all of us to understand. We're out of class for the next 45 minutes. Oh, okay. And I start every message like this.

I say, I did not show up today to try to get you to believe what I believe or act how I act. The goal for me is that we can walk out of here more inspired than when you came in.

And if we can rally around that, I promise there's going to be something that you can take away from this. So that's kind of how we started the platform. And then one day I said, I really want to know something from you.

And I had these pieces of paper, and I said, here's the statement. Things I wish my parents knew. I want you to write to us during the break. We're not going to give, like, a specific time for this.

If anything has helped you today, if you would be courageous enough to share that, I don't want your name on it. I want this to be anonymous. I want to know from your heart. And little did I know that that exchange, in other words, that's what they could offer.

And when they started to write, like, I was actually blown away. Leanne, I'm looking over, I'm like, what are they even writing? I was curious. And then 10 letters, 20 letters, 100 letters, a thousand letters.

Every event just started piling up. And as we started to kind of dig.

Dive in and dig into this content, I said, oh, my goodness, if the parent knew, I have to believe that they would do something or they would. They would step into that world.

And so for us, and when we go back to the connection that you talked about, we only share what's Allowed to be shared or talked about. You ever notice that, like, we kind of have like almost these guardrails that are, that are unseen and many relationships.

And so, especially with our kids, like, they're. They're not the same version as they were six months ago. Right.

They're growing up so fast in a world that is so fast paced and they've got questions, they've got moments that they're navigating, but they're only going to talk about typically what's allowed to be talked about. And the thing that breaks my heart on that is what happens if they bring something up that's maybe off, off the charts. Right.

When they're actually really searching and seeking for guidance and direction. Right. And so the guardrails, I love using that analogy is because the guardrails, what they do is they keep us in check whenever we lose control.

And we've all been there before, but it also protects us, our kids and our families when somebody on the other side loses control. Right. And so when we started to kind of frame this in that, in that sense, we wanted to look at, okay, what were the trends?

What are the things that we're hearing most about from these kids?

And when we started to uncover that, what it did for me, and I want to be very like, as transparent as I can with you, is it was almost as if a mirror got put up in front of me as a dad, as someone that has kids as well, because being on the stage and proclaiming a great message of inspiration and hope, and at least we think we believe it is the version of me that the people see on stage is often a different version that my family gets to see. And so we got to take the information because it was anonymous, and start to have some pretty courageous conversations around that. Now why anonymous?

Anonymous. Because whenever we've shared the letters and the content with parents, a lot of times the parents will say, that's not my kid.

There's no way that's my kid. Thinking about that, talking about that, asking, and it's good, it's funny, it's bad, it's everything kind of in the story.

And the interesting thing to me is I said, well, if you believe this is not your kid, then I will probably say that it might be one of your kids friends that might be asking this question.

So one of the parents brought a list of the top seven that we had kind of seen and they put it in front of their kid and their kid was like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And I said, just ask this Question. Do any of your kids, any of your friends maybe, do you feel could relate to any of these things?

That's when the conversation changed.

So lots to unpack there. But let's start with. Why do you believe that kids, teens, young adults have so much.

They struggle so much to share their emotions, share their feelings, their desires, their fears with their parents?

Expectations, maybe. I think that's a big one. Unspoken expectations.

Expectations that we create, you know, even for us, as, I mean, we're still a son and a daughter too, right? We still have parents. They might not be with us anymore, but there's that thing that. That we've been entrusted this gift of life that we want to.

We get to a point where we realize we want to do something remarkable with that, and we can. But I think the biggest thing that happens is comparison, right? We look over at our friends, you know, families, and we only see the highlight reels.

We don't see the behind the scenes. Take it, take it further. We see that online, right? We scroll, we scroll, we scroll. Oh, I want to be like this. I want to have that. I want to do this.

If I could just, you know, have this many followers, then there would be significance. And. And I believe that for me, that was my story, too, is like we constantly compare our lives to other people's highlight reels.

But what I'm comparing myself to is what I see in the mirror. And a lot of times, that's the challenge. And I share this with. With teenagers and parents and corporations.

The greatest obstacle I believe in life that we will ever have to face has little to do maybe with a tragedy or a difficult situation, though, that's. That's big. But the biggest obstacle, I believe, is the reflection that we do see in the mirror. To be able to understand that we're not perfect.

We're in process. Today is the starting point of what's going to come tomorrow. The decisions we make today get to determine that story we get to tell tomorrow.

And so I believe that that is a big thing with the young people that we get to serve is they're trying to find their place, but everything is exposed now. Everything that we do. So many of us that didn't grow up in the.

In the technology world, we didn't know that there was a camera right around the corner that could capture a bad day of me, and then that could get exposed or whatever. So there's almost this guarded protection, right? And unfortunately, we bring that everywhere that we go.

And so my hope is that as families, we can say you know what? This is the place that it's like coming home safe, right?

This is a safe place that we can be honest and that we can talk and we can share and we can get to know where we're really at and what we can do to help.

So on that point, what can parents do to create that safe space in order to let their teens or their young children in to have those courageous conversations that you alluded to?

Ask questions, Ask questions. I think repetition is always one of the greatest tools that any communicator has, any coach, any guide, any.

Any person of influence in someone else's life. And the reason why, and this is what we've just learned this in our own journey, is that we can hear the same thing a thousand times.

But then that thousand and one time you hear, it's like, oh, I got it, I get it. And you're like, what do you mean? I've been telling you this a thousand times. Clean your room, do this, do that.

And all of a sudden they own it and they understand it. But the only reason why they, I think they can own it at that point is because it's been. It's almost been.

The foundation has been laid a thousand times so that now they can take that and do something with it. So here's one thing on that, because you might say, well, I do talk to my kids. I do. But I get these answers. Here's the biggest one.

I'm sure if anybody's watching this, you've been there. How are you doing? What's the answer? Good, Fine, Fine. How was your day? Good, Fine. And as a parent, you're like, okay, great talk. That was awesome.

We got nowhere.

What we've learned is that those questions, even though there's only one word responses, is the questions that become a foundational point of their day. They almost need that to know that we have no idea what kind of day they had.

But that one kind of grounding space, that grounding question, that face to face moment, all of a sudden gave permission to that one time when they're like, how was your day? And then it just gets quiet for a moment. Buckle up, buckle up. And just allow you to receive.

Because our kids are going to talk to us and, and reveal to us things that they don't know how to articulate the way that we do.

And maybe that's one thing that would be helpful for maybe your audience listening and our audience that will be tuning in too on this is that just give your kid and yourself a little bit of Grace with that, because they might be saying one thing, but feeling a completely different thing. But at least there's words starting to come out. We're starting to put the pieces together. Right?

And so that's one thing, maybe that I would suggest as a reminder is that just because they say something doesn't mean that's the thing yet, but it might be the path to get there.

It's a very important point because as parents, as adults, we probably tend to look at things through the lens of the age that we are, as opposed to the age of the child that we're talking to. And so there's that disconnect. So certainly a very important point. You speak to these kids, you try to inspire them and motivate them.

They start the letters that.

That you talked about, writing those letters and how they're feeling to their parents, and then it leads you to taking those letters and writing this book and putting that together. What was the tipping point for you to make that decision to collect them in this book as you have?

The tipping point, I think, for me, was the letters were staring back at me like, we've got thousands of these, and they're in binders.

And we knew that there was something really special here, not just for us, but it was meant to be shared in any platform, whether you're a business leader, you have employees that most likely, many of them have kids, a team, same thing, a school community. And I wanted to respond to this in a way that was honoring the gift that was shared with us.

I believe that these letters are, though they are nameless, have a name behind them, they have a story behind them. And what I share with the kids, too, is I said, writing this to us is your gift.

And it might not change your story immediately, but it might have the event, have the ability to eventually change someone else's story. So you got to be a part of that, not even knowing that. And so when we started the process of the book, I wanted to approach it like I do an event.

And so every chapter has stories about my life, kind of what I share with the. With the students at our events. And then within the book, we kind of incorporate a few of the snippets of letters throughout.

And then at the back of the book, there's a couple of pages that are just, you know, full of the letters there. And then we take it from the book onto the social platform that we've just launched, and we actually showcase the letters every day.

We do one letter going out there, and it's our Response to honor back the gift that was given to us.

So I'm curious.

You talk about thousands of these letters, and I'm sure it was a process for you to, to go through them and it sort of distill it down to, to the point of getting it into a book format. But are there any examples of letters that really struck you that come to mind?

Oh, my, yes. I think the, the, the most, the one that stopped me in my tracks actually was. It was things. Actually, I brought some letters to show you.

Here's one of the binders that we have. And I don't know if you can see that, but it's just things we wish our parents knew. And they just write. I mean, some of these, they write a lot.

Some of them write just a little. But on one of these letters, it was just two letters written really big. And the two letters were me. Things I wish my parents knew was me.

And I remember looking at that and I was like, whoa. They just want to be known. One of the biggest things is I just want to spend more time with them. Wait, wait, what?

You want to spend more time, but it doesn't seem like you do. Yeah, because I'm this age, we might not have all the same things in common, but I love you.

The number one thing that we hear in almost every letter at some point, not all of them, but if we put them all together is how much I love them.

That was a moving moment for me, that even though they would spew out all of these, you know, things of, you know, I wish you would give me space or I wish you would this, but I want my parents to know how much I love them. And that was the moving moment for me as well.

It's like, let's now bring this in as conversation starters, as conversation kind of triggers almost to say, what about this? What about that? Tell me what you're excited about today. Tell me what you're struggling with today. Another piece.

Let me share with you some things that, that I'm going through right now.

And we got to be mindful as parents, like, we don't want to over share at things we don't want to, you know, put on our kids what's not meant to be put on them to carry kind of thing. But they see it, they see the version of us and they feel it too.

If there's a struggle in the home, if there's a tension in the home, if there's an uncertainty in the home, they carry that and they want to do everything they can to not add any more to that. So a lot of kids, we've learned, don't necessarily share because they don't want to be a burden.

They see how busy we are, how tired we are, how overwhelmed, all the things that we're doing. But if we were to hear that from our kids, I think we said, wait a minute, but you're one of the most important gifts in my world.

I want to give you that time. Right. So.

So on that point, you've said that, you know, oftentimes teens feel unseen and unheard, even in a loving home. Take us through why you think that happened. How does that happen?

Unseen and unheard. I'll go back to what I mentioned earlier. It's the unspoken expectations that they may have and also the changes that they're going through.

What we've learned is that for a long time, I thought change was the hard thing, and it is. But there's reasons why we change. We change when we have to change.

Let's say we break our arm, and we have to all of a sudden learn how to write with this hand. If you're not that. If you write with a different hand. Uh, but it's not the change, I think that is the hard part.

I think it's the transition of change. Right. That. That's the thing that makes us uncomfortable, because what will happen maybe in junior high, now I'm in high school. Wow.

That's a different rhythm of life for many people. That's a different group of friends. A lot of times they might go to a different high school. And so with a lot of things that are.

That are happening, it's like, we want to stand out, and we want to know that we have a place. But at the same time, we're afraid to be exposed. And so when we take that in, that's where the, you know, not being noticed or unseen can happen.

Right. And so I think it's just the constant reminders of, like, I want you to know that I'm here. I want you to know that we can talk about this.

And again, a lot of times we don't. We don't share it. I mean, think about our own lives.

How much of what we went through in our high school and junior high careers do our parents really know about. Right. And some people, like, oh, I share everything. Okay, that's. That's amazing. That's rare.

But because of the home life and whether it was difficult, hard, whatever mine was, had its challenges. Look at you today, Leanne. Look at what you're Doing for thousands and thousands of parents. That's. That's remarkable.

I'm honored by you for that, and that's inspiring to me. And that's my hope for this, is that it's remarkable that that kid shared. And I want you to know that you can, too.

And maybe it might be just to write down some things and then we'll talk about it in a week, we'll talk about it in a month. Right? So there's.

We got to get creative that way, because what might work for one group or one family or one relationship might not be the same for the other. So I'm very cautious to be like, if you do this, you're going to get that.

All I do know is, is that if we engage and we show in authenticity that we are here and we love you. And sometimes love doesn't mean accepting everything that goes on.

Sometimes that means that we've got to say, okay, I see where you're at, but you're still the parent. You still got a guide. We are still in control. So I want to be friends with my kids. What? You want to be friends with your kids?

Are you diminishing your role then? And I say that, and they're like, what do you mean? Because you will always be so much more than a friend.

You will have a connection that is more than just a friendship connection.

So, yes, you can be friendly, but the goal may be, is that once our kids move on from our home, what if it looked like that they wanted to come back, they wanted to spend time, go deeper, or if they wanted to spend time with their brothers and sisters, that's the kind of goal, I think, for the parenting of the family, that would be pretty remarkable, right?

Absolutely.

Now, you talk about in your book how you have woven in elements of your own story throughout, in addition to the letters from the kids, and I'm curious, are there specific highlights of your lived experience, Michael, that have shaped your interest in what you do and what you've done for over 20 years in this space?

That's why I'm here. That's why I'm here. And not perfect at it. I'm still growing.

Just as a snapshot from my life, my parents divorce when I was three years old, broke my heart. I found myself in a place that was not understanding and took all that onto myself. Right. It's because of me.

My dad was a musician, my mom was a roadie, and they got together, and they got together and decided to get married because they thought that was what everybody expected. Them to do. My mom had a really hard journey. My mom ended up in prison, in and out her whole life.

To this day, the relationship with my mom has been complicated. We're closer than we've ever been because of this book now, and I'm very grateful for that.

But I know what it's like to be sitting in a theater with a motivational speaker up there being like, what is this really all about? I don't care about what this guy has to say, and I share it in the book. I got called out by that guy because I was making all my friends laugh.

And he made me stand up. He said, hey, funny man, stand up. And of course, I was the class clown, so I stood up, and he goes, do you think you're funny?

I said, well, clearly, I'm funnier than you. And he says, well, since you don't get the attention at home that you need. And I'm like, oh, this guy's got my number. He's good.

And I told him about my family, and I told him about my dad because I was proud of my dad. Right? He was there. He raised me as a single father for the majority of my life. But then he asked the question that called my bluff.

He asked the question, tell me about your mom. And at that point, I didn't know how to talk about it. And he was respectful. And this is in front of, like, 800,000 kids in our theater.

And he says, I'm not going to make you talk about that, but will you answer me one question? I said, what? He goes, do you love your mom? And I remember there was a silence in that theater, and I clenched my fists together.

And I was tired of pretending. I was tired of, like, I had questions, and I wanted to be honest.

And remember what I told you earlier is that sometimes what we say is not necessarily what we really mean, but we just have to start. And I looked at that guy, and I said, no, no. I don't know how things end up. How could I love someone that. That walked out.

I didn't know the background of my mom's story, though. And he said this one statement. He goes, if I can prove to you that you love your mom, would you sit down and listen to my talk?

I said, give it your best shot. And with one statement, everything changed for me. He said, if you didn't love your mom, it wouldn't hurt. Got it.

Powerful.

And I sat down and I realized that there's more to the story than I knew at that moment. And that began the journey for me. And that began also.

The inspiration for me is that if I can help be a part of being a light to one kid, one person that might be questioning life and thinking, I don't belong here. One question from a kid that says, hey, I got this dream and this idea, and I want to pursue it. I don't know if I'm good enough.

But to have that one story kind of speak into your life in that moment, because the moments create movements. What kind of movement that creates? That's up to you, and that's up to me.

And so we've made a commitment to kind of keep showing up, and if a thousand people are there, great. But I will always do for one what we hope to do for a thousand. And so that goes back to the story of us being here on this podcast, I think, too.

Yeah, there's a book, and I'm honored and grateful for all of our supporters that helped us get here to this point. But really what matters most is conversations like this between you and I.

Learning from each other, sharpening each other, helping each other, and then taking the gift that, Leanne, you've been given because you've been given a powerful gift and sharing it with the world, letting them take that now and then do something even greater with it. That's our hope.

And, you know, as you speak, we're living in a time where being a parent has never been more uniquely challenging in human history, it's safe to say. And being a young person has never been more challenging for all of the reasons that you, you know, some of which you've alluded to.

A confluence of things are making it challenging to be a young person and to be a parent these days. So on that note, then, what can parents do in terms of, like, how often, for example, should they ask their teens, what do you need me to know?

Getting that conversation. You talked about curiosity and asking questions and all those things. But do you feel that there's a sense of urgency for.

For parents to get this kind of conversation going? Because we are living in a time where we're in the middle of a youth epidemic globally, of mental health issues and other things.

And some of these issues can probably be traced back to what's going on in the family.

Absolutely. I think there's three things on my heart that I've been kind of leaning into in this, and number one was emotional intelligence. Right.

Really understanding what the emotions are, because then we can have different conversations. Social awareness of knowing, like, what. What is my place in this moment around Me, the people around me, should I be here? Should I not be here?

And the third was relational responsibility. Relational responsibility. What do I owe to this, this relationship? And what do I think I owe that I don't actually owe anything to? Right.

Because we have this pressure. It's like we've got our young people becoming counselors to their friends and wanting to help because they don't know how to ask. Right.

They don't know how to ask, ask for help. And they are. We're just maybe not seeing it the way that we want to see it or that we need to see it. One thing that we've noticed with the.

In the mental health space is a lot of times if a kid shares something to their parent or guardian that they are struggling with anxiety or depression or whatever their struggle may be, there's a sense of the parent feels that it's their fault, that it's their fault. And so there's almost a fear in the parent to be like, oh, man, if I go do this, then people are going to look at me different. No, no.

That's one of the most loving things you can do. And that's even putting a lot of times our ego aside, to be like, no, I'm going to do whatever I can for you.

And there's so many people that are out there willing to help.

That's the thing that kind of shocked me with that, too, is that sometimes we're thinking about the end goal when maybe the answer is, let's pull back and think about what's the next step. I can do that. Our kids can actually do that part. And they can do that willingly, by the way.

They might fight a little bit, but it's easier to help them take one step than it is to run a mile. Right. And so in this time of being a parent and. And being a kid, it's like, let's allow them. Let's not assume that we know what it's like.

Even though we've been there, we were there at a different time, though we were there with different circumstances, our kids are navigating life in a very different world today. And remember that we are the parents.

And so for us, sometimes to do the hard thing is to step in and say, there's something not sitting right in my heart. I need to know what's going on. What kind of conversations are you having, kind of thing. And they might fight for it.

They might fight and try to yell and scream, because that yelling and that screaming and that fighting is what they're feeling on the inside. And they need you to help break through that. And that's not every case.

And however somebody takes that statement, I just said, you know what that is for you?

It might be, you know, what they're talking on online or in their gaming, but that is one thing that a lot of the kids shared with us is that when it comes to technology, understand that when we turn off a game, it's not like when you were a kid. We're turning off the game for a lot of people. So just give us like two minutes so we can tell everybody we got to turn it off.

Little things like that that just kind of give us windows and answers to how to navigate certain things at different stages in life.

Michael, you've shared with us a little bit about your childhood. You have spoken to kids for the last, again, over 20 years. You are in that space.

You're on the front lines as a parent, curious as to in what ways, if any, have you been impacted in your own parenting of your own children who are 12 and 16 from all these various learnings through all these various sources.

I love my kids, I love my wife. We've been married 20 years now. Our daughter Hannah is 16. Our son Simon is 12. And very different, very different kids, very different stages of life.

I think what it's taught me with my own kids. I share a story in the book about my daughter Hannah.

It was when she was little, she was in dance and she dressed up and they were doing Elsa the Frozen show or whatever. And I got home from an event, it was about a week long tour.

And when I walked into the, into the home, I mean, she was ecstatic and excited to be like, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad. She wanted to tell me something so bad. I wanted to get home, I wanted to finish a couple emails, shut it down, and then I was 100% there for her.

Dad, dad, dad, watch me dance, watch me dance, watch me dance. And my wife is in the background watching this go down. I said, hannah, just give me a second.

And I'm on my computer, she shuts my laptop and I'm like, you have my attention. She goes, dad, watch me dance. And I said, go ahead.

She literally did about three spins, jumped in the air, got distracted, took off, went upstairs into a room. And I turn around, I look at Melissa and she's just smiling at me. And I'm like, ah. What did she want me to know?

She wanted me to know that she wanted to know that I knew that she was the most important person in the room. Right then. And so these little moments, and there's so many more. I mean, we could, we could talk for hours about this that we, that we go through.

And even my, my son and his, I mean, he's just, everywhere that he goes, he brings joy, but there's also struggle. So I don't want anybody to think that just because we have a book saying things we wish our parents knew, we're still learning this together.

And that's why we want to be as real and as authentic. It's not a how to book. It's not like I, I think those are helpful.

But our approach is like we're sharing and learning and sharing and learning and struggling and stumbling and getting up, and hopefully we're a step further ahead at the end of the day.

We're almost out of time, Michael. But I did want to ask you if you could write one letter from parents to a teen, what would it say?

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I allowed myself to get in the way of what she needed most in that moment. And I'll just, I'll share that with you.

With my daughter had had a moment happen a couple of.

Just over a year ago, and I reacted to the situation because I thought it was, you did something, you didn't listen, you didn't do this and made a mistake. And what she needed was her dad to know that whatever mistake you made, we're going to get through this together.

And it happened about a month ago or two months ago where I looked at her and I said, hannah, I am so sorry.

I'm so sorry that I just didn't stop, put everything I was feeling aside and allow you just to let your dad love you in that moment and, and just be there. And that's one thing that maybe that's what not every parent. But for me, that would be the letter I've written back.

Lots of really important food for thought. Michael Chaison, speaker, entrepreneur, writer, author of Things We Wish Our Parents Knew. Really appreciate your time and your perspective today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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