If you have a tween in the house or teen or are heading in that direction and you want to make sure that you are ready for the battle join us on this episode as we talk with Kari Kampakis on how to parent our teens and tweens well.
Listen to “allmomdoes Podcast #136: Kari Kampakis – Parenting Teens & Tweens Well” on Spreaker.
On This Episode:
- Follow Kari Kampakis Online, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
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Kari’s new book – Love Her Well: 10 Ways to Find Joy and Connection with Your Teenage Daughter
- Special thanks to our sponsor The Adventure Bible
Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:00:00] Today on the allmomdoes Podcast who has a tween in the house or teen, or, you know, you’re heading that direction and you want to make sure that you are ready for the battle. Well, I have the gal who’s going to help us understand how to do that well. My guest today is Kari Kampakis. Thanks so much for joining me today, Kari.
Kari Kampakis: [00:00:28] Thanks for having me, Julie.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:00:30] Now you have gotten to do some really cool things in your career and in the parenting space. So give us a little background on you and how you ended up on the Today Show panel for parenting. All those really cool accomplishments.
Kari Kampakis: [00:00:42] Well, I’m a writer and a mom of four girls.
We live in Birmingham, Alabama, and I guess it was in 2014 I released my first book for teen girls. Called 10 Ultimate Truths for Teen Girls should know it was from a blog post that had gone viral. We turned it into a book. Thomas Nelson published it. Two years later, released another book for teen girls. So that really kind of set me on a track of writing for teenage girls.
My daughters were about to enter the teenage years at the time. And so that’s where my heart was. And, um, anyway, just that experience allowed me to start meeting moms and girls all over the country and just start writing about topics that are near and dear to the hearts. Girl moms everywhere. The Today Show that was actually just a feature as a featured blogger.
One month they had a challenge on raising kind kids. And so I had submitted a story called in a kind daughter that had done really well on my website. And it was one of their most friend blog posts that month. And so it got featured there. So that was exciting. Yeah. And I’m, you know, I think that’s one of the neatest things about writing for, for girls and girl moms is just seeing what resonates and seeing that really, no matter what part of the country you live in or what part of the world really that deep down, we all desire the same things for our kids.
You know, we want them to be kind. We want them to be strong. We want others to be kind to them. We just want to raise good human beings and, you know, have those relationships in place. So anyway, that was the start of my journey writing was writing for teenage girls and of course their moms are the ones find the books.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:02:06] Right, right.
Kari Kampakis: [00:02:08] I would go to these events and the moms would often say, you know, thank you for writing this book. It’s like, you took the thoughts in my head and put them down on paper. And it’s just so good to have this to share with my daughter. A lot of them would say no. When are you going to write a book for us, for the moms?
And that was where I would just smile politely, you know, I’m from the South and in my head, I’m thinking never, I’m not writing for moms there too, it’s a hard audience, but I would just kind of, Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure, you know, maybe one day, but I really had no idea intention to do that. And it was really just the course of a few years.
God worked in my heart. And, you know, as I got to know these moms and really they, they open up to me, they share their struggles. I get so many emails with the struggles our daughters are going through. I see the joy on their faces as they introduced their daughters to me, and also the sadness in their eyes.
As they tell me what they’re going through at school, my heart started opening up to these moms. And then my daughters became teenagers and I went through some rough patches with each of them. I have three teenagers now, and then one preteen daughter and, you know, God really used those things experiences and a lot of the mistakes I made to soften my heart.
Yeah. For the moms of teenage girls. And I realized, you know, when our kids are little, I think there’s so much advice out there. You can, you can talk to anybody to get advice or wisdom. And, you know, you have teenagers, you have to be protect their privacy, not everybody, the parents the same way or with the same values.
So it’s not like you can just ask anyone, you know, what to do in a situation. So anyway, I wanted to create a resource where moms could not feel so alone and, you know, share a lot of the mistakes that I’ve made and just the things that I’ve heard over the years, because. I do meet so many awesome moms.
And I feel like I have learned so much from the other moms out there that have been allowed to meet that is, you know, wisdom that I’ve tried to put into this book. I just had an advocate this years. I just think we’re in unprecedented times of parenting and our teenagers are facing so much and as moms we want to help them.
So that’s really what this book is about is being that mentor and that guide, but also having that relationship. While still being the parent of course, which is hard to do balancing it.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:04:06] Right, right. That, that tandem is really interesting. It’s fascinating for me because you have four girls. I have five and the spread of age between my daughters is my oldest daughter is 16 and a half years older.
Than my youngest daughter who just turned 13. So we’ve got four teenagers still in the house. We were still in the thick of it. My friends, we are still thank the Lord. We are not diagramming sentences because I just called a complete time out on that. But we are still working on all the things. And so the thing that is very interesting to me right now, and I’d love to hear you speak to this, the world that I was raising my oldest daughter in and the things we were facing in her teenage hood, there are variations on the theme. It’s not that with Madison, I was dealing with things that, you know, now with Mercy just seemed completely off kilter in a different world. It feels like to me though, with Mercy, my youngest daughter, there’s been an amplification of all of the things that we were starting out with Madison a few, you know, several years ago, we were beginning to see the first waves of no I was raised in an era where. You know, in the eighties, it was kind of a wild and crazy time. And it was there. I can’t say that anybody was claiming to be a Saint back then, but I definitely knew with my friends, even with my friends who were not of any kind of faith that we all had a desire are to be seen as special and cherished.
And when it came to dating relationships and all that kind of thing, and that’s one of the things that I’ve noted in my daughter’s generation that I think that felt needed. It’s still there. But culturally that, yeah, something that seems to be getting lost. What are some things that you are noticing for our young women today our tweens and teenagers that is a shift that we all need to be aware of. Whether you raise a teen a few years ago, and maybe now you’ve got a younger one or you’re looking ahead, or you came from a high school background and a college background just a handful of years ago, but now the landscape changing, what are you seeing?
Kari that is, that is different. That we’re going to need to make sure that we’re equipped for.
Kari Kampakis: [00:06:16] You know, I think the biggest difference probably between, I mean, your older daughter and your youngest one is just the technology and the introduction of social media. And, you know, that was really one thing I kept seeing over and over as I wrote this book was how that shifted everything.
I mean, that sits in, we’ve seen, you know, suicide rates are the highest level years for girls and anxiety levels are through the roof. I have a friend who counsels teenage girls. And I think she used to say like four out of every 20 girls used to have anxiety. And now it’s more 16 out of every 20 girls.
And then, you know, I read this recently and it just broke my heart that said today’s teenagers are the first generation of teenagers to be more stressed than their parents, except during the summer. And I just, you know, I didn’t have a perfect teenage experience, but we had fun, my friends and I, we loved each other.
There wasn’t all this pressure on us. And I just thought that just breaks my heart. That what used to be this time of exuberance and this time to discover who you are and, you know, to make mistakes or to fail if you know, to, to chase big dreams. But if it doesn’t work out to bounce back and learn from those lessons, and now I think there’s just a standard of perfection.
They’re scared to death to fail. They’re scared to make a mistake, any mistake they do make convenient. Yeah on social media. And you know what I see in my work, I really feel like the root problem was really the most hurtful and the hardest thing that girls are navigating and their moms too, is relationships.
I mean, I would say nine out of every 10 emails I get is part failings or drama or something going on in friendships with other girls. And it’s usually with their best friends and the moms feel so alone. And, you know, I get phone calls, you know, in my community. And they’re like, I don’t know who else to call.
They think they’re the only one. And I’m like, sadly, this is like common I mean, I hear this over and over, you know, there’s this Harvard study that said that the key to happiness in life is really warm relationships that not having that can be, as it does know, smoking or alcoholism as loneliness can be. And I just think that, you know, we don’t have those relationships in place.
So my opinion is that these teenagers are dealing with really hard things. Whether it’s social media or pressures, or just the expectations of the world, um, or just the culture that they’re up against, which does not really value for cheese and all the things we want for them as parents they’re up against so much.
But if you don’t have those warm relationships with your parents, with your friends, with your family, if you don’t feel that connectedness, you don’t really have people to talk you through it and walk through it with you. And I’m just a firm believer that, you know, we can get through anything in life.
With God and with our people, with people who will love you through it, no matter what you’re going through. So I feel like that’s, um, it’s just that loneliness and that disconnect that they’re really struggling with. And that’s one reason I wrote the book because I started thinking, you know, I have such a heart for teenage girls and I started thinking they can read my books. They can come to an event. You know, their moms will drive five hours sometimes to bring them to an event. And I’m just like, wow, you know, mother’s love, we will do anything to help our kids. If we think it will be beneficial for them. But I was started thinking if they do that, that’s a once a year thing for them to breed this or come, but they’re with their mom every day of the year.
You know, nobody loves a girl like her mother, but yet you see this terrible narrative beginning when your kids are little, but just wait until she’s a teenager, she’ll be a nightmare. And you know, we bonded that script and I think that I don’t know what the disconnect is, but if you go Google moms at teenage daughters, it’s all negative.
It’s all dysfunction fighting. And so I just think the enemy is really at work there. He doesn’t want us to be close to our, to our family members, to our daughters because then we can help them. And so I really, I had to work through that myself. When I was going through some rough patches with my daughter, I discovered it was a lot of pride that was getting in the way, the relationship.
And I had to really look at myself and think, how can I approach this differently? Still be the mom. But really look at this, like she needs a relationship with me. She needs wise mentors and counselors in her life. And how can we build those bridges between the two generations so that we can help our teenagers.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:10:06] Right. You know, you bring up and I think this is really interesting. Back when I was in college, there was a gal who made a bad decision at a party. There were pictures that were taken and part of what I remember in that experience was of course in that day and age, you had to take film too. You had to be really intentional to be that exposing of someone like you had to decide to take the film to, you know, your local Walmart and get it developed.
And the thing that was cool was there was a group of girls who banded around her and figured out who had those pictures, who had the negatives and shut it down. And it was able to be shut down. Today. You’re so right. I mean, if somebody has a lapse of judgment, if someone makes a mistake, it can be immortalized for so long.
And the other thing that I find that’s interesting is it feels like we haven’t done a good job training our girls on how to close rank around one another and protect each other. There seems to be a real ethos of the mean girl environment How do we combat that? How do we help our daughters understand that sisterhood with other women is so important and that we need to be protecting each other, not exposing things when people make a mistake, not participating in some of the drama, because the drama can be addictive.
You know? I mean, we’ve got a whole culture built on reality shows. And did you hear, and did you see and post going viral about things that people didn’t know about. And now they do, how do we help our girls acknowledge that that’s a human impulse to see what’s novel to call something out, but at the same time also teach them how to sister well.
Kari Kampakis: [00:11:49] I, again, I think it goes back to those scripts and those narratives and it just really be mindful. I think we live in an age where we get on social media and you see something enough, you just start to believe it and buy into it. And one script I don’t like is girls are mean. I know, and I’ve been there as a mom, like somebody does something mean to your child and you are just like, what can I say to make her feel better?
And it’s just the low hanging fruit like girls are mean. And it hit me a few years ago. I had a friend tell me that she’s like, I really struggled with adult friendships because whenever something happened when I was younger, my mom was always like, she’s just jealous that she’s just, you know, she’s just doing this.
But she said, what it did is it really built this distrust to me against other girls. And I started thinking about that and I think we do our girls a real disservice when we hand them these stereotypes. And it’s like, all boys are jerks. All boys are not your heart’s, you know, in any category. So I think it’s just being mindful of, you know, when they are hurt instead of throwing out those, those stereotypes girls are mean, because then we’re saying you’re mean, I’m mean, we’re all mean, there’s no hope for friendship is just really walking through them as they go through life. Like. Yes, girls can be very hurtful. We live in a very main culture.
I don’t think it’s just necessarily a girl problem. I think it’s a society problem that we’re in a very main age, but girls need each other. And I was telling my daughters, I’m like, you know, you need your friends. Like I need my friends. You know, nobody understands what you’re going through. Like I do. And, um, I think one disservice, we did, our girls is not teaching them how to work through conflict.
Not teaching them conflict resolution, you know, two girls get in a fight instead of talking it out, they go talk about it with everybody else. And then everybody gets on, you know, picks aside and it creates all this drama. And you’re just like, you know, if you could just teach them to respectfully talk it out.
A lot of times they can work through it. And, you know, at least get to a better place. And so just teaching them this conflict resolution skills. I mean, I think it just boils down to the love of Christ and now we’re all sinners. We all mess up. We ask for forgiveness, we apologize. We do our part, but really that we do need each other, especially in an age like this and knowing that, okay, who’s being picked on now, this girl is being picked on.
It could be you tomorrow. You need to handle this the way you’d have somebody would surround you. You know, and I’ve learned to just, you know, when our daughters go through something hard, as hard as it is to watch them do that, sometimes they one of the best lessons, because you know, if they’re being ostracized from a group and then somebody comes up and is kind to them, all of a sudden it clicks, Oh, my word, you know, next time somebody else gets ostracized, I’m going to be kind of down.
You know, they don’t realize it’s that empathy that they develop. So I just think it’s having all this conversations and using whatever they’re going through in life to, to teach them that, you know, a win for one girl is a win for all girls. You know that you were in this boat together. Nobody understands your life like the people who were in your generation with the round, but it’s hard.
It’s hard to teach those lessons.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:14:38] We’ll get right back to the interview in just a moment.
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You know, I think one place where we’ve really had a deficit and I began to identify it with, with watching the growing up of my daughters.
And of course having sort of a multigenerational experience in watching that because of the age range of my girls is I realized that my husband and I both realized that we were going to have to be very intentional in the culture in which we live to teach our girls how to be leaders. It seems like there’s a lot of embedded language around our guys, almost an assumption that everyone has to be a leader in the way we define it.
Now, Kari, I believe that everyone is a leader in some form, but you know, when we talk about a born leader, we’re so often talking about a male centric definition of that. And I think part of why we slide into some of these stereotypes, like mean girl and everybody picking on the one girl and all those things is because we’ve had a hard time.
Teaching our young women, how to stand and be leaders. And I gotta be honest, not trying to throw anybody under the bus, but I think our church culture has only exacerbated that. Like we have had a really hard time showing women how to close ranks, stand well and lead out in ways that are very powerful for the encouragement and exportation of other women.
So what are some things we can actively do to help engage our daughters and understanding that part of being part of the sisterhood, right is, is leading well, is being the person in the crowd who will say, that’s not cool and I’m not going to forward that. Or I’m not going to participate in this dialogue even if you, my peers don’t like it, I’m going to stand and stand well, how do we begin in culcate that into their experience?
Kari Kampakis: [00:16:58] Right. I think one of the best things we can begin to tell them, just think for yourself. There’s such a hard mentality. And I know that, you know, we can tell our girls all the lessons all day long, but you know, they get into the pressure cooker at middle school or high school.
And sometimes they’re just scared. It’s self preservation. They are just going along with the flow. And so I think, you know, just teaching them, we can teach that early, you know, thanks for yourself. Because I think, you know, really, especially in middle school, you hear about girls, very smart girls. I don’t want to take advanced classes.
All my friends are taking regular classes or a girl is being mean to another girl in the whole group goes with her. Not because they agree, but because they’re scared of being outcast and just really teaching them to think for yourself. Don’t be scared to be the only one doing the right thing because it’s, you know, you can never go wrong doing what’s right.
And it’s something else I really think we have to think about and be aware of is if we, as moms are thinking for ourselves, right. Our girls to be strong and to be leaders in that way of like, whether one person’s following you or no, and he’s following when you were 10 people are following you, you know, do what’s right.
Which you feel is right. We’ve got to do that. And, you know, I don’t think we realize how much we fall into that hard mentality and I’m as guilty. Does anybody like, well, everybody’s, everybody’s doing this or everybody’s, you know, buying these shoes or everybody’s doing that. And I think that if we are not mature enough, to be able to think for ourselves and make different decisions than other families, then how are our kids ever going to see that? Especially our girls, because we’re modeling that. And I think sharing our mistakes. Sometimes, you know, and it could be, I do that a lot with my children. Like, you know, this one time when I was in college and somebody was talking about my good friend and I wanted to stan and up for her and I did, and I regret that.
But teaching them the power of you might be in a situation and you don’t feel strong enough to do it, but you know, really laying into that regret because that’s what could inspire you the next time to do the right thing. Or like you said, when you see somebody, I think sometimes seeing somebody stand up and do the right thing sometimes that gives us the courage. Like, Ooh, next time I’m going to choose that route. I want to be like her.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:18:58] Right. It sounds like Kari, that a really integral part of loving her well loving our daughter well is being the woman that she needs to see. And this is a place that I think it’s very interesting sometimes for a lot of us as women, because you touched on it earlier that pride, and of course, pride is such a two sided coin, right?
Because on one side is pride and on the other side is the insecurity. And we flip that thing back and forth. You know, we’re trying to hide the insecurity with developing some kind of pride. And then we’re also insecure in our pride. I mean, there’s just a whole mess that goes on there, but you know, when I see the mom pushing her daughter to be something that the mom feels like she never got to achieve, or the mom has never been able to effectively model in her own life. And yet she has this expectation of a daughter that is so far beyond what the mom has been able to do, willing to do all of the things. So how do we do the internal work that we need to do to make sure that we are women worth following when it comes to loving our daughter well?
You
Kari Kampakis: [00:20:01] know, I’ve heard it said that we can only take our daughters as far as we’ve gone. Oh, I love that. That’s good. I think that’s just a good motto to live out. Like if we really want them to be these things, we’ve got to journey with them and I think it’s okay to tell them, like, I’m just walking a few steps ahead of you, you know, you’re teaching me too.
I’m growing here too, but I do think, yeah, just making those intentional efforts to, um, I think really just doing those hard checks. And just really being willing to look at ourselves and, you know, one reason I didn’t want to write this book was I start with a big mom fail. I’m crying on the floor. I’ve been in this, the lock down with my daughter, you know, within standoff for a few weeks.
And I’m just, you know, I just spit the guilt and the regret is weighing down on me. And it was hard for me to come to that point to like swallow my pride and look at myself. But that is really where our relationship started to turn around. And where God opened my eyes to a lot of things I had not been seeing.
And you’re right. Pride. I think there’s the pride of our children. Of course, we’re proud of our children and that’s a good, proud pride, but then there’s that pride that, that makes us think that we’re always right. And everybody else is always wrong, what we’re seeing in our society. So I think it is just really, you know, breaking down, looking at ourselves, doing that hard work.
I call it the hard work and the legwork to really look at ourselves and think, you know what we’re doing wrong. Um, I’ve heard it said that sometimes moms have a tendency to see their daughters as a chance to have a perfected version of them. Right? Yeah. Very true. And I think sometimes we need to really check it.
Say if your daughter doesn’t make a team and you were more devastated than she is, then that’s kind of a time to look at yourself. Why am I so upset? You know, am I really, is this really about my daughter or is this about me? Instead of, I just think that we don’t really realize the importance of going back and dealing with our old ways and our old baggage until we have daughters that get to that age and we find things emotions boiling up and not us that, you know, that’s bringing back to mind. Some things we had gone through there we probably need to work through also. And I had to do a lot of that. Writing these books for teen girls, I had to really kind of go and unbury some of those things from my teenage years that, you know, you look back, I was fine, but then, you know, you forget some of the sad and the hard thing.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:22:05] Oh yeah, yeah. Revisionist history.
Right. And
Kari Kampakis: [00:22:12] so, you know how to really go back to, I get myself in a place where I could relate to them. And it was my editor telling me, you know, the first time I sent the manuscript a few chapters, she was like, this is a good start, but you sound like a mom.
And she said, you know, to really connect with these girls, she she’s like, you’ve got to sound like a wise, big sister, you know, or best friend. And so go back and just channel your teenage self. Right. So that really, it forced me to go back and really look at myself and some of the insecurities that I had and why those insecurities made me do some things.
But anyway, I think it helped getting to that place of empathy, of being able to relate to our daughters. And just for us, we’re all human where we’re really struggling with the same things. And we don’t always master these emotions, whether it’s jealousy or insecurity, you know, we don’t always master it, but we can get to a more evolved place.
And I think that’s the goal in life and to teach our daughters how to do that.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:23:00] Right. You know, bring up something that I think is really critical that moms take a hard look at, and it’s, it’s a difficult thing to face, but it is this, you know, these girls don’t belong to us and they are not further expressions of who we are they, the greatest gift we can give our kids is to let them them have their own lives. And I’m not saying release them too soon, and I’m not saying that we’re not there. And I’m not saying that we don’t guide and direct them. Of course we do those things, but the tension I think a lot of people feel in those tween and teen years is your teen grasping for independence is actually good and healthy.
And your reluctance to honor that desire is indicative to me of the challenge you may be having, allowing them to have their own identity and to not be part of yours. Do you find that that place of that messiness of identity is often at a core of the conflict that can arise between mothers and daughters?
Kari Kampakis: [00:23:59] Oh, definitely. Definitely actually have a chapter where I talk about that. About having, we’ve got to have her own adult interest or own adult lives. We’ve got to have friendships. And I think we talked about, I was raised in the eighties too, and we’re kind of like, you know what you just were, I don’t think there was any intentional parenting going on back then.
Kids kind of did their thing. We did our thing. And so I think, you know, you hear that. I think the pendulum has definitely swung, like our generation has grown up. Like we want to be more engaged in our children’s lives. We want to be more intentional. And I think the intentions are good, but we do, we can create such child centered homes where they’re the center of the universe and everything’s riding on them. Our happiness is riding on them and that’s when our identity gets tied up in what they’re doing or what they’re choosing. And I think that is a dangerous place to be. And so yeah, something happens and we’re more upset than they are, and we can’t even comfort them because we’re so sad.
I really do think our goal as parents is we’re trying to be strong. We want to be a source of strength for them. You know, we, if we want to cry with them, but but also offer that hope like you’re going to get through this, you know, we want to be that strong voice in their life, but again, we’ve got to work through all of that with ourselves and not tire of our identity and their identity and know that they are separate people.
And, um, as a friend of mine, I share this story too. She lost both of her parents within a few years, and I’ll never forget her being in my kitchen. And I was asking her a few weeks after her, her mom died, you know, how are you doing? You know, I knew it was, she was in a hard place and she kind of teared up.
And then she said, you know, I realized recently that my parents spent their entire life preparing me for this moment. And they were preparing me for the day when I would have to stand on my empty feet and do life without them. She’s like, that’s the gift they gave me. And it just hit me. And I thought she’s so right.
Like we are, we’re preparing them for the day when we’re not here. When they’re, maybe they can hear a voice in their head, but we’re not here to guide them. And we want them to be independent adults. And we’ve got to, you know, release them and let them have that freedom. And I do think that if we do that well, they’ll want to come back to us, right?
We’re not clingy if we’re not, you know, making their life about our life. And if we do it well, and we’re there to support and guide and mentor and just, you know, call me anytime you need help. I think they’ll come back to us. They’ll continue to want our wisdom and our, our friendship and all of that. But if we are tying our identity into theirs, then maybe they might just want to set some boundaries as they get older and we might not see them as often.
Right? I think they need us speaking over them that we believe they are capable and, and strong and that they can do this and they can live life. And if we’re speaking over them is you don’t know, you don’t have the experience. You have no idea. You’re naive. You know, those things really aren’t helpful.
Those aren’t the things that really help foster someone into a sense of their own adulthood. And that’s where we need to be heading that’s the purpose is the launch. And so I love that you bring that up. Now, talk to me about this, Kari. It seems to me that we need to develop a skill set and we need to be able to show our daughters how to pick friends well, you know, it’s it’s so as you were saying earlier, who our kids are around is so important. And I think often we have really focused a lot on do these kids have good morals? Are they running around and doing things they shouldn’t do and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I don’t know that we’ve done a very good job of saying, what are the characteristics? Not just the moral behavior of someone, right. But the, the asset and the facets to someone who actually makes for a good friend, because the reality is your kid could be running around with some girls who seem to be the good girls who don’t seem to be going out to the parties or dating the bad boys or whatever, but they could be some of the meanest nastiest girls ever.
So how do we help our girls understand what it means to truly. Pick companions in life who are life-giving, who are iron sharpening iron who have a different level to what we’re looking for in terms of the relationships we surround ourselves with.
Right. You know, I think the number one trait and it can be rare to find is just kindness.
I know a kind friend might not be as exciting as a really fun viviacious friend, but, you know, Tom’s the fun friendships that are so exciting they fizzle out it’s just to look for that kindness and you know, what does kindness look like? Girls, especially thinking older, they’re pretty smart. The high school, they kind of know different types of friends and different personalities, but they might say, well, she’s really sweet to me, but I hear her talking about her friends a lot.
I’m like, that’s a red flag, right? That’s right. Talking about other people, even, especially her friends all the time that you’re not going to be safe in that circle. I also emphasize, I always say cast a wide net. I think girls, especially in this day and age and on Instagram, they have, these are my peeps. These are my people. They get really interlocked into a group. I say this a lot at the high school level at every school, but they had these groups and a lot of times they might’ve formed in seventh or eighth grade and people start making different decisions in high school, but the groups, people were scared to leave the groups, even though they’ve outgrown it because there’s another group might not take them in and they don’t want to be by themselves.
And so they stay or, you know, surrounded by people that might not be. Helping them become who they’re supposed to be, because they’re scared to be alone. It’s better to start over and be alone, and pick friends based on who’s really good for you. Who makes you feel good, who is going to help you live up to your potential rather than staying in a group that might be toxic or unhealthy for you because you want that security of a friend group.
It is so hard because you know, their age friends are like oxygen. They just want to have those friendships. And I’ve met very few girls who have not gone through. A hard season of friendship and as hard as that is, even watch it as a mom. I really think that’s where we learn our best lessons. Like, okay, now I won’t conference, you know, now kindness matters.
And whilst speaking the truth in love matters. So I talked to a lot of girls that they have friends, you know, their first friendships are. Kind of main, you know, Oh yeah. I used to go to school and she told me, I looked ugly in those jeans, but I thought that’s what friends did. Like they don’t really know that something better is exists so sometimes I do have to go through those things and that they’re not so good friendships to really get to that point of like, I’d never want that again. It’s kind of like dating, I think the same thing to be like, okay, I know that is what I don’t want. So now I have a better idea of what I do want.
What’s the saying that water seeks its own level and say, you know, they want kind friends. It really starts with them being that friend. And I think also teaching them to be proactive in their friendships. I think sometimes even as women, you know, we look on social media, I’m so hurt. I wasn’t invited, right.
I never get invited to anything. And we forget that we had that power to go be that friend, somebody else, we have the power to reach out and invite them to go on a walk or to go get a dinner. I was talking to this one girl who plays a sorority. She knew nobody in her sorority and she was from out of state and she said, okay, I just sat in the den of the sorority house.
And I knew I just sat there for a few hours. I would meet people. I was like, that is really smart and proactive. Yeah. And a place where she was going to meet people. And I think the more proactive we teach our daughters to be and make friends, whether you’re at school or sports or church or camp, wherever you are making variety of friends, not only will you be a better and enriched person because of that, but you’re also more likely to find those friendships that are genuine and real and true.
Right. You can do, you can do some screening. It’s a good thing to decide who we’re going to be. The people closest to you. Carrie can packets. I’m so glad that you’ve been here with us. Love her. Well, is the book, Carrie, thanks so much for all of your insight today. I know that we are going to have a lot of moms out there raising girls who are going to be so thankful for the wisdom and insight that you’ve provided.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:31:36] Thanks so much for being here.
Kari Kampakis: [00:31:38] Thanks for having me, Julie,
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:31:39] Be sure and check out the show notes that our content coordinator, Rebecca puts together each and every week. A big shout out to Donna. She is our producer and helps make sure that the audio quality and all the things are the way they need to be so that you can get the episodes.
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