Finding the Courage to Use Your Voice

 

Parenting is hard.

I am incredibly blessed to have two great kids. Even as teenagers, they are respectful, kind, and rule followers. Their dad and I actually laugh sometimes that maybe we did too good of a job teaching them to follow the rules, because now we are trying to teach them something that feels almost opposite:

You are allowed to speak up.

You are allowed to ask questions. You are allowed to disagree. You can question something and still be respectful.

At 14 and 15—almost 16—my boys rarely want to question an adult or speak up when they disagree with something. Unless, of course, that adult is me or their dad. They have no problem finding their voices at home.

But we want them to understand that their voices matter outside of our house, too.

As adults, we know that if you don't ask for what you want, you'll never know if you could have gotten it. If you don't ask the question, you may never get the explanation. And if you disagree but never say anything, no one has the opportunity to hear your perspective.

This is where parenting gets hard, because it's incredibly tempting to step in and do it for them.

We could call the coach. We could email the teacher. We could explain what they want, what they're questioning, or why they're frustrated.

But sometimes doing the hard thing for our kids steals the lesson from them.

We aren't always going to be there to make the phone call. Someday it will be a professor, a boss, a coworker, or a relationship. They will need to ask for what they want, set boundaries, disagree respectfully, and have conversations that make them uncomfortable.

I'd rather they start learning how to do that now than at 25 or 35.

So instead of speaking for them, we help them prepare. We talk through what they want to say, what the other person might say, and how they could respond. Sometimes they have the conversation. Sometimes they don't. But either way, they're learning that they can.

And maybe the most important thing we can do is show them what that looks like.

Recently, I had a situation at work that I wasn't happy with. I needed to advocate for myself, and I was incredibly anxious about it. What I thought would be one difficult conversation turned into several.

Before one of those meetings, I wrote on the whiteboard above my desk:

Have Courage.

Do what you tell your kids to do.

I could see it throughout the meeting.

In the end, I got what I was asking for. But that's not really the lesson.

Speaking up doesn't guarantee you'll get what you want. It guarantees that you gave yourself a voice in the outcome.

That's what I want my boys to understand.

Being respectful doesn't mean being silent.

You can be kind and have boundaries.

You can follow rules and ask questions.

You can respect someone and disagree with them.

You can be nervous and still speak up.

And maybe that's something all of us need to remember.

There will always be conversations we'd rather avoid. Questions we're afraid to ask. Things we want but feel uncomfortable asking for. 

Life is hard enough without making ourselves smaller because speaking up feels uncomfortable.

Your voice is worth hearing.

Have courage. And do what you tell your kids to do.