Parenting Post-Wilderness: Parenting a Struggling Teen Before, During and After Treatment
Your guide to parenting a struggling teen or young-adult, whether they’re home, transitioning home, or presently in treatment.
Parents, say goodbye to exhausting confusion, overwhelm, panic and the unhelpful patterns that keep you and your family stuck. Learn how to develop healthy responses and set healthy boundaries with your teen instead of acting out of fear and anxiety.
Experience the relationship-changing power of focusing on your own behavior instead of futile attempts to control your teen.
Your guides to Parenting Post-wilderness are Beth Hillman, a life coach for parents of struggling teens and mom to a post-wilderness teen, and part-time co-host Seth Gottlieb, a wilderness therapy guide turned teen and young-adult recovery coach. Their unique combination of experience and training yields candid conversations chock full of practical, actionable tips and tools to smooth the challenges both parents and teens experience surrounding treatment.
Every week, you can expect conversations around:
- Parenting a struggling teen or young-adult;
- Setting healthy boundaries with your teen;
- Treatment options for your struggling teen or young adult;
- Bringing your kid home from treatment;
- Parenting skills to support your struggling child;
- Teen substance abuse, drug addiction, gaming addiction, suicidal ideation, or other teen mental health concerns;
- How to end power struggles and instead foster healthy communication with your teen or young-adult;
- And much more.
Listen in to discover how parents like you have learned to influence equanimity in the home and rebuild connections with the teens they love.
Connect with Beth on Instagram (@bethhillmancoaching) or find more information about working with Beth at www.bethhillmancoaching.com.
Episodes
139 episodes
138. Life After Treatment: How Your Kid Can Find the Peer Support They Need
One of the most overlooked challenges after treatment? The loss of community. Teens and young adults often return home (or head off to college) and suddenly find themselves without the peer support they had in treatment, even though that kind o...
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Episode 138
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36:52
137. How to Care Without Losing Yourself When Your Teen Is in Crisis
When your teen or young adult is struggling, it’s easy for everything else to fall away, including you. It’s a pattern we both see often: parents abandoning their own needs in the name of care, staying on high alert for the next crisis, and los...
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Episode 137
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20:04
136. Finding Balance While Shifting Parenting Patterns
When you're doing the work to grow as a parent, it's common to overcorrect. You recognize a pattern (maybe you tend to be explosive in conflict) so you swing to the opposite end and become overly passive. It feels like progress, but suddenly yo...
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Episode 136
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25:01
135. Challenging the Stories We Tell Ourselves About Our Struggling Teens & Young Adults
We all have an inner dialogue. But it's too easy to take the stories we tell ourselves, about our kids, our parenting, and what’s going to happen next, to start feeling like facts. In this episode, Seth and I explore how our narratives can quie...
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Episode 135
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36:15
134. Helping Your (ADHD) Teen Manage Time & Build Executive Function Skills With Chrissy Nichols
If your teen or young adult constantly underestimates how long things take or insists they “have plenty of time” when they don’t, welcome to the club! This common struggle is called time dysmorphia, and it’s more than just procrastination or la...
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Episode 134
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39:58
133. When to Step Back: The Power of Disengaging for Healthy Communication with Your Teen or Young-Adult
Do you ever find yourself stuck in a conversation that’s going in circles, desperately trying to find a resolution? It’s natural to want closure, but sometimes, the healthiest thing you can do is step back. In this episode, Seth and I explore h...
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Episode 133
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31:53
132. Why Isn’t Your Love Enough to Make Your Struggling Teen Choose Better?
It’s devastating to watch your teen struggle and feel like nothing you do is making a difference. You love them more than anything, yet your support, advice, and care don’t seem to make a difference. If you’ve ever thought, Why isn’t my lov...
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Episode 132
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27:52
131. Navigating Home Visits: How to Approach Your Teen’s Visit Home from Treatment
Home visits after treatment can be both exciting and nerve-wracking for everyone involved. It’s a time filled with hope, but with that hope often comes fear: fear of falling back into old patterns, fear of things going wrong, and fear of not kn...
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Episode 131
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36:34
130. From Sibling to Mentor: The Sibling’s Perspective & Building Community After Treatment With Ethan Gordon
When a child struggles, the entire family feels it. But the sibling’s experience is often overlooked. Today, we get to hear the sibling’s perspective as Ethan Gordon, a mentor for struggling kids, teens, and young adults, joins me to share his ...
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Episode 130
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30:27
129. Shifting to Healthy Communication with Your Teen and Family
Healthy communication is the foundation of strong relationships. But when emotions run high, it’s easy to fall into unhelpful patterns. In this episode, trauma therapist Sarah Allen joins me to explore how communication styles shape family dyna...
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Episode 129
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40:29
128. Parenting an Overwhelmed Teen (And Dealing With Your Own Overwhelm as a Parent)
When life feels like too much, it’s easy to get caught in the spiral of overwhelm. And let’s face it, whether it’s your teen or yourself as a parent, overwhelm is something we all face from time to time. In this episode, we dive into how to sup...
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Episode 128
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23:24
127. When Nothing Seems to Work for Your Struggling Teen
What do you do when you’ve tried everything? Your teen has been to wilderness programs, therapeutic boarding schools, partial hospitalization programs, and more—and yet, the struggles persist. The behaviors, the fears, the maladaptive patterns,...
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Episode 127
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36:16
126. Will My Work as a Parent Ever Be Done?
Parenting often feels like one of the most rewarding yet unrelenting journeys. There’s no clocking out, even after major milestones are achieved. In this episode, Seth joins me to explore what it means to keep showing up as a parent, even when ...
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Episode 126
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26:08
125. Strengthening Relationships Through Conflict
Sometimes the shame around my actions feels so heavy and I feel like I’ve failed as a parent. Sounds familiar? In this deeply personal episode, I open up about one of the most painful regrets I’ve had as a parent. A moment I carried shame aroun...
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Episode 125
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16:24
124. How to influence better sleep and beat insomnia for yourself and your teen with Sleep Doctor Funke Brown
It’s no secret that sleep is crucial for teens, but getting them to prioritize it? That’s a whole different story! This week on the podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Funke Afolabi-Brown, a triple board-certified sleep physician and founder of Restful ...
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Episode 124
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35:16
123. Recognizing Your Teen’s Progress With Ciara Fanlo
How do you know if your teen is truly making progress? As parents, we often cling to our own standards, like better grades or sticking to curfews. These are the markers we cling to as evidence that the therapy or treatment is “working.” B...
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Episode 123
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22:03
122. Your Kid Shouldn’t Take Your Advice: Here’s Why - With Ciara Fanlo
It’s SO frustrating when your kid doesn’t take your advice, isn’t it?! As parents, we have more life experience and we can share our advice with our kids to give them an easier and smoother life experience, at least that’s how it feels to us, r...
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Episode 122
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31:33
121. Unshaming My Anxiety: A Personal Story
I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety lately. Our wilderness kid is doing really well, so you’d think, after all the heartache, pain, and anxiety of that journey, things would finally feel calm. But life has a way of throwing curveballs, doesn’t i...
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Episode 121
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18:38
120. Releasing Control and Desired Outcomes for Our Teens With Maggie, Mom of a Wilderness Kid
It’s natural to want to steer our kids toward success and protect them from struggle. But what if trying to control the outcome does more harm than good? In this episode, I speak with Maggie, a mom of four (including one “wilderness kid”), who ...
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Episode 120
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49:17
119. Why Messing Up After Treatment Can Be a Teen's Greatest Teacher with Former Struggling Teen Michael Wangsgard
What happens after your teen completes treatment? It’s a question many parents grapple with. In today’s episode, Beth talks to Michael, a former struggling teen who went to wilderness himself, about his journey through treatment and the challen...
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Episode 119
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48:37
118. What Success Looks Like for Young Adults With Joanna Lilley
It’s natural to feel uneasy when your kid strays from the socially accepted path of college, career, and other traditional milestones. But as today’s guest Joanna points out, the reality is that the so-called "normal" path is often the exceptio...
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Episode 118
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35:58
117. Pointing Positive: Influencing Your Teen Toward Positive Change
Are you unknowingly sending your teen the message that their best isn’t good enough?In this episode, we dig into a concept called "pointing positive," a term from river kayaking that can make a big difference in parenting teens through ...
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Episode 117
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24:31
116. Understanding Trauma Responses in Parents & Struggling Teens, With Trauma Therapist Sarah Allen
Ever found yourself reacting strongly to something, even when it seems like “no big deal”? Or maybe, in a tense moment, you freeze or shut down instead of reacting? If you’re a parent of a struggling teen, be it addiction, mental h...
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Episode 116
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46:05
115. Understanding and Overcoming Fear in Family Dynamics
Fear has a sneaky way of impacting our brains, pushing us toward avoiding what feels uncomfortable instead of working through it. For many of us, fear makes us want to avoid the situation, but doing that keeps us from working through what needs...
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Episode 115
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26:27
114. Self-Care for Parents 101
It’s easy to forget to prioritize ourselves as parents, especially when our children are struggling. In this episode, Seth and I dive into the emotional balancing act of parenting a teen in treatment while still finding time for self-care. It’s...
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Episode 114
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23:12