Parents Were Handed the Same Script

For years, my work focused on adults: leaders and professionals who had spent their careers editing themselves to fit in. As I helped them reclaim who they are, I kept seeing the same pattern. What happens to adults at work doesn't stay at work. It travels home. And it reaches our children.

That is why I created Teens UnEdited. But building it taught me something I didn't fully expect. You cannot help a teenager stop editing themselves without eventually reaching the adults who taught them to.

A Dean's Honest Admission

A member of our Teens UnEdited advisory board, a former university dean and the mother of two grown sons, shared something with me recently that I haven't stopped thinking about.

She was an Olympic-caliber swimmer whose injury cost her a chance at the team. So she wanted one of her children to make it. She pushed her sons toward the paths she had imagined for them, including pulling strings for a study abroad at Oxford that one of them didn't want. Her biggest regret, she told me, was that she didn't ask her children often enough what they wanted to do.

As a dean, she saw the same pattern in her students. She once asked a freshman class how they wanted to make the world a better place. Twenty of the 25 said they wanted to be doctors. When she asked why, the answers were the same: my dad is a doctor, my mother is a nurse.

She did all of it with the best intentions in the world. Most parents do. That is what makes it so hard to see.

We Didn't Just Do It to Our Kids

When she described how horrified she was by what she had done to her children, I told her something I believe deeply: You didn't just do it to your kids. You did it to yourself.

The adults at home were handed the same script. Fit in. Achieve what is expected. Become what others need you to be. We absorbed it, and then we passed it on, often without realizing we were doing it.

The pressure our children feel is real. Pew Research Center found in 2025 that 68% of teens feel a great deal or fair amount of pressure to get good grades, and 41% feel pressure to fit in socially. Some of that pressure comes from the world. Some of it comes from home. As I've written, the exhausted executive was once a kid.

Winning the Teen and Losing the Parent Changes Nothing

This is why our position on community engagement starts with a simple belief: parents are not secondary. Winning the teen and losing the parent changes nothing.

Our board member put it even more urgently. The worst thing that can happen, she said, is a teenager who begins to claim who they are and then goes home to a parent who doesn't support it. Few things will push a young person further from their family.

She also described what controlling parenting produces. Children tend to do one of two things. They comply, and the initiative is drained out of them. Or they move as far away as they can to reclaim their individuality. Neither outcome is what any parent wants.

Insight You're Handed vs. Insight You Own

So how do you reach both the teen and the parent? Not by lecturing either one.

One principle guides how we designed Teens UnEdited: a teen who reaches an insight themselves owns it. A teen who is handed an insight argues with it. Every lesson opens with a real decision before any concept is named, so young people discover the idea rather than receive it.

The same is true for adults. That's why our parent guides aren't designed to give parents answers for their kids. They help parents recognize the decisions they made in their own lives that hurt them, so the same thing doesn't happen to their child.

Our Kids May Lead Us Home

Here is the part that gives me hope. I believe this work is going to bring more adults to reclaim who they are. Some will come because they know they need to. But many will come because of their kids. Their children will lead them there.

In that sense, we are not just helping a teen or awakening a parent. We are helping reconstruct the family unit around who each person truly is.

No teenager works out who they are alone. It happens in rooms other people built: a kitchen, a classroom, a locker room, a first job. A book can start the conversation. A community decides whether it holds. And it begins with the adults at home being willing to put down the script they were handed. That is how we break the chain I described in the conviction crisis that doesn't stay at work.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.