Will My Kid Always Live a Life of Crime? 😫

Does your kid's behavior ever make you wonder if you're raising a criminal?

We've had a few of these moments (heated/WTF? moments at home, emails from teachers, a few calls from the principal, and ooooone in-school suspension). Are we still calling these kinds of kids "spirited leaders" through gritted teeth?

One time, I got an email from a kindergarten teacher letting me know my kid was "stealing people's snacks. 

I told her I'd need more context. When we hopped on the phone, I learned that this first-year teacher was having all the kids put their snacks in a big blue bin at the beginning of the day. At snack time, they were to dig through the bin to find theirs.

Well, my kid would rummage right past her pink lady apple and grab the non-existent-in-nature-blue Gushers.

She was no dummy; those things are straight candy. But also — I remember thinking, "Will she always live a life of crime?!?

After I stopped imagining my kid in an orange jumpsuit, I let the teacher know I'd send her with a LABELED snack. Next thing I knew, the teacher sent a whole-class email asking parents to please label their kids' snacks.

You're welcome, everybody. Really putting these degrees to good use.

We used to say in graduate school: smart animals will test their boundaries. I've thought about that a lot over the years — because sometimes the kid isn't the problem. Sometimes it's the system. And when you build the right system, the testing settles down. Not because the kid changes. Because they don't need to anymore.

My kids are 19, 17, and 14 now.

My husband and I have been talking a lot lately about how we're not worried about our kids right now. Our relationships with them feel close in a way I know is not guaranteed. I genuinely like these people. I'm proud of them. And I no longer lie awake wondering if anyone is headed for a life of crime 😂

This past weekend, my girls were silly-fighting over who got to hug me, and I ended up in a full group hug with two teenagers. I am NOT taking that for granted.

I don't take any of it lightly, because I know what the years in between looked like. 

Our family had some really hard years. A late ADHD diagnosis for one of our kids — and years of parenting her in all the gentle-but-not-working-for-her ways, which had us feeling like we were banging our heads against a wall. Big and unexpected losses that landed on our hearts and didn't leave quickly. Social worlds that fell apart at the worst possible moments — when a pandemic made rebuilding impossible, when the St. Louis private school thing quietly emptied out friend groups at the start of high school and left kids scrambling for a new social scene in ninth grade. The kind of lonely that a parent watches and can't fully fix.

There were more nights than my kids probably realized when my husband and I quietly rearranged our plans — came home early, didn't make them, canceled them — because we didn't want our kids home alone with their thoughts and their grief and their hanging-on-by-a-thread mental health. We didn't announce it. We just stayed closer than we otherwise might have.

I hear people say all the time: “Don't be your kids' friend,” and I genuinely disagree.

I think what people mean is: if you're their friend, you won't hold the line, and they'll end up walking all over you. 

I get it. But great friendships aren't void of boundaries and tough conversations — they depend on them. Emotional intimacy requires both.

I am absolutely my kids' friend. I'm also someone who teaches them how to treat me — which teaches them how to treat other people, what's worth tolerating in relationships, and how to draw a line without being a jerk.

The warmth and the limits aren't in competition. They need each other for a relationship to have any real depth.

Here's what I don't say enough: most of us didn't grow up in households that did both. I didn't. I had no idea what it even looked like. What I did know was how to sweep my feelings and real self under a rug and build walls of resentment with the best of them.

Learning to hold high warmth and high limits at the same time — and to do it consistently — took real work.

And here's what I've watched happen on the other side of that work: when kids genuinely like and respect you, they want to please you. Which means you need less discipline, not more, and parenting is just genuinely more fun.

This is the system I teach in a ridiculously simple way in the Family Rules Workshop — how to get kids to listen and cooperate without yelling, threatening, or damaging the relationship. It's not magic, and it didn't happen overnight. But we're getting to see the fruits of our parenting labor, and it is seriously making me teary lately. 

If you want my exact parenting plan (templates included), I have it on the website for $37.  

→ Join the Family Rules Workshop

Happy to help :) Also, knocking on a v large piece of timber….

P.S. Already watched the workshop? If you need a refresher, CLICK HERE to log in to your account. You have everything you need. And second, if you haven't tried the Ask Mika chatbot yet, now's the time. I trained it on the full system, ADHD and big-feelings parenting, all of it — and it's honestly a little creepy how well it knows the approach. It's like having me in your pocket for the moments when you don't have time to think. You get 10 free questions just to try it, and unlimited access is on sale through August 20th. [→ Try it here]