The moment I knew I couldn’t do this alone

On August 24, 2016, I was standing in a Target in North Carolina, helping my daughter buy supplies for her college dorm room, when my phone rang.

It was my son’s high school principal.

He told me I needed to come pick him up.

He was high.

I was furious.
I had spent an exhausting year trying to make him stop smoking.

Then, panic hit.

I was 3,000 miles away.

I remember standing there, frozen in the aisle, realizing how little control I actually had and how scared I was about where things were heading.

For a long time, I thought being a good parent meant staying on top of everything.

So I tried to manage him.
(If I’m honest, I tried to control him.)

I tracked him to “keep him safe.”
I pressed him for answers to catch lies.
I grounded him when he didn’t do what I thought he should.

None of it worked.

What it did do was push him further away.

That day in Target, it became painfully clear:
What I was doing wasn’t helping.
And I couldn’t fix this on my own.

Shortly after that, I got help.

Not because I didn’t love my son enough.
But because love wasn’t enough on its own.

The first thing that changed wasn’t his behavior.

It was me.

I learned how to calm myself down before talking to him. To notice what I was scared of or worried about first.

I learned how to approach conversations from the side instead of head-on.

How to listen without him feeling my disappointment.

How to prioritize our connection over controlling his behavior.

How to accept his choices without approving of them and why that mattered.

Slowly, I stopped trying to manage him
and started actually influencing his decisions.

And something shifted.

The tension eased.
The blow-ups became less frequent.
He stopped shutting me out.

Today, that same son calls me when he’s struggling at work or in relationships.
I’m the first person he tells when something good happens.
I’m part of his life in ways I once worried I’d lose forever.

If you’re in your own version of that Target moment right now —
scared, exhausted, and realizing what you’re doing isn’t working —
I want you to know this:

Getting support isn’t giving up.
It’s what gives you a way forward.

And I see this same turning point happen for parents I work with all the time.

Not because their kids suddenly change, but because the parent finally has a different way to show up.

The first thing that shifts isn’t what your teen does.

It’s what they feel when they’re around you before you even say a word.

When you’re not carrying all that worry into every conversation, they sense it. And that’s what starts to open things up again.

Not because you finally said the perfect thing.
But because it felt safer to be honest with you.

You don’t have to figure this out alone.

🧡 Jeanine

P.S. If this story hit close to home, I’ll share more in the next blog about what support can look like.