The one mistake parents are making with their teens

It’s easy to lose sight of the basics when raising kids today. So much time is spent making sure they are happy and healthy, are in the right schools, have healthy friendships and extra-curricular activities.

But what many parents are forgetting is the fact that they are the biggest influence on a child’s life. Hands down.

It’s something confidence coach and author Erika Cramer makes pains to explain to her clients, particularly mums who run themselves ragged ensuring their children have full and rich lives, whilst forgetting their own wants and needs.

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Cramer, who also known as The Queen of Confidence, tells 9honey about women who come to see her asking questions like, “How do I get my kid to be more confident?”

“And I’m like, ‘Are you confident?’ So good luck to you because your kid’s not going to listen to what you say, they’re going to model who you’re being,” she explains.

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Cramer says most mums follow “sets of rules that they know” from their own lives and childhoods, giving little thought as to who they truly are and the lives they want to live.

She too fell into this trap before she had an epiphany.

“I want to make sure that my kids see a confident, powerful-ass woman.

“When I drop them off and I’m like, ‘Goodbye, I’m going to go travel’. That’s the best thing I could do because I get to see Mummy living her dream doing what she does,” she says.

She says children are being raised by social media and their peers instead of the parents who are leading by example.

”We have an issue with being peer-led,” she says. “So these kids are being raised by their friends, that’s a parenting issue, right?

“We have anxiety, all this shit… So if we don’t get good with our mindset, if we don’t work on ourselves, if we don’t heal, all the shit that stops us.”

It has taken years for Cramer to come to realisations such as this after suffering a series of cruel blows.

Looking back, Cramer is proud of how far she’s come.

“Whatever is messing with you is tied to your childhood, is tied to what you learned as a little person,” she explains. “And if we don’t work on that, we hand it down to our kids. We model that for our kids.”

Cramer hopes to encourage women to begin this process without waiting for those painful life lessons that usually spur them, warning that it isn’t easy work, but it is most definitely worth it.

“The obstacle is the way,” she says.

For those who don’t know quite where to begin when it comes to transforming their lives, she advises they start with the biggest “knots” or areas that are causing you the most pain.

That means taking stock of your life, your relationship, money, career health … and identifying the biggest knot. That’s where you begin.

“You don’t work on everything at once. That is so overwhelming and ridiculous,” she says.

“And then once you see that then I would get therapy, coaching … they need a place where they can start to look at the parts of their lives that they’ve pushed away and just start addressing one, just one at a time.”

At the same time, there are things you can do today to make you feel better.

For one of Cramer’s clients, that meant wearing brightly coloured clothing that she was always too scared to wear. For another that meant wearing ‘bling’ sneakers.

For Cramer herself that meant wearing large hats and pink.

“If you dress in the way that you want to be perceived, it’s an actual thing. It’s called ‘enclosed cognition’. It not only changes the way you show up … it changes the way people see you, and so I started to heal and love myself more and then I started liking pink,” she says.

She transformed from feeling “angry at the world” to wanting to help others, launching her first coaching course.

“Our deepest fear is not that we’re inadequate, it’s that you’re powerful beyond measure and you’re scared, especially in Australia. It’s a tall poppy, right? You’re scared to be the great person that you know yourself to be,” she says.

“Everybody thinks they’re a good person, but we showcase I’m-not-good-enough-imposter-syndrome. And I’m like, ‘Can we just stop?’ It’s so boring. I’m so tired of it. You actually do think you’re awesome. So why don’t you tap into that version of you that believes you’re good?

“She’s the one that’s dressing you. She’s the one that’s going for the pay rise. She’s the one showing up on social media. We let her come out and we don’t don’t rip her to shreds, then we can walk around as her more and more.”

You can follow Erika Cramer via her podcast The Confidence Chronicles. Her extraordinary journey is chronicled in her self-help memoir Becoming Magnetic, out now.

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