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Raising confident, responsible young men means knowing when to guide—and when to get out of the way. Author and boy mom Jennifer Fink returns to the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide podcast to talk about parenting boys through the middle and high school years, when puberty, growing independence, friendships, school responsibilities, and some questionable decisions can test even the most seasoned moms.
Jennifer and Suzy share real-life stories from raising six boys between them and explore why boys need opportunities to struggle, experience consequences, solve their own problems, and gradually take responsibility for their lives. They also discuss shifting from managing to coaching, resisting the urge to rescue, finding a trusted community of other moms, and remembering that the lessons you taught your son when he was little are still there—even when it doesn’t look like it.
Jennifer L. W. Fink is a mom of four sons, author, and journalist who has spent more than 20 years researching boys’ development, behavior, and education. She is the author of Building Boys: Raising Great Guys in a World That Misunderstands Males, which combines research with practical, real-world advice for parents raising boys from childhood through young adulthood.
Drawing from both her professional expertise and her own experience raising four boys, Jennifer helps parents better understand how boys develop, why they behave the way they do, and how parenting needs to evolve as they grow. Through Building Boys, she shares research-based insights, relatable stories, and practical strategies for raising capable, confident young men.
The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Consult with a qualified professional for specific guidance.
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Building Boys: Raising Confident, Responsible Young Men.
Jennifer Fink, author of Building Boys: Raising Great Guys in a World That Misunderstands Males, is back to share practical advice and plenty of real-life experiences from raising her four boys. In our previous podcast, Why Boys Struggle in Elementary School and What Moms Can Do About It, we focused on the challenges younger boys face. It was such a great conversation that we knew we needed to follow up.
Today, we’re picking up where we left off and talking about what happens as boys grow into the middle and high school years. How do we encourage independence, responsibility, and resilience while still being the moms they need us to be? Jennifer, welcome back.
Jennifer Fink: Suzy, so good to be here talking with you again.
Suzy Shaw: So, before we dive in, congratulations on your book… Building Boys is now available in paperback, right?
Jennifer Fink: Indeed. I got a bunch of them last week, and I am a huge paperback fan. So for me, I think the paperback’s even more exciting than the hardcover.
Suzy Shaw: So, for the listeners who might not be familiar with this, tell us what’s in your book and what it’s about.
Jennifer Fink: Building Boys: Raising Great Guys in a World That Misunderstands Males is a book designed to help explain boy behavior and help parents understand boy development, which all sounds very academic, but it’s in a conversational, like if you’re sitting down with a friend that has boys older than you kind of way.
So, it explains a little bit about boys, and then it has some very, very actionable tips that parents can implement. And it applies for boys of all ages. Each chapter is one major tip, like let them struggle or challenge them with chores and caregiving. But then throughout the chapter, there is examples of how to do that with various ages of boys.
Suzy Shaw: And I love that you tackled, let’s talk about love, baby.
Jennifer Fink: Right? Very relevant when we’re talking about middle- and high-school-aged boys.
Suzy Shaw: Yes, yes it is. No stone should go in turn. You just gotta pull up your big girl pants and dive in, right?
Jennifer Fink: Absolutely.
Suzy Shaw: So, as a mom, my goal was always to raise happy, independent young men. And I presume you had a similar goal?
Jennifer Fink: You know, it’s interesting. My goal was to raise decent humans. But I think so often we don’t even have a concrete goal when we start, because let’s be honest, initially the goal is to survive.
Suzy Shaw: True.
Jennifer Fink: To survive. Those are those early years, and we’re so busy on that. And then we are trying to survive. We’re trying to help our boys thrive. And it’s almost only in hindsight that it starts to coalesce into this bigger mission. And I definitely did not realize this necessarily while I was in the throes of everyday parenting, but in hindsight, I’m starting to think that we need to aim for interdependence. More than independent, especially with our boys, because our boys get hit with this super heavy dose of, you’ve got to figure things out for yourself. Right. And we want them to be able to do that. We want to raise capable humans who can stand up to and solve problems and help others.
But we also want to raise humans who know when to reach out to others, who know when to seek help, who know how to rely on others as well. And that’s a piece I think we haven’t talked about enough as parents of boys.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah. The trust factor too, right? So love those goals. And we both know that this does not happen overnight. And, you know, in elementary school, it seemed to me like I was thrilled if they could remember to feed the dog or take the trash out or even pull the homework out of the folder and actually hand it in. Because most of the homework just stayed in the backpack.
So now that we’re talking about middle school and high school years, hopefully some of those skills are a little bit better baked, you know, maybe. So, what do you think the goals are, and how do you think our role as parents changes in it as we prepare them for adulting?
Jennifer Fink: I am guessing that we have some parents of middle school boys, especially, and even high school boys listening who are like, are you kidding? I’d be happy if my middle schooler got the stuff out of his backpack. I’d be happy if my high school kid turned in things much less on time.
So I want to acknowledge that those skills are skills that take a long time to develop for kids, and some kids in particular. So moms, dads, if you are still struggling with those things with your middle school, your high school-age boy, you are not alone. Your kid is not the only one.
Suzy Shaw: I also think that it’s, you know, I always say the reason you have more than one child is so that, that, you know, it’s them and not you. Right. And the difference between, you know, two boys being able to pull homework out of their backpack can be night and day.
Jennifer Fink: Yes. Our kids are different human beings. Even if they come from, you know, the same biological combination, mom, dad, raised in the same house, they can be night and day different. One may not struggle with it at all. And the other, everything you did with boy number one does not work for boy number two. So parents, where you are is where you are. And all you can do is try and build from there.
Broadly speaking, the goal as our boys are in middle school and moving into high school is that we want our boys to take on more responsibility for themselves instead of us doing and scaffolding everything for them. So, for instance, you know, when the kids are little, you will often, you’ll lay out the clothes in the morning, you will tie the shoes for them, you will hand them their backpack you’ve already put the snacks in. You don’t want to be doing that when your kid is 16, because you don’t want to be doing it when he’s 20 and 25, and you don’t want to send him off into the world not knowing how to do those things.
Suzy Shaw: Right. Well, and those little steps of independence are so important. Talking between are so important. Talking between elementary school and middle school, you know, what do you think was the biggest kind of transformation that occurs in middle school?
Jennifer Fink: One thing that I think catches parents, including me, especially the first, first time, second time, by the third and fourth time I was more prepared, puberty comes up sooner than so many of us think. I didn’t know this, but you can start seeing signs of puberty by like age nine. And I want to be sure that those signs of puberty does not mean that your son looks like a teenager at all. But they can be having the beginnings of the hormonal changes of puberty going on within them, which often manifest in things that we do see. The once sweet boy is suddenly, you know, slamming doors, and he’s wanting more time alone. And he’s starting to orient and care a whole lot more about his friends than you.
So often for parents, the first realization is like, what happened to my sweet little boy? And it’s not that you did anything different. It is that he is growing, he is changing, he is maturing. And I’m putting air quotes around that because at the moment for parents, it doesn’t look very mature.
Suzy Shaw: Right. It’s a spectrum.
Jennifer Fink: It’s absolutely a spectrum. And so that shift, your perhaps once very agreeable son kind of becomes less agreeable, perhaps more unpleasant to live with and starts having his own ideas about how he wants to do things, which sometimes just seems like hating everything you suggest that can be challenging. It can be challenging for parents. It’s developmentally appropriate because it’s during this time when our boys do have this internal drive to have more control over their own lives.
Where we parents get lost sometimes is that our boys want more control over their lives. We want them to take more control over their lives. We want them to do things like turn in their homework on time and keep their room neat. And I’m here to tell you that those are not the top priorities of most teenage boys.
You’re laughing.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah, definitely not. They’re not the top priority at all. And I agree…the friend group definitely becomes more important. Members of the opposite sex become more important. And how we navigate all those things and promote healthy conversations and friendships with members of the opposite sex was really important to me too, just because I want women to be respected and I want men to be respected. Do you agree?
Jennifer Fink: One of the things that I kind of find funny only in hindsight, so often when our boys are, I don’t know, 9, 10, 11, there is a stage for a lot of them, not all of them, where it seems like a fight to get them to shower, to pay attention to their personal hygiene, to brush their teeth. And I have heard, and I’m sure you have too, Suzy, so many parents like, “How do I get them to shower? What do I do?” You really don’t have to worry about it at all. Not at all, because at some point hormones are going to kick in, and he is going to start to care about attracting the interest of other people, whether it’s the opposite sex or the same sex. When he starts caring, the problem solves itself. That’s not really one you have to obsess over.
And then, as you said, Suzy, the question becomes, “How do we sort of help him navigate and ideally develop healthy relationships with people at a time when he is prone to kind of push us away?” It’s a challenging line to walk, isn’t it?
Suzy Shaw: It is. And the riding the waves up and down. And in my book, I called that, a part of that period, “Smells like teen spirit.” Because sometimes it’s just driving the boys in the car to a sporting event was like, “Roll the windows down between the BO and the Ax.” Because the body spray, oh my Lord.
Jennifer Fink: It was the bane of our generation of parents, Suzy. Because teenage boys are not known for subtlety either. Like one spray, not enough.
Suzy Shaw: No, more is better. One of the ideas I think that we both agree upon, but you spell out in your book, is letting boys experience consequences. And while they’re still at home and under our roof, so that they can learn from their experiences. You had a car story in your book. Can you tell us about that?
Jennifer Fink: Yeah. I talked about this one recently. I think I made an Instagram reel about it because I discovered a review of my book where somebody said, “I think some of these stories are made up and fabricated. Am I to believe that she really let her son buy this old car and then find out it was a lemon and then sell it at a loss?” And the answer is yes. Yes, that is exactly what happened.
My third son, he was into cars, and he was 15. He did not have a driver’s license at this point. He was 15 years old. He had always been interested in cars, and he knew that he wanted to learn how to drive stick. We didn’t have any manual vehicles at this point in time. He found a car that he was interested in online, with a manual transmission. And so he went with a friend of his, an older friend of his who was 16, did have a driver’s license and knew how to drive stick. And they went to look and they bought this car. And by they bought this car, I mean my 15-year-old, with money he earned, bought this car. And there’s a line in my book that you might remember, Suzy, in parentheses on like, “Listeners, if you think this sounds like a bad idea, I thought so too.” Because every adult listening to this is like, “Oh boy.” Absolutely.
So he gets the car home, and lo and behold, this car needs more work than the car is worth. Which didn’t surprise me, but this was new information for my son. And so for me as a parent, there’s this internal, it is not helpful at all to say, “I told you so.” Or, “What did you think was going to happen?” Right?
I held all of that to myself. Thank goodness he was my third son, and I had a little more practice at this point in time. And I empathized actually, like, “Oh, that stinks.” And I left space. That stinks. And ultimately, it was his problem to solve. This was not my problem to solve; it was his problem. And so, as I shared in the book, he ended up selling that car. He sold it at a loss. He ended up getting something else, and he learned so much in that process.
And since I wrote the book, that kid has gone on to graduate high school. He’s gone on to complete an automotive technology certificate at the local technical college. And he currently, at this moment, has two more non-functioning cars, Suzy, that he plans to kind of collaborate, take parts from this one, parts from this one, and then build one really functioning car. He also does have a car that runs that he purchased himself and he paid off. So when I got this feedback, I shared it with him because I knew he was going to think it was hilarious. He laughed, and he’s 23 now, and he says, “I still wouldn’t do it any other way.” He’s grateful for what he learned through that experience.
Suzy Shaw: In my book, I call the boys Earnest and Exuberance. And Exuberance, we take the car to visit his brother in college for siblings’ day, his brother’s freshman year. And I got a call from the police saying he was pulled over doing 99, which we know was a very kind thing for the officer to do. And we had him turn around and drive back slowly to our house. And we had a lot of family say, “Are you going to go hire a lawyer and fight it?” And it’s like, “No, he was speeding. He needs to understand how to manage this.” And so he fully had to do all the communications with the court, had to pay the fines, absolutely everything. We offered advice if he asked, but otherwise he had to figure it out.
Jennifer Fink: I mean, four boys. Similar stories have happened. I had one that, at one point, he was on a motorcycle, which he had bought, and he got pulled over too, Suzy, going way too fast as a mom. I think you can relate. Your reaction is, “Thank you, officer.” Because I would rather have… I don’t know if he really cared that the officer pulled him over, but it was somebody besides me saying, “Hey, you can’t do this.” And I will be honest, at the time, that particular kid thought, “Eh, that’s no big deal. I’ll just pay my fee and who cares?” Stupid cops. He was still pretty young.
Well, he got a little bit older. He made a few other interesting choices and mistakes, and that all snowballs. That all snowballs in terms of your insurance and potentially even legal consequences. That was his problem to figure out. And now that he’s a teenager who used to be very brash and, I’ll say, arrogant- I know everything teenager and early 20s person- now he’s in his mid-20s, and he’s much more balanced, and he’s not making those choices anymore. And I think it’s partly because he had to deal with those consequences on his own.
Jennifer Fink: I remember when the boys were little, I used to say that boys learned boundaries by blowing past them. How many times did you see that with your own boys, Suzy? Even if it’s just the two of them play-fighting or wrestling, right?
Suzy Shaw: Yeah, or just hurting. I mean, it’s like when they were a toddler, they had to do a header down the stairs and physically hurt in order to not do any more.
Jennifer Fink: Same thing. Right. It’s like they don’t stop until the thing happens that stops them. And that kind of applies yet with our older boys. And so if we don’t let them experience and don’t let them learn from those consequences, if we take it all away, sure, you could have gotten a lawyer, spent a lot of your money, maybe gotten him out of some of the legal consequences. Does that actually help him become the kind of human that you want him to be?
Suzy Shaw: No, not at all. And I will also say that, just the reaction that I think both of us probably had with the law enforcement, I mean, my reaction was scare him. That was my answer, was scare him. And the officer actually cracked up on the other end. He’s like, that’s not the response that we typically get. But I meant it. I mean, really scare him.
So how do we resist the urge to rescue our sons and let them figure it out?
Jennifer Fink: It’s hard because when they are young, we develop this really innate sensitivity to them. So we get to know these boys so good that sometimes we can anticipate what they need before they do. And to make our lives simpler, when they’re little, we just kind of do those things. And it becomes this ingrained habit.
Their middle school years are a time for us to really practice pausing. Pause. Don’t go with your first reaction. Give them space and let them try something first. And I’m going to be real and say that a lot of times you won’t catch yourself until after you’ve already done something.
I was just talking with another mom last week. Her oldest son is going to college. She is a very let them son, let them kind of parents. She lets her boys do things and learn from their experiences. But she found out that the roommate situation, like he was going to have more roommates than anticipated. And her first reaction is to start making phone calls and resolve this. And her husband said, “Hey, leave it. Let him figure it out.”
And it is absolutely within the capability of an 18- or 19-year-old heading off to college kid. But even after all those years of experience, sometimes her first reaction is to do it. And our intent is couched in good intentions. We want to create environments where our boys can thrive. They thrive better when they help create the environments where they thrive. If we are constantly setting the stage or arranging the room, curating the interactions, we’re robbing them of the opportunities to develop those skills.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah, totally, totally agree. So let’s get into kind of specifics, right? What kind of responsibilities should parents begin to hand over and expect from their boys in middle school and then in high school?
Jennifer Fink: A big one is school itself. The homework, the schoolwork, the grades- that is your son’s job. I’m not saying that on the day he starts middle school, you just step back, put your hands up and say, “Good luck. It’s all on you.” But ultimately, you want to get to that point because, and a lot of parents get caught here because they start thinking, “Well, yes, but if he doesn’t pass this class, then he won’t be able to this and then he can’t get into college or he can’t get into the right high school and all of this stuff matters.” It does kind of, but what matters more is your son’s ability to manage these things himself.
So often for boys, we just said it before, they have to fail. They have to experience consequences before they do something. So this may very well mean that you have a conversation at some point. Perhaps early on as the year starts, you say, “Hey, I know I’ve been really involved in your homework before. I’m going to step back this year. This is yours to do. I’m not going to tell you when to do it. I’m not going to be constantly checking in on it. I’m here if you need something.” Can be encouraging him to take the lead in conversations with his teachers.
Suzy Shaw: Right. That communication, very critical.
Jennifer Fink: And where it gets challenging, and then parents will be like, “I know, but I’m looking and he’s got like 15 missed assignments.” You can bring that up. You can talk to him. You can say, “Hey, I noticed. What’s your plan?”
Suzy Shaw: Yeah. And the answer was always, “The teacher hasn’t put it in yet.”
Jennifer Fink: I heard that one a lot too. And you know what? To be fair, there were definitely times when that case. Yes. All the time?
Suzy Shaw: I think that school communication management needs to happen during middle school, ideally. So that by the time they go to high school, when the grades really matter, I mean, the grades kind of matter in middle school, but they really matter in high school. They’ve worked out the kinks of that.
And when I think about some of the things that we did step in for, it would have been I had a son who had- I wouldn’t call it bullying, but he had some social anxiety, and lunch was a big deal for him. So it was the kind of middle school where you weren’t allowed to sit wherever you wanted to at lunch. And he was kind of sitting by himself because he wasn’t friends with the people that he’d been assigned at the table with. And for boys, lunch and recess are their favorite activities in school. And so I did step in and have a conversation with the guidance counselor, and they helped us work through that.
And with the other son, we call him Exuberance for a good reason. He would have some overly funny, not appreciated moments in school. And so we did have to make him talk with the teacher and take responsibility for what he was going to do. But more in a coach- I feel like middle school is coaching, not managing.
Jennifer Fink: That is such a great way of putting it. So that’s really how your role shifts as a parent. When they are little, you are hands-on, and you are literally doing for them things that they cannot do. By the time they get to middle school, they have all their basic capabilities in there. So now your role is more that of a coach: to step back and to let them, to give them opportunities to practice. That’s so important. That’s what coaches do. You give them opportunities to practice, and you don’t expect them to get it right every single time. It’s practice, practice, practice, practice.
There can be the breakdown afterward where you sort of, well, what went well there? What didn’t go well? What could you do differently next time? I’m sure you had those kinds of conversations with your boys.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah, absolutely. And I will say one of the things that got me through those years was my sense of humor and keeping my sense of humor and the mother community. Being able to share the reality of what was going on and either laughing or hearing another mom say, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to do a lot of things happening to me.” Or, “When that happened to me, I did X, Y, and Z.” So, so critical. What role was that for you?
Jennifer Fink: I think same. And a lot of other parents and I find it harder during that stage of life to find that kind of community because when our boys are young, so preschool and then elementary school, there are all these built-in touch points. There’s mom groups, and there’s PTA meetings, and you literally sometimes you go to the playground together; the kids play, and you talk.
As our kids become teenagers, there’s this combination. We’re trying to respect their privacy, so we don’t want to talk about their stuff. And I think a lot of us, moms especially, feel a little bit of shame. Like, if our kid is getting in trouble at school, if our kid is getting a speeding ticket or some other legal consequence, like, let’s be real. Our kids can do some really dumb things, and things that a lot of us, when we start parenting, we think, we think if we do everything right, our boys would never insert bad thing here.
Guess what? They do things. And it can be difficult to be honest about what we’re talking about, what we’re experiencing in our lives, when we feel like maybe we’re a failure if our boy is doing this thing.
So what does that look like in practice? I think it’s so helpful to curate even one person that you can be actually honest with, even if it’s just one other person. It is great if you can have one person who’s got boys a little bit older than yours. That’s ideal, I think. Somebody else who’s kind of in the same stage of life and somebody else, ideally, who sort of shares your values and can laugh at it also. Because if you’re not going to laugh at it, it’s going to be a very hard 5-10 year period right here.
Suzy Shaw: Not only the friendship and the bonding, not only the friendship and the bonding and the sharing and the moral support and all of those things, but for me, there was a practicality of… I had a friend whose daughter was the same age as my older friend. Her younger son was my second boy’s age. And I wouldn’t have known when senior pictures were being taken or when the senior prom was if I didn’t have a friend who had a girl the same age because that information just wasn’t coming back to me.
Jennifer Fink: One of the things that was shocking to me as an exclusively boy mom, no girls, was that the girl moms were talking about prom in January. Our proms weren’t until like almost May. And they already… Not only did they know when it was, but they were also starting shopping. It’s like you. I was utterly oblivious as to when prom even was, much less picture deadlines, things like that. So yes, that is helpful.
And whether or not you necessarily share the same values or you share everything with the moms around you locally, those moms are great sources of information too, like you said, for logistics. Because they know the who, what, when, where locally. They know which people at school have been responsive to certain kinds of discussions. They know maybe which doctors have appointments and which ones do not.
As a boy mom with my particular boys, I spent a fair amount of time in the bleachers at various sporting events. Those sideline conversations, even if they’re relatively surface-level, it’s great because you’re getting to know the other parents. You’re learning about the local resources. You’re learning what they’re dealing with. You’re getting to know one another too. And those connections are so crucially important. Because, for instance, when your kid tells you, “Hey, I’m going to so and so’s house,” you may have their number in your phone saved as, like, Hunter’s mom baseball. But you can at least reach out, and you can verify, and you can double-check. Parenting teenage boys…there is a lot of, you know, you want to trust them, but also trust and verify.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah, for sure. And I will also say that when both of my boys worked in high school, and that was really valuable in their becoming more independent, more confident.
One of the things I had both boys do was babysit other younger boys. And that had a twofold positive benefit. One was learning responsibility and having a younger boy think that they were fabulous because they needed a little self-assurance. But it also doubled as sort of a sex education and benchmark. Like, is this something I want to do full time?
And so I really want to encourage moms to let their boys babysit younger boys.
Jennifer Fink: And there’s so much demand for that. So much demand. And even if they’re not 100% independently responsible for the boys, I know some other parents where their teenage boy, for instance, their teenage son was into baseball. Somebody else had a younger son that was into baseball, and they had the older one practice with the younger one. Right? It was skill development really on both sides. It was intended to be skill development for the little one, but the older one is realizing how much he knows, for instance, it can be things like just playing with the younger kids and keeping them busy, maybe while mom or dad works from home. Like they’re there in case of an emergency. But as you know, it’s really hard to focus when your kids are coming to you asking for popsicles, for instance. So, you know, for the moms for instance.
Suzy Shaw: So, you know, for the moms listening today, you know, what can you just share one from your book that you think would be critical for a mom of a boy of this age range?
Jennifer Fink: I’m going to go with two. Okay.
First of all, it is 100% possible to raise a great guy right now in the world as it is. It’s so easy to doubt ourselves. And yes, there are all kinds of things out there that we don’t want our boys to come in contact with, but they will anyway. Your influence is powerful. And that leads into the second point.
All of the care, all of the love, all of the attention and nurturing that you poured into your son when he was a little boy, when he was an infant, when he was a toddler, when he was a preschooler, elementary- that is all still in there. You might not see that or feel that during those middle school and high school years. Trust it. All of those values, all of that work, all of that teaching you have done is still in there. I guarantee that.
And so when you trust in those two things, you may have a bumpy roller coaster ride, but you’re going to get someplace beautiful.
Suzy Shaw: So I called the teenage boys “man cubs” because they’re sort of looking at you in the eye, but mentally they’re not fully developed yet. And then that last stage, the “remarkable transformation,” because just when you think they’re never going to get it, suddenly it just comes together.
Jennifer Fink: When about did you see and experience that with your boy, Suzy?
Suzy Shaw: Which, the remarkable transformation?
Jennifer Fink: The remarkable transformation.
Suzy Shaw: It was really not until late college, like 22 to 24. And not that they weren’t capable of many things before then, but asking me how I was doing, for example. Oh, right. I mean, there’s just some humanity kind of 101 that takes a while for it to bake in. And that happened a little bit later. And having a significant other helped significantly. Jennifer Fink: One other point that I want all moms and dads listening to know, and you alluded to it right here, but it’s so important to understand as we’re going through these years, boys mature more slowly than girls. It is a biological fact. And I don’t mean this as an excuse. No, this does not mean you have to tolerate disrespectful behavior from your boys. That’s not what this is at all. But it’s helpful in benchmarking. You cannot reasonably compare a 15-year-old boy to a 15-year-old girl. Developmentally, they are not at the same place.
And so if you are constantly expecting, even if it’s just subconsciously, your teenage boy to have a certain level of communication or organizational skills or concept that you, as a person, might have your own issues or feelings that you’re dealing with, and he’s not there yet, it’s going to be really uncomfortable for both of you. They get there. 100% they get there.
My now young adult sons, yes, they have surprised me by asking about me, showing me compassion when I go through some hard stuff. I was not seeing that when they were 14.
Suzy Shaw: Right. Yeah, such a great point. Such a great point. So as we wrap up this interview and this conversation, do you have a motto that a mom can say to herself as she’s navigating the middle school, high school years?
Jennifer Fink: You know what? I probably use the most. I stole this from Dory in Finding Nemo. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.
Suzy Shaw: Oh, I love Finding Nemo. That’s beautiful. And where can listeners find more information about you?
Jennifer Fink: Building Boys, the book is available anywhere you get your books. Find it online. You can go to a local bookstore. If it’s not there, ask them. They can order it. BuildingBoys.net is the home of all of my boy stuff. So you can find lots of blog posts there, as well as a link to my Substack, which is Building Boys Bulletin, my newsletter, and kind of my community of moms.
Suzy Shaw: Love it. Well, here’s to future moms and their kids. And thank you so much for joining me today.
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