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In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Suzy Shaw sits down with Casey O’Roarty—host of the Joyful Courage podcast and Positive Discipline trainer—to talk honestly about the messy middle of parenting teen boys. Together, they explore why the adolescent years are naturally challenging, how power struggles can quietly erode connection, and what actually helps parents stay influential when teens are growing fast and pulling away.
This episode focuses on mindset shifts, language changes, and the importance of self-regulation and “soul care” for moms—laying the foundation for deeper strategies and practical tools that will continue in Part 2, releasing next week.
Casey O’Roarty
is a parenting coach, author, and internationally recognized Positive Discipline trainer who supports parents through the often messy, emotional, and transformative teen years. She is the host of the Joyful Courage podcast, where she has recorded more than 600 episodes over the past decade, offering honest conversations and practical guidance for raising adolescents and young adults. Drawing from her background as an elementary school teacher, parent educator, and mother of two grown children, Casey blends real-life experience with research-based tools to help parents stay connected, reduce power struggles, and lead with confidence.
She is also the author of Joyful Courage: Calming the Drama and Taking Control of Your Parenting Journey, a trusted resource for parents navigating the challenges of adolescence with clarity and compassion.
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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Parenting Teen Boys: How to Stay Connected and Manage Power Struggles.
Welcome to the MOB, Mothers of Boys. Today, on the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide, I’m joined by Casey O’Roarty, host of the Joyful Courage podcast, an author, and Positive Discipline Trainer for parents navigating the messy middle of raising teenagers.
Casey helps parents stay connected, set boundaries without power struggles, and lead with confidence during the teen years when boys are growing fast and pulling away. In this conversation, we’re talking about staying connected, courage in your parenting, and what actually helps when parenting feels difficult.
Welcome, Casey.
Casey O’Roarty: Hi. Thank you so much for having me, Suzy. I’m thrilled to be here, and thanks to all the listeners that are tuning in.
Suzy Shaw: You know, you’re a mom, right?
Casey O’Roarty: Yes.
Suzy Shaw: You’re a mom of two, and one is a boy, so you are in the MOB.
Casey O’Roarty: I am in the MOB. My son is my secondborn, which I find birth order really interesting and temperament and all those things. But yes, I have a son, and I also have a daughter. My son is 20, and my daughter will be 23 in the next couple of days, which is wild.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah. Adulting. Empty nest. And you’re bilingual because you do male and female.
Casey O’Roarty: Yeah. I don’t know if my husband would agree with that, but…
Suzy Shaw: That’s another subject.
Casey O’Roarty: That’s another podcast, yeah.
Suzy Shaw: So I really enjoy your podcast and your practical, positive suggestions. I call the teen boys “man cubs” because they just grow so fast. They’re suddenly looking you in the eye. They’ve got these big manlike bodies, but emotionally, they’re still incredibly immature.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you became focused on parenting and coaching parents of teens?
Casey O’Roarty: Yes, yes. I started out way at the end of the 19th century as an elementary school teacher in a very small town up here in Washington State, which is where I live. And I had my kids and was kind of in that tension that I think a lot of us might find ourselves in, where I loved my job, and I had these two young kids, and where I lived did not really offer opportunities for really great childcare.
And my husband and I just decided together, and we’re fortunate enough to be able to make the choice for me to stay home with them. And in the period of time where I was teaching, I really appreciated getting to know the families of my students. And I did home visits, and I really – it’s where I was exposed to the first parenting practice that I leaned into as a teacher, which was the Love & Logic program.
And so once I had my kids, I got trained to do – to teach those classes. And interestingly enough, as I was teaching those classes, some of the lessons, some of the teachings stopped feeling good to me. And so I have a great friend, my friend Jeanette, who kept just gently saying, like, you might want to look into Positive Discipline. Do you know anything about Positive Discipline?
And personally, what was happening in my parenting was I had a four-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son, and I was finding myself in this cycle. You read about, oh, the mother bear tendency to push the older child away when you have the younger child. And I thought, no way. I had this, like, dreamy baby girl who couldn’t have been sweeter and sure enough had my son, and she seemed like, you know, this massive bull-in-a-china shop. And I found myself doing exactly what I’d read, pushing her away because she was kind of getting too into – in my baby’s face. And then the more I pushed her away, the more she was kind of all over the baby.
And it was just this cycle that I was in personally and then professionally wanting to kind of venture into this parent education, not feeling the teachings and the philosophy that I was actually teaching, went to Positive Discipline, and had the most profound experience on so many levels moving through that training, including recognizing that I was in what we call a “revenge cycle” with my four-year-old, meaning, you know, I hurt you, you hurt someone else. And it’s this feeling she was having of lack of belonging and significance.
And Positive Discipline is really based on that idea. It’s Adlerian theory from Alfred Adler, the idea that human behavior is based in our perception and interpretation of the world around us through the lens of, do I belong, do I matter?
And so I started – I mean, I just became like so – such the cheerleader for Positive Discipline in my community. I was doing classes at the local YMCA. I became the parent educator at the local co-op preschool. And I mean – and I was imperfect at it because just because we know –
Suzy Shaw: Well, as a mother, right?
Casey O’Roarty: Yeah. Just because we know that there are useful ways of navigating challenges and useful communication to use doesn’t mean in those moments when we’re flooded by emotion and baggage and conditioning that we choose, you know, what we know is more useful. So –
Suzy Shaw: Right.
Casey O’Roarty: You know, it became really this awesome opportunity for me to – of personal growth and development, you know. And so I imperfectly practiced it. I started blogging about it. I started podcasting. I eventually became a Positive Discipline trainer and was leading trainings for parent educators and teachers in the classroom as well.
And then my daughter, my oldest, hit eighth grade, ninth grade, and things started going sideways real quick. In ninth grade, all the things that I thought would show up over the course of high school showed up in the first three months. And I was like, oh my gosh. Have I been totally duped? Like I thought I was doing all the things and adolescence was going to be a breeze, you know. God bless me.
Suzy Shaw: Bless you.
Casey O’Roarty: I know, right? And it wasn’t. And I was really, really struggling. I was in a lot of fear. The relationship that I had with her felt very tenuous. And what I did is I leaned into community.
So the Positive Discipline Association, I put a call out to other trainers and lead trainers and I said I want to do a summit. I want to talk about Positive Discipline during the teen years. If you’re interested, great. But I will only have you as a guest if, one, you are in or out of the teen years. I was not interested in listening to someone who had yet to experience adolescence with their kids. And, two, I am not interested in talking to you if adolescence was a breeze. Because I knew that I didn’t want to send the message of if you just do this, everything will work out fine, right?
Like, I didn’t want to send the message that there’s some formula or magic tool that somehow avoids teen brain development and the typical struggles that show up during the teen years. I didn’t want that conversation because I feel like it’s defeating. So anyway, I had all these amazing friends and colleagues join me. And I think there was 13 or 14 or maybe 15 interviews that I did. And I mean, we got super real and I started to recognize like, okay, yes, Positive Discipline is the philosophy that I want to continue to hold and to stand on.
And yes, the adolescent years are messy, no matter your parenting style. So that’s when I really, and I was not finding the conversations that I needed about teenagers. And so that’s when my podcast became totally niched into, we talk about teens, we talk about young adults a little bit, but we’re really talking about adolescents.
And my inspiration was my daughter who has been a guest. Both my kids have been on the show. She, I mean, was such a teacher for me. She had a pretty significant mental health breakdown, she talks about it on the show. She had, you know, led me through a narrative that I never would have seen coming, you know, with dropping out of school and substance use and all the things.
And today is a junior in college, is studying biochemistry, is planning to go into graduate school, is super well-adjusted, lives on her own, right? So I am so grateful to her, as are many others, because she’s been so generous with her sharing. I’m so grateful for her to be a model of, okay, like, adolescence, it’s a snapshot. Right now, today, whatever parents are struggling with, whatever you listeners are moving through that’s hard, it’s a snapshot in a much bigger picture that is your relationship with these kids through your lifetime, their journey, yeah. And now I’m a lead trainer. So I not only can train parent educators, but I can also support parent educators who want to move into the trainer space.
Suzy Shaw: Well, I think one of the things that’s refreshing about you, and it’s really part of the reason why I wrote my book, which is Mother’s A Boy’s Survival Guide, is I didn’t feel as though parents were being honest, that we were being honest with each other about the struggles, and that we needed to join together and help each other and build community and not, you know, throw rocks.
Casey O’Roarty: Yeah, absolutely. And the feedback that I get from clients and people that work with me is, I chose you because you’re real, and because you didn’t have a walk in the park.
And you know, I just, when I, from the very beginning, so I’ve been podcasting, it’ll be 11 years this spring. So it’s been a long time. I have well over 600 shows. And something that was important to me, and I had a, I just found myself in the room with, like room, the Facebook group, with all of these people, authors, who I was, I had their books on my shelf, and that’s when I started podcasting. And I was like, do you want to come let me interview you?
So Tina Payne Bryson and Dan Siegel and all these incredible people, Michele Borba. And I always would ask, because they’d share their knowledge, and I’d always ask, like, okay, “and tell us about when it was hard for you to show up that way.” I wanted the authors and the experts and the influencers to speak out loud into, yes, it’s an imperfect practice. I only had one guest, and I won’t share her name. I only had one guest that said, oh, nope, I made the shift, and that was who I was, no matter what. And I was like, okay. But yeah, I think that authenticity is so important.
Suzy Shaw: I have a friend who says, “parenting is a big slice of humble pie.”
Casey O’Roarty: Big time.
Suzy Shaw: So I have two boys, in the book, I call them Ernest and Exuberance, because, and I think it reflects on how different their personalities were. I mean, you really had to throw the book away when it just was, there wasn’t a whole lot of crossover I found between how I parented one to parenting the other. I mean, they just needed different things.
Do you think that is typical, and especially with parenting boys?
Casey O’Roarty: Well, I mean, speaking from my experience of two kids, absolutely. I mean, they all come with different temperaments. And so I think for, and, you know, honestly, I had one kid who got under my skin a lot quicker than the other. I’m just going to be honest about that. You know, I, God bless her, and we’re very close. My oldest, it was, there was, there’s something, and it’s probably a generational, it’s probably, I think it’s an intergenerational thing of daughter, mothers with oldest daughters. We can look back in my line. It’s just something in our line that, you know, I had less patience with her. And with my son, endless, endless patience. And that wasn’t about who they were. That’s about who I am.
And so I think there’s two things there. There’s the, and I think this is really important, there’s the work that we do to take care of ourselves and manage ourselves in the role of mother and parent. And then there’s the work of learning who our kiddo is, right, and what they need.
I think Positive Discipline as a philosophy is useful no matter what, no matter who your kid is. And, you know, it might look and sound slightly different for different kids, because you’re right, they have different needs. But I hold, you know, it’s very relational. So I, to me, the most important thing I can do is nurture and strengthen the relationship that I have with my kiddos. I do not have control but darn it if I’m not going to try to grow some influence. I want to seat it at the table. I want them to ask what I think and care about what I think. But ultimately, they decide. That’s the kind of, that’s the lesson.
Suzy Shaw: Right. Well, because the goal is independence, right?
Casey O’Roarty: Well, the goal is independence. The goal is critical thinking. The goal is compassion. The goal is that they want to hang out with you when they don’t have to. You know? Yeah, for sure.
Suzy Shaw: You know, when I was parenting the teens, you know, one of the mottos that I said to myself was “don’t bite,” you know, because I felt like there were times when they just wanted a reaction out of me and it might not have anything to do with me. It might have been they had a bad day and they just wanted to have somebody to complain or let that energy out of. And so, you know, between don’t bite and keep them busy, although balance has to be in there too. That was sort of how I survived, I think, all those teenage angst. And it was messy. You are so correct.
Casey O’Roarty: Yeah. Well, and I think the messiness isn’t, I really want to have parents hear this, the messiness of adolescence is not an indicator that you’re doing something wrong or that you have bad kids. It is a messy period of time. It’s a messy season.
And I love that. Right. To me, yeah. I love that don’t bite. To me, when they’re little, I think it’s really easy for us to remember, “they’re not being a problem. They’re having a problem.” And once they get big, we tend to forget about that and we look through the lens of you’re being a problem or you’re, you know, you’re giving, you’re being disrespectful or you’re doing this and we hold them to this standard forgetting that they’re still very much in development of the life skills that we want them to learn to embody.
So even our teenagers, they’re never being a problem, like, or not that they’re never being a problem. But if we can look through the lens of, okay, they’re having a problem, like something has happened to shake up what’s internal for them to create this angst or to create this pain or whatever it is that they’re throwing around.
I want to be, instead of like, don’t you dare talk to me like that, I’m going to say something like, wow, it sounds like you’re really upset about something. What’s going on? And that requires me to smooth out my hackles and remember they’re not being a problem. They’re having a problem. So that’s going to get me to a place, that’s going to get me to a place where I can support them in moving through whatever it is that they’re going through.
Suzy Shaw: I really like that they’re not being a problem, they’re having a problem, that’s a great concept.
In your recent podcast at the beginning of the year, it was about called- Create, Don’t Correct in 2026. And I appreciated that and the talk about goal setting for yourself personally and self-caring.
And I think as mothers, it’s really difficult to put yourself even on the platform of having a seat at the table. I mean, I sort of feel like you’re so busy taking care of everybody, it’s part of your own maturity to recognize that you need to do some things for yourself.
And for me, I call that soul putty, because I feel like everybody has cracks in your soul. And you need to know what’s going to help you fill your cracks. And for me, I play the guitar, playing the guitar helps make me happy, being happier makes me a better parent. So when I turned 40, I discovered that I had stopped playing the guitar because I was too busy doing everything else, working and being a mom and a wife. And so taking that piece back for me was so critical to my own confidence and happiness. And I felt like I taught my boys that they need to find their own soul putty.
And in the teenage period, because of all the angst and the hormones and everything, helping them find soul putty was, I think, one of the most important things I did during that period.
If you found this conversation helpful, be sure to listen to our Mindful Mamma, Strong Son episode too!
Casey O’Roarty: Yeah. I just actually this morning, so I have a membership community. And one of the things that we do along with group calls that are more workshop content oriented is on Thursday mornings, we have a “soul care” call. And I started doing the soul care call because I always encourage my clients and my members to have, yeah, to be in the mindset of, okay, and the don’t correct, create idea, right? So you’re in the moment and the angst is there, the challenge is there. And really, it’s an invitation to move from don’t you dare, you cannot, and instead shift in our mind to what do I want to create in this exchange, meaning, and for me, the answer typically is I want to create some ease, I want to create connection, I want to generate a sense of acceptance and non-judgment.
But to get there, I have to, just like if I want to be able to lift heavy things during the day, I have to work out, I have to build strength. And so soul care is a daily practice for me. And I do it in the mornings, and it looks like sometimes it’s I read a book or I listen or I watch some inspirational 15-minute video, and then I do some journaling. I’ve got some, they’re called soul navigation cards, they’re amazing, and I use them as a tool. But I am very particular about this time. And I probably do it at least five times a week.
And so as I’m working with parents and encouraging them, you know, think about what you want to create in the moment, and hearing back, like, “Casey, in the moment, there is no room for me to think about what I want to create.” And that’s when I was like, oh, you know what, I’m going to bring this practice into my membership and really model and invite people into recognizing how powerful it is. Because the busy schedule and all the things we’re doing and not putting ourselves first, that’s on us.
Suzy Shaw: Right.
Casey O’Roarty: And caveat, I’m sure that you’ve got, you know, single moms that are holding so much. I understand that it is a privilege for me to say, take an hour every morning and do soul care. But I will lean in and say there are places for you to practice calming your nervous system, to practice slowing things down so that you can be more thoughtful, right? Whether it’s driving, you know, on your commute, you’re not going to close your eyes and meditate, but there are so many resources that are available to help you practice. And really, it’s practicing calming your nervous system. It’s practicing getting out of fight or flight, noticing when you’re there, getting out of fight or flight so that you have the space to say, okay, you’re having a hard time. What do I want to create in this moment? And then lean into that.
So that to me, yeah, I love the soul putty. I call it soul care. And my kids know I do it. They’ve, you know, sometimes when they lived at home, you know, I’ll get up in the morning before them and sit in the living room and do it so that when they come up, they can look over and they can see, oh, mom’s got her journal out or mom’s got her AirPods in. I think the model is so important because all this busyness is just a construct. And it’s something we’ve all bought into. And we get to set personal boundaries and say, you know what? You get to learn how to make your breakfast in the morning. Let’s work on training you up for that. And then when you’re ready, you know, I’m going to take 10 minutes to tend to me. There’s so many ways that we can make it work and model it for our kiddos.
Suzy Shaw: And that independence and letting them, you know, do things and have regular jobs.
And you know, one of the most important things to me when they were in that teen period was changing my vocabulary and how I spoke with them. So instead of saying, “you should do this,” “you need to do this,” I might say, “I suggest,” or “I recommend,” you know, and you think it doesn’t make a difference, but it really makes a difference if you are pushing the ownership of their actions back onto them. They have to own their actions. They have to do it. And so you’re not telling them what to do. And you know, I think that was just a really big change in that teen period. And then as they move on to become independent adults, I call that last stage The Remarkable Transformation because just when you think they’re never going to get it, it’s like, boom.
Casey O’Roarty: Yeah. Maturity.
Suzy Shaw: Wow. Look at you. Yeah.
Casey O’Roarty: One of the things that Tina Bryson, Dr. Tina Bryson was on my show a couple years ago and she – one of the things she said that really stuck with me is “maturity happens no matter what.” Like they are – you know, and so we can hang on to that.
And what I – I appreciate what you’re talking about with language. You know, one thing that my oldest taught me – and again, I’m always trying to think about critical thinking because they need to practice thinking critically to develop critical thinking. They need to practice taking ownership to take ownership. They need to practice decision making to become good decision makers.
So yes, and with my daughter, something that she taught me and I used as well with my son was okay, I’m hearing that this is hard for you or I’m seeing – you know, this is what I’m noticing. I’m wondering if you want my feedback. So taking what you said and taking it one step further and first asking permission, which I find to be really respectful.
And you know, do you want to know – “do you want me to listen? Do you want to hear what I think? Or do you want help problem solving?” So the message I’m sending is you’ve got this and I’m here to support if you need it. The other thing – there was something else about this too. Oh, energetic – I call it the handing over the energetic responsibility, right? And you kind of alluded to that. There’s so much, whether it’s too much information through school portals or monitoring everything they’re doing on technology. There’s too much information for parents. And in that, we’re holding all the responsibility like, well, it’s up to me to make sure they don’t get into trouble. No, it’s not up to you. It’s up to them, right? And that doesn’t mean you’re like, good luck, you know. Bye. You’re still a steady presence and an influence and you’re building relationship. But at the end of the day, you know, their journey is their journey. And their relationship with whether it’s, you know, any kind of risky behavior or learning in education or, you know, how they’re in relationship with other people, like that is ultimately theirs to navigate, right?
Suzy Shaw: Right.
Casey, thank you so much for this thoughtful and honest conversation. It was such a great discussion that we didn’t want to cut a thing—so this is Part 1 of this topic, with Part 2 coming next week. We’ll share links to Casey’s podcast, Joyful Courage, and her book, Joyful Courage: Calming the Drama and Taking Control of Your Parenting Journey, on the MothersofBoys.life website
Thank you all for joining us today. Be sure to follow the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and your favorite podcast platform—and as always, be kind to yourselves, MOB.
