Jillian Pransky - "The Power of the Pause"

I had a three-hour blowout with my 16-year-old daughter.

[laughs] I think some of it's just, it's just natural, you know? She's at a huge transition point in her life.

She's going into her senior year.

She's, like, trying to write essays about who she is and what she wants to do in her life for colleges, as though she's supposed to know that at age 16.

You see, that's something that not everybody knows about my daughter.

When we lived in Brooklyn, the cutoff date for, like, how old you were to go into whatever grade level was December, and my daughter was born on December 24th.

So we had a choice to make whether or not she was gonna be the youngest kid in class or the oldest kid in class.

We...

And we could decide.

We could've kept her out for another year, but she was so ready to go, we went ahead and let her go early and be, like, the youngest kid in the class.

She's never had a problem in school.

When we moved to Pennsylvania in 2017, the cutoff here in Pennsylvania is actually October.

So if we had been in Pennsylvania, she wouldn't have had the option.

She would've had to, you know, have waited another year.

But because she had already done that in Brooklyn, she'd already finished those credits, she essentially skipped a grade.

So she's kind of a year younger than everybody else in school, but it's never been a problem, you know? She's always, like, wanted to be [laughs] older than she is.

She's always been very mature and...

But I, I get a sense, like, right now, at this moment, you know, like, another year of life would make a huge difference in knowing something about who you wanna be or what you wanna be.

But still, how are we s- how are these kids supposed to know that? I don't know why we ask them to write these essays, but we do.

And it wasn't about the essays, it was about other stuff, you know? It's like I think she's struggling with some things.

And, you know, people were in her ear and, like, diagnosing her with, like, different mental disorders, and I, I, I'm, I'm not saying she might have some, but I, I know her.

She's my daughter, and I feel like what happened was is we got to, like, a kind of subject that had to do with what I do.

It had to do with knowing what your behavioral patterns are and then making changes to them.

And she was able to articulate the behavior patterns that she's observing in herself that she wants to change.

And I'm saying, "Okay, we can do something about that." If you can do that, if you can know yourself well enough to observe your behavior patterns and know that I'd like to change this behavior pattern in myself, then you stand a decent chance of making it happen.