About Mike Barsamian
Most parents find me at a specific moment.
The arguing has become the normal temperature of the house. The door is closed more than it’s open. The kid who used to tell you everything now answers in one word. And somewhere along the way you started choosing your own words carefully, in your own home, around your own child.
Underneath it is the question almost nobody says out loud: what have I done wrong?
Here’s the first thing I want you to know. Almost all the time, you haven’t done the thing you’re afraid you’ve done.
Parents come to me for their teenager. We start with them instead.
That sounds backwards, and it’s the reason it works.
A parent running on a dominant inner critic becomes a critical parent without meaning to. Not because they’re harsh. Because the voice they use on themselves leaks. You can’t lead your teenager anywhere you haven’t led yourself first.
So we start with you. How you talk to yourself. How you stay on your feet when your kid says something that lands like a slap. And then, once you’re steady, we build your family something to stand on.
Where this came from
I’ve worked with teenagers and families since 2003.
Teaching, training, pastoring, and coaching inside churches and schools for seventeen years.
In 2015 I finished a master’s in theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, in the youth, family and culture emphasis. One of my professors was Chap Clark, who wrote Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers. His argument is that adolescents haven’t so much rebelled as they’ve been abandoned by the adult systems around them, and have quietly built a world underneath where adults can’t reach them.
That idea never left me. It’s most of the reason I don’t believe your teenager’s behavior is the problem.
Then in 2020 I started consulting — for businesses, churches, and schools — on organizational alignment. Which is where the thing I’m now known for came from, and it came from a client rather than a book.
Dave is the founder and CEO of a staffing company. I was consulting for his business when he asked me to coach him and his wife as parents. He kept hitting the same wall: he knew exactly what he wanted for his family and he could not stay consistent about it. Every hard moment, he was making it up again.
So one night we stopped talking about parenting and built him a system. I used the same framework I was already running inside his company, because it was the language he already spoke.
His company had an operating system. His family didn’t. So we built one.
That became the Family OS™. Dave’s family got closer. Other parents heard about it and wanted the same thing, and in 2022 that turned into Present Solution for Parents. I’ve coached 70 parents through it since.
What I believe
Four things I’m not willing to be talked out of.
Behavior is the tip of the iceberg.
What you’re seeing is attitude, or silence, or a door. Underneath it is an emotion, under that an unmet need, and under that, usually, a fear. Respond to what’s below the waterline.
You can’t punish a teenager into character.
Pain and consequence make you the source of the pain, so your teen starts running from the person they most need to run toward. You get compliance without connection, and you stunt the maturity you were trying to build.
What looks like defiance is usually development.
Your teenager’s actual job right now is to become a separate person. It goes badly. That doesn’t make it wrong, and it doesn’t make it about you.
A teenager still fighting with you is still reaching for you.
To aim something at a person, that person has to matter. The teenagers who are genuinely gone aren’t rude. They’re polite, and pleasant, and absent. Almost none of the parents who call me live in that house.
The method
What is the PACE Setter Method™?
The PACE Setter Method™ is Mike Barsamian’s four-part framework for parents of teenagers, built on the idea that a parent’s job in the teen years is not to run the race but to set the pace. P — Present-moment awareness. A — Appreciate their development. C — Connect strategically. E — Empower independence. Unlike behavior-management approaches, the PACE Setter Method™ starts with the parent, not the teen.
Pacesetters don’t run to win. Their job is to hold a steady pace so the runner beside them can reach something they couldn’t reach alone — staying calm when the runner isn’t, easing off when they need it, and staying there through the worst stretch. That’s the parent’s job in the teen years. It’s not your race. You set the pace.
Then we build the system
The Family OS™ has four layers.
Values
The five or six things your family actually stands for.
Standards
What proves those values, so a value becomes a behavior instead of a word on a wall.
Boundaries
What protects the standards.
Expectations
Agreed by everyone who has to live inside them — including your teenager.
The point of it is simple. Nobody should be improvising in the middle of a fight at ten at night. And you shouldn’t have to be the bad guy every time you hold a line.
What the work looks like
The PACE Setter Parent Leadership Academy runs twelve weeks.
- Training modules to work through at your own pace
- Two group coaching calls every week, where we talk through what’s landing and what isn’t
- Five one-to-one calls with me — one at each phase of the program, plus onboarding
- Weekly email coaching. You write in, I write back.
- Text access for the urgent things an email can’t hold
I’m the only coach and trainer. You’re not being handed to someone else after you sign up.
Who I work with
Career-driven parents of teenagers — married, divorced, and single.
Most are co-parenting alongside an ex running a completely different playbook. Most have already tried therapy, consequences, and taking the phone away, and hit a wall.
I turn away parents looking for behavior-management techniques. That isn’t what I do, and it isn’t what works.
Still in the room
I sit with teenagers every week.
I’m a Young Life leader in my own community. It’s volunteer, it’s local, and it’s entirely separate from my practice — I don’t coach teenagers for a living.
I do it partly because I was a lost teenager myself and someone showed up for me. And partly because it keeps me fluent in what a fifteen-year-old actually means when they say something, which turns out to be most of this job. When I tell you what your kid probably meant, I’m not guessing from a book.
What I’m not
I’m a coach, not a therapist or a psychiatrist, and coaching is not therapy or medical care.
My client is the parent. If your teenager needs clinical care, that’s a clinician’s job and I’ll tell you so — most of the families I work with have already been in therapy. I’m not replacing it. I’m changing the house they go home to between sessions.
The short version
The facts, in one place.
- Founder, Present Solution for Parents
- Creator of the PACE Setter Method™ and the Family OS™
- M.A. Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, 2015 — youth, family and culture
- Licensed and commissioned pastor
- Maxwell Leadership Certified Coach
- Working with teens and families since 2003
- 70 parents coached since 2022
- Host of the Present Solution Podcast
- Guest on Dad Up, Faithful Fatherhood, Audacious Faith, and Been There Got Out
Where to start
Three doors, and the first two are free.
The PACE Setter Masterclass is free, and it’s the fastest way to see whether the way I think about this makes sense to you.
The PACE Setter 7-Day Parent Training Guide is also free.
When you’re ready for the whole thing, the PACE Setter Parent Leadership Academy is the twelve-week program.