his sadness and his anger in a more constructive manner by verbalizing it, but, unfortunately, his father has not given John the emotional support he craves.
Socialization—Their Vital Work
If you were going to measure the worth of your offspring by how little they did around the house, you would be sadly disappointed. Teenagers are busy with their own lives, and although superficially that life may seem nothing more than hanging out with friends, every social interaction is a building block toward the understanding of human relationships. Socialization is as vital to relationships as academics is to learning, because one without the other makes a very one-dimensional young adult. Through interaction with peers, teenagers sharpen their powers of observation, test the limits of their grandiose behavior, find the courage to speak in a group, look for someone with whom to share confidences and trust, and, eventually, seek a partner with whom they can share the rest of their life.
While socialization comes easily for some young people, it is difficult and emotionally painful for others. If your child is shy or introverted, if their self-esteem and self-confidence is less than adequate, you may observe them watching from the sidelines, as if they are disinterested in making friends or participating in school functions. Trust us; they are interested. They just don’t have the necessary coping skills to take risks, or the emotional confidence to bounce back if they are rejected. Your son or daughter very much wants to be sought out by their peers, picked to be on the team, romantically involved with someone who bolsters their confidence level. They just don’t always know how to get there.
Times Have Changed
Life is so much more complicated than it was at an earlier time when there were few expectations beyond helping with the family chores and contributing to the family workload. In years gone by, the primary emphasis was not on socializing or dating, schoolwork or recreation, but on survival: bringing in the crops before the first winter freeze, tending the cattle, milking the cows, hoping the chickens would lay eggs. If these tasks were not handled, there would be no food, and families would starve. Success was measured not in material possessions, of which there were very few, but in the unity of family: sharing experiences of birth and death, working side by side with a sense of pride and loyalty as an integral member of a tight-knit unit.
In this twenty-first century, materialism has all but snuffed out intangible successes, which have been overshadowed by the “me” society of insatiable appetites fueled by greed and jealousy. Rather than working side by side, people are pitted against each other in fierce competition, vying for jobs and lying for money, which has become the barometer by which our young people have learned to measure success and is the underpinning of anger and depression.
The love of money has become the driving force behind the seventy-hour work week, robbing our children of precious time. Employers foster the notion that everyone is expendable, and in such a competitive world anyone who is unwilling to play by the company rules is simply replaced by someone who will.
For all of our cumulative intelligence and technological progress, we have surged forward but left our children behind. They are being babysat by television sets, their minds captured by violence and sexually inappropriate material. They interact silently with television actors whose sarcasm or racial biases cross the airwaves, invading our children’s psyches. They are being fed junk for their brains and junk for their stomachs. The dinner table is littered with crumpled bags of fast food—wads of salt and grease wrapped in pretty packaging, cooked by someone else’s mother, packaged by someone else’s siblings, and advertised by someone else’s father.
If you take an objective look at just how much quality time you spend with your teens−getting to know who they are actually becoming rather than projecting who you believe they are—you will be pleasantly surprised at their appreciation of your interest in their hopes, dreams, ambitions and disappointments. Instead, some of you think that because you have spent exorbitant amounts of money on your kids’ clothes and activities, or because their social calendar is penciled in for the rest of the year, you have fulfilled your parental duties. You have not. Because your children attend an activity after school every day does not mean they are not being neglected. There must be a balance between activities and home life, between signing up for activities and interacting with family members, between being an integral part of a club and being an integral part of a family. The rules which must be obeyed in school or sports are meant to avoid chaos and keep the activity organized and running smoothly; the rules that children learn at home are valuable lessons in life skills and understanding the human condition. The former cannot be substituted for the latter. Exposure to your heritage and culture, making memories, and bonding are the life lessons your teenagers will take with them and pass on to their children someday.
Responsibilities and the Teenage Brain
Some of you have unreasonable expectations regarding your children, acting as if they have disappointed you and squashed your dreams. You feel they have embarrassed you by problems they cannot seem to solve or poor choices they have made. Statistics now prove what we have all assumed for quite some time: Our teenagers are unable to consistently use good judgment in making decisions. There is actually a segment of brain matter which remains immature and underdeveloped until at least the age of twenty-three, meaning that even the most responsible of your offspring will make a really bad decision some of the time, and some of them may make consistently poor decisions almost all of the time.
Your children should not be given responsibilities in areas where poor choices may impact the rest of their lives. They should not, for example, be left to watch younger siblings if those children need supervision; this includes babysitting other people’s children, where the teenager certainly must exercise good judgment and attentiveness at all times.
Many parents believe that the task of babysitting will teach their teenager the fundamentals of childcare as well as responsibility. This is not only dangerously faulty thinking on the part of the adult, but a careless disregard for human life. Ask any teenage babysitter and they will tell you that most of their time is spent raiding the refrigerator, rifling through drawers and cabinets, watching television, and talking on the telephone. Should an avoidable accident occur under the watch of your child, not only they, but you, will have to carry the legal and emotional burden for quite a long time, if not forever.
Every parent wants to get to the bottom of a problem, and when your child messes up, one of the first things you are likely to ask is, “What were you thinking?” The most frequent response to that question is, “I don’t know.” This infuriates parents, who expect their child to come up with a better explanation than that. This is generally when the parent banishes the teen to his or her bedroom to think up a better answer, promising they will not gain freedom from solitary confinement without one. The truth is, your child really doesn’t know what they were thinking, anymore than they weighed the possibilities of disaster, or anticipated the outcome.
However, if you insist on an answer to “What were you think-ing?” your teenager will come up with one that may satisfy you, not because they have been evasive all along but because they have the power of imagination and creativity and know this is the only way they will ever be let out of their room.
In fact, the realistic bottom line in their messing up is simply this: Your teenager cannot consistently make good decisions and, moreover, rarely thinks about the consequences of any decision they have made.
Responsible Rose
Rose had always been a responsible young lady. She was community-minded, helping to build houses with Habitat for Humanity, and did her part to recycle paper and plastic to preserve the environment. She was exceptionally compassionate to the elderly, spending half the
