Teen

Gracefully Transitioning To Life’s Seasons?

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

I wrote a post about sending our first kid off to college last time.

If you haven’t read it yet, I’ll summarize it for you:

Whiny, whiny, boo-hoo, cry, send our kid away… boring, boring.

But this is the thing that really bothers me, as I think about it a bit more.

It’s not really fair that just when our kids become helpful we send them away.

I mean think about it for a minute. Kids come out of the womb as little Machiavellis. I can give an example from my own life. Before one of my kids could speak she was bossing me around.

“How?” you ask.

We had taught her sign language and she knew about four words. She knew how to say “I love you” and she knew how to say “Milk”. We were teaching her to ask for what she needed. This is good. But we didn’t expect a little tyrant to emerge.

For example, when I walked into her room in the morning she didn’t gaze up at me with loving, thankful eyes and ask for some milk with a smile.

Her face screwed into a scowl, she was standing and angrily clenching both fists, glaring at us, and non-verbally (effectively) yelling the sign for milk.

“WHERE is the hired help?!” her nonverbal cues were sending us. Clearly, we weren’t measuring up to her expectations. And we were only two months in on this parenting journey. (OK maybe it took her longer than two months to become a tyrant but not much more than that.)

And compare that to now. I mean homeschooling teenagers can cook! And they know how to do the dishes!

Why would we get rid of them now?

I think parents should form a union.

We should demand that homeschooled teenagers stay with us forever. They should be massaging our feet and feeding us grey poupon (Do you swallow that stuff whole?) after all the blood, sweat, and tears we poured into them.

If people do need to change and mature over time, then I think that after we’ve had our homeschooled, helpful kids and teens for a long time, then sure, they can change back into babies.

Then we can send them away because we’re losing the unhelpful babies and not the helpful teens.

Wait. What’s that you say? God already designed the universe that way?

Ah!!! I guess you are right!

When God gave teenagers parents, he designed the parents to do just that. Parents are helpful to their teens, and then the parents are the ones that mature into essentially incoherent, helpless babies again.

Ah!!! 

I didn’t think of that!

Maybe it’s all about perspective!? I’m alive today!

This is a good day!

I don’t mind that my helpful, kind, sweet daughter went off to university!

The way the universe works is just fine, come to think of it!

Go away!

If I’m not poised halfway between land and sky, about ready for them to shovel earth on top of me, then this is a great day!

It’s amazing that being grateful that we’re alive is a balm to so many of our problems!

I think I’ll see if my husband wants to learn English country dancing with me now that my daughter has left for university.

We have some extra time.

What a perfect world we live in!

(. . . But if distraction isn’t a perfect solution for you either . . .

As you try desperately to hang onto the rope as you swing through the seasons of life, you could cling to God by praying through the lyrics of this song: “I’m here traveling down this long and winding road. Seasons come, seasons go . . . But I’m still standing on the only rock I know.”)

Every Homeschooling Parent Will Be Ready To Wave Goodbye To Their Teen

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

I’m mad at you! At all of you with a child more than 17 years old who left home! I hate you all! Why didn’t you tell me it would be this hard to say goodbye when they left for college!?

And all of you with babies too, babies that are older than my oldest baby, I hate you all too! Before we had babies, why didn’t you tell us that looking after babies would be so hard!?

Ah, yes . . .

It is because we wouldn’t have believed you even if you would have spoken up.

And if our teens truly understood the depth of our loss, many of these kids wouldn’t leave home. They are good kids. I relayed these thoughts to my husband, processing them aloud through my tears.

“And we want them to leave,” I cried out. “Yes, we do,” my husband comforted. Then he shoots me a sideways, knowing look. I remembered that this morning our teen was definitely right when she was definitely wrong and instead of bursting into tears, I burst into laughter.

I feel some joy mixed with some sorrow.

And so, “Goodbye!” we say as we wave. Except it’s not kindergarten they are heading off to on a bus. We homeschooled so we missed that milestone. It’s 600 km away and the tearing, the necessary, painful cleaving continues.

Reflecting God’s nature He created them male and female. . . Therefore, a man leaves his father and mother . . . The Message

I told you it would be that way, Jesus reminds me softly. Many years earlier, in prayer, Jesus showed me a picture of my daughters, one after the other, ready to board a plane, to soar off on their journeys of independence. He was preparing my heart to say goodbye many years ago, even then.

Many of us homeschooling parents pushed the love boundary of our hearts a little further than expected when we cracked open those brand new math texts on day one of homeschooling.

The depth of love surprises us all, and surpasses the boundary markers we set up to protect ourselves.

If we love what we know, then we will get to know these kids and our love for them will transform us, them. Love always does.

I’m not saying that homeschooling is one domino after the other of perfect days. I have homeschooled for 4,745 days (I’m convinced you don’t have enough math skills to figure out how many years I have spent homeschooling- Who does?). Out of all those days, I have NEVER yet had one perfect day.

Nope. Not one.

Just daily joy mixed with daily sorrow.

Master storyteller J.R.R. Tolkien explains it this way:

The possibility of [sorrow and failure] is necessary to the joy of deliverance . . . giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

And so saying goodbye to the teen as she flies off to college is just another homeschooling day: some joy mixed with some sorrow. We are used to that. We’ve gotten stronger over the years. It’s just another part of the daily homeschooling rhythm.

We will be ready because we have been practicing every day for this: some joy and some sorrow, repeat tomorrow.

We’re going to be OK.

And so as we watch them soar, we nurse our grief a little, and then flap our baby wings and listen for the call from Him into a new adventure.

And in the same way that we invest in our future by putting aside a few dollars each month, is He asking us to invest in our spiritual future by putting aside a few minutes each day to listen to Him calling us, comforting us, asking us to set aside the old, and to pick up the new?

How is he calling you to wake up?

Where to next God?

I can’t quite fly yet but I am sensing another adventure.

Yes, I’ll follow!

(How about you?)

Science Proves Your Teen Doesn’t Have To Be A Jerk! (Part 2)

/ Lori Lawe / Leave a comment

Last time I gave scientific evidence to begin to prove teens don’t HAVE to be jerks!

Here are some more nails in the coffin of the idea that teens are generally jerks. The kids from the homeschooling culture we encountered were not in the habit of constantly being jerks. Also consider:

2. My eyes didn’t have to unwillingly be subjected to myriad low-cut cleavages and to buts mysteriously falling out of swimwear (wait – you mean they DESIGN modern bathing suits to do that? WHAT now?) when we were at the swimming pool with many of the kids from the conference.

The young men were not lurking nearby with half-crazed hormone-induced semi-leers, noticing with appreciation the buts and cleavages so mentioned above.

They were just kids having fun.

Even the older ones.

In fact, assuming they would behave like this, with their cerebral cortex’ filled exclusively with ideations of sex, would be dishonoring to them all.

The adults who assume this is all our teens think about are the ones with the problem.

It’s almost as if these adults assume self-control isn’t a real thing.

These kids know better.

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Ancient Text

We moderns like all this fruit of the spirit, except, of course, self-control. Who wants that? It turns out that the fruit all come together as one big package. Joy and self-control are linked.

Why would these youth grovel in the mud when they can soar into God’s purposes?

So they just had fun together, playing random games with all ages of the kids there, laughing, and creating a whirlpool with 50 kids running in a circle in the small hotel pool. One tried to dive into the shallow end of the pool on one occasion (they definitely didn’t all have FULLY developed cerebral cortexes yet). A random parent yelled at them and they cut it out.

Which brings me to my next point.

3) Parents were welcome, and generally unnoticed at all of these get-togethers. Reminds me of the study mentioned in the last post that they WOULD hang around adults willingly.

Why? Because it didn’t actually matter if the adults saw what they were doing or not.

And ironically, of course, the parents are bored making the decision of whether they should actually be there with their kids.

It doesn’t matter if they are there.

They yawn and go to bed, as my husband and I did, and we let our teen girls frolic around with a hundred youths we didn’t know until 2:00 in the morning.

We heard later that was when they got back. We were asleep.

We found them in the conference room of the hotel singing praise songs to God together late into the night, when I got up to get a drink of filtered water. They had a couple of guitars, a violin. Some younger kids were playing cards nearby.

Sometimes a table of adults sat nearby, sometimes not. No one was really paying that close attention.

These were good kids, in general.

They were used to having healthy, hearty fun.

And so they blew the expectations we had for youth wide open.

Maybe our expectations are too low.

Maybe we are the ones with the problem.

These homeschooled kids open a door to another culture for us to glimpse into for a short time, a weekend.

May this glimpse be enough to blow open our current expectations for our youth.

Is this another way that homeschooled kids may offer hope to our society and discussed here, here, and here?

Science Proves Your Teen Doesn’t Have To Be A Jerk! (Part 1)

/ Lori Lawe / 5 Comments

It was the kind of research results that make you readjust your position in your seat, sit up straighter. Your hand automatically reaches out to tap the audiobook’s 10-second replay button a few times.

Huh?

Yup. Your teen doesn’t HAVE to be a jerk!!!

I was listening to the audiobook Your Best Brain: The Science of Brain Improvement by John Medina. Consider the following excerpt from Lecture 17:

“Epstein makes several important observations about the powerful effect of culture [on teens] . . . Epstein points to a study . . . looking at adolescent behaviour in 186 pre-industrialized societies. The research did NOT find lots of classic impulsive, obnoxious, get me away from my parent’s teenage behaviour in ALL of them. In fact, they found the opposite. More than half the young males exhibited no rebellious behaviour at all. Teens in these cultures spent most of their time hanging around their parents. They often helped with the chores both in family and in broader social activities”.

It kind of sounds like the homeschooled kids I met.

We attended a 4-day get-together with classically homeschooled kids from almost every US state and many Canadian provinces recently.

It was a culture shock.

In fact, the previous year, I attended this same event with only my kids. “You have to come to this event next year with us,” I pleaded with my husband. “This is culture shock.”

So my husband rearranged his holidays to attend this year with us.

“Uh-huh,” he agreed. He was glad he came. Some things just have to be seen to be believed.

The biggest culture shock is that all the teens weren’t jerks.*

“That must be your own rosy glasses you have put on only when you observe homeschooled kids!” you protest. “You don’t even know most of these kids for Pete’s sake!” you spit. (Wait- I know you don’t spit but it kind of ruins the effect if I say “You say politely”. Stay with me on this one.)

Consider the following reasons why it seems to me that these kids were not in the habit of constantly being jerks:

1) At the family barn dance (Can I stop there?) in which parents and all ages of family members including teens danced in the same big hall (Can I stop there?), often a very young child would join in the fray. Partners switched every few seconds sometimes, in a (deliberately) Jane Austen style. EVERY SINGLE TEENAGE BOY that I saw whose turn it was to dance with the 3-year-old, hunched down, smiled and spun the little girl in time to the music. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

Photo Source: Logos Online School Website

It was so sweet to watch teen after teen do this, it made me tear up.

These are not the teens skulking in corners, hoping for a chance to get outside and smoke some more pot.

As if this itself is not enough nails in the coffin of the myth that all teens HAVE to be aloof jerks, there is more evidence to follow that I will talk about next time.

Hold onto your hat. Adjust your position to sit up straighter and to take more notice. 

Entering this homeschooling culture, even through reading this blog post, may be enough to seriously damage your low expectations of today’s teens.

Check out this site below to blow another sock off the low expectations we so often hold for our teens.

the rebelution – rebelling against low expectations

Blogpost Footnotes

*Yes, of course, there are homeschooled kids who are jerks. I’m a jerk sometimes. So are you. And, similarly, there are myriad amazing public schooled kids. Of course!

We are observing cultural norms among various groups of teens. And the culture of these homeschooled teens aligns well with the science quoted in the study.

Did You Find A Crumb Of Hope For Your Teen Yet Today?

/ Lori Lawe / 1 Comment

The dawn of a new day. I can sense the inspiration.

A blank page.

A new life.

The possibilities are endless. We are inspired.

Parents spend thousands of dollars on baby clothes, cribs with matching wall decor, and expensive lotions for baby’s butt. We are inspired. The possibilities are endless. We haven’t messed this up yet.

We have hope.

But in the depths of the dark of night, on the page that has been written on, crossed out, erased, for the teenager who has messed up big time, inspiration and possibilities seem like a closed book. Every corridor that can be walked down from here seems dark, foreboding.

For the sullen teenager, a disappointment, we toss her an iPhone and watch her walk to her room. His life feels like the depths of night, right now. We must have messed up as parents. We spend less time with her and feel more frustrated. The dark corridors all seem to point to the same place, the place we don’t want to travel down. This is your journey, we say.

Good luck.

But what if his silence is imploring you to walk down the darkest of corridors with him? What if the light at the end of the tunnel will be so bright, so warm, that it will heal your soul too? What if the savior of your kids’ life isn’t you after all, but is the One through whom all things are made? What if, at the end of the journey, you find a piece of your soul?

And so we pray, on our knees, for our lost son, forgotten daughter. We pray until our hearts are transformed. We pray until we have some extra love left over, poured out to us from the Father, to give to our children.

We pray until we can find a tiny bit of hope to grasp onto, and then we continue our journey, offering a morsel of hope to our child when the opportunity arises. And we pray some more.

And in the transformation of ourselves, a tiny bit piece of beauty comes from ashes. The possibilities are endless for us and for our children. They are, like a new life, even this day, as are we. The page written on, erased, still has room for new words. Hope is born this day. And all is well with the world. I nourish my soul with today’s food and pass on a crumb to my child. It is enough to sustain her, for today. And He is pleased with His child, with you.

Oh! May the God of . . . hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope! The Message

God, though we have left a trail of continual failing as parents, and though our teens look back on a similar trail of constant failing, You never stop reaching your arm of love down to us and helping us to stand, again, to keep walking. Would you help us up again today, to continue our journey as parents, though we are tired and discouraged? And may we show the same grace to each of our children we pray.

How To Interact Normally With Teens

/ Lori Lawe / 1 Comment

I really needed a relaxing afternoon with a chick flick movie and popcorn.

I asked my 17-year-old daughter to join me that afternoon after church. Fun!

At church, I felt the call of God to invite the 21-year-old woman to join us.

She had phoned me earlier in the week to ask for some advice about a boyfriend. I hadn’t had a chance to get back to her yet.

We picked up the 15-year-old after church and they all came for lunch.

After the movie, the four of us sat on the floor and whispered about boys and love and life and wisdom for two hours.

I thought only a few minutes had passed but was surprised that we had forgotten about supper.

But this is normal for us, in kind of an abnormal way.

We attend the women’s prayer meeting together – youth and teens and young women. We go to the women’s retreat together – all ages.

Why not?

This is what we do in the church.

My mind recollects 25 years back when I was taking a course for my Master’s degree. The Professor said that the church is the last place where we can collect sociological data that reflects all ages.

That surprised me like a 2×4 aimed at my head.

The church is the LAST place in our culture where people of diverse ages interact.

Wow.

Just because something happens frequently doesn’t mean it’s normal.

Maybe tossing our teens in the basement with a jumbo pack of Cheezies and a few other youths, knowing they will be staring into their phones and doing “who knows what?” is not “normal”.

Maybe hoping for the best for them as we try to forget them for a while, while we watch our own movie upstairs is not “normal”.

This is common in our culture of highly segregated ages. It is common for youth to share their hearts almost exclusively with people in the same age demographic, give or take 6 months, but is this normal?

No. Look to the church for normal.

There are some alternatives we can take to insert some “normalcy” into the “common un-normalcy” of our cultural expectations around how we interact with teens. Here are a few:

1. Push them out of the way at the buffet when you are trying to get at the cheese. Hey, you never know! It worked for me!

2. Wear weird pants and wait for teens to come to you. Hey, you never know! It worked for me!

3. Buy a Christmas present for yourself and pretend to give it to some youth. This may guilt them into interacting with you. Hey, you never know! It worked for me!

4. Bring your kids and youth to church. Try this while you are still bigger than them if they are physically resisting you.

The 70-year-old lady told me a story this week of the 7-year-old from our church who came over to sit next to her on the public bus. This child was genuinely curious about what the older lady was doing that day. They love each other because they have had some time in each other’s company.

That’s kind of cool.

The 90-year-old wise lady in my life, when I was a teen, turned me down a narrower, healthier path many times.

And I loved her too.

Anyway, let’s keep being the uncommon normal.

Society may depend on it.

Apollos was accurate in everything he taught about Jesus up to a point, but he only went as far as the baptism of John. He preached with power in the meeting place. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and told him the rest of the story. The Message

After a moment of thankfulness, and of laying the well-being of a teen we love humbly at the feet of God, does a particular person come to mind as someone who can potentially connect with them? For example, an aunt, uncle, business associate, elderly person, neighbor, or friend?

Jesus, we pray you would show us the wise adult in our beloved teen’s life who may have a key to open their heart.

When can we cook our youth their favorite meal and invite this person to join us? Let’s keep praying for the uncommon normal.