Raising Teenagers: Top Ten Suggestions, part I

Since 1985,  I’ve had the pleasure of working with teenagers  as a teacher, principal and parent. My wife and I raised four children—three boys and a girl— all in their 20’s and 30’s now. By observing parents with their children, and sometimes bumbling through raising our own, I’ve learned a lot about raising teens. Here then,  are my “top ten suggestions.” 

10) “Build fences.”  There are two opposing tendencies we are tempted to veer into as parents, depending on the issue: to give our children too much freedom, or the opposite, to micromanage all facets of our children’s lives. Teenagers absolutely need rules and structure, but they also need space, a chance to try things and learn from their mistakes.  Threading the needle between those two extremes is THE challenge of being a good parent of teens. 

The best advice I ever heard on this came from a mother of five well adjusted kids (I didn’t say perfect). The key, she told me, was to build “good fences” as a parent.  “Teens are like bucking broncos. If we try to ride them, they’ll buck us. But if we build fences,  they will eventually move in the direction we want them to move, under their own power.” 

Here’s what I think she meant: Suppose our child breezily announces he is going “out” on Friday night. It’s perfectly reasonable to ask “what are you going to do? and “who will you be with?” But we’ll quickly get into an unfruitful argument with our child if we by ask too many specific, probing questions, or if we begin to legislate it’s OK to be with child X but not child Y.   When we “ride” the bronco, it’s going to buck us, or lie to us, or try and parse words to retain as much freedom as possible.  Instead, we should make sure we’ve established a consistent time our children must be home every night, and establish the practice of being there to greet them at the door. The curfew time is the “fence” which doesn’t change, and as long as they respect that fence, we can then give them a little space on the exact details of their activities.  

9) We should insist our children “finish what they’ve started”—About half way through baseball season, my 12 year old son told me he “hated baseball,” and begged me to allow him to quit. That killed me inside, because he was good at it (and I enjoyed the accolades he received), but he already knew what my answer would be: “We’re not quitters in this family. When the season is over, you never have to play baseball again—that’s your call and I’ll respect it. But you gotta finish out the season.”  I believe insisting our kids   “finish” is a critical lesson for them, especially in a culture of instant gratification. The instinct to run from hardships or unpleasant things is natural, but if it becomes an “option”  for how they handle hard situations, it’ll affect their high school academic careers, their future job performance, and perhaps most importantly, their relationships, even their future marriage. Though “domestic tranquility” is good for our families, it’s not more important  than developing virtuous children, which sometimes means we have to help them deal with difficulties rather than run from them. It’s too common in high schools today that parents  immediately want to yank their kids from difficult classes, change difficult teachers, or change schools altogether if their child is “unhappy.” Pushing through unpleasant situations is an important skill to teach our children—the “struggle” and “powering through it” makes our kids healthier and tougher.

8) Insist on variety of activities.  One of the more pernicious forces in teen culture today is club sports, which tells athletes (and parents) that students must “play their sport year-round if they want to compete for college scholarships.”  Doing so divorces kids’ participation in other school activities, other athletic programs, and in healthy extracurriculars by sucking up their time and energy (to say nothing about the family’s time and energy, traveling to different venues all over the region). Many of these kids, as the years wear on, often feel disconnected from their peers, unhappy that all their eggs are in the proverbial  “one basket,” and even begin to grow weary of playing the sport they once loved as a younger child. I know many students—especially girls—who played a sport year round since they were 7 or 8 years old, only to completely lose interest in that sport in their junior or senior year. 

We don’t want our children to become specialists! Instead, we should aim for “wholeness” and “balance.” We should invite our children to become involved in a great variety of activities—athletic teams, yes, but also academic clubs, fine arts activities,  and church/religious organizations. Variety is the spice of life, and our kids will be happier over time with this “renaissance” emphasis. 

7) Set rules about cellphones/smartphone usage— I suggest three: First, if my wife or I call our kids, we expect them to answer! If they don’t, and we try again a bit later and  they still don’t answer, they’re going to forfeit their phone privileges for a few days. Second, at social functions, including family dinner, no cell phones! Third, cell phones, Ipads and all  other technology must be holstered in the charging station in the kitchen by 10 p.m. each  night, or when they get home on weekend nights. 

The reasons for the first two rules are self-evident. I insisted on the kitchen charging station because it kept our kids from taking their technology to bed, which would deprive them of sleep—doctors say the blue light emitted by tech devices stimulates our brains and disrupts our natural sleep cycle, and teenagers already get too few hours of sleep. Second, for boys, the temptation to view porn is overwhelming, and for girls, the temptation to fixate on social media or to engage in the latest gossip is unhealthy. 

“But Dad, I need my phone because I use the alarm clock to wake me up!” my son protested. I went to the store and bought him a $7 alarm clock.  He wasn’t impressed.

6) Help your child prioritize school. The teenagers’ “job” at this time in their life is to do their best in school. Next to faith and family, school should have priority over everything else. That’s easy to say—most of is would agree in theory—but in practice, not so much. 

How sacred is school time? How often do we parents take our kids out of school for an early start to vacations, or hunting expeditions, driver's license tests or hair appointments? How often do schools ask kids to leave school early—or miss it altogether—for ball games? How many times do academic organizations (like science and foreign language associations) schedule competitions on school days to improve participation rates? How frequently do we let our children miss school because they're a little under the weather? The answer to all of the above is "too often." My advice: Make it the truly rare exception that your child misses school for voluntary reasons, and insist that unless they have physical signs of illness (a temperature, nausea, an infectious disease or illness) that they “power through” if they’re feeling a little under the weather. 

(To be continued)

Sweet Caroline, Rest in Peace

We learned over the Thanksgiving weekend that Caroline Berry passed away. She was a member of the class of 2020 at St. Michael. 

We got to know Caroline when she enrolled into our freshman class from Spanish Fort High School, in our first year as a school. She was a good volleyball and basketball player, but had to sit out her first year with us because of the A.H.S.A.A. transfer rule, even though she practiced with both teams. She acclimated quickly to St. Michael, making friends and doing well academically.  

However, at the end of her first semester, around Christmas time, she started to feel pain, and when she went to the doctor, she was diagnosed with soft tissue cancer, or rhabdomyosarcoma. Hers was a particular virulent form of this very serious form of cancer, and for almost two years, she and her family fought against it with great stamina and bravery. 

I once heard a priest say at a funeral that in his experience, people “died like they lived.” I think he meant that if you have a fighting spirit, you don’t succumb to something like cancer laying down; you fight against it, doing whatever it takes to get well. Caroline fought hard and long—a testament to her guts—and even in the middle of it,  she used her suffering as a platform to raise money for childhood cancer research. We were honored to be part of the "Go Gold" Childhood Cancer Awareness day in honor of Caroline Berry earlier this fall, as memorialized through this video. 

It never makes sense. 

That’s what we try and do when someone young dies—to make sense of it. It doesn’t make sense. We ask “Why would God allow it? Why would God allow an innocent, good person like Caroline to suffer so much?” but there are no satisfactory answers, nothing anyone can say which causes us to say “Aha! Now I understand.” 

But as much as we can't understand it, her example, suffering and death have had a positive impact on St. Michael and all the people she knew. 

First, it’s really hard to get to know Caroline and understand all that she fought through, and at the same time take our petty annoyances and grievances too seriously. Whether or not “he said this” or “she said that” or all the little things we allow ourselves to get upset about seems silly in light of Caroline’s suffering. It’s too easy at times to get trapped in our own bubble of self-pity. Our suffering is trivial, unimportant by comparison. It’s good to be reminded of that. 

Second, it’s noteworthy that Caroline died on Thanksgiving Day. I think there’s a message for us there: We have MUCH to be thankful for. Our friends, our family, our good health, our school, life itself. It’s too easy to take all these things for granted, and to be like the “nine of the ten” lepers  Jesus cured who never came back to thank him. Caroline reminds us to be like the tenth leper and to thank him often for all that he’s given us. 

Third—and I think this could be true in all cases of suffering—it really depends on how we respond. When people are hurting, when they have needs, they often bring out the best in us, calling US to be generous, calling US to be less self-centered. A few of you have been Caroline’s friends through thick and thin, visiting her in the hospital, spending time with her at home, calling and texting these last 2 years. You won’t forget her. And you’re not the same person you were when you first became her friend. 

For it’s one of the great truths of our Christian faith that the more we give, the more we grow, and the happier we are.  God has pre-programmed us this way, but we fight against God’s plan, trying to horde our material possessions, our talents, our time. Yet the more we horde, the more miserable we make ourselves. Being Caroline’s friend, spending time with her, ministering to her—has been a great gift to some of you. Earn that gift, by living well, by allowing yourself to be shaped by your relationship with her, bent toward generosity and concern for others. 

When you start a school as we have, we get to celebrate many firsts: Our first medals in foreign language competitions. Our first music awards. Our first football victory. Our first prom and graduation this spring.  Our faith tells us, with Caroline’s death, we celebrate another first: 

Our first Cardinal in heaven. Our first saint! 

"Saints of God, come to her aid! Hasten to meet her, angels of the Lord! Receive her soul and present her to God the Most High." 

The "Nones"

Question. Among all the religious denominations--Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, and others--what is the fastest growing segment among young people? 

Answer: The “nones.” Not “N-U-N-S” but “N-O-N-E-S.” The fastest growing segment is those who profess no religious affiliation at all. 

That’s alarming. So as you'd suspect, there’s been a lot of discussion why this is so. For sure, the recent scandals haven’t helped. But this began long before the scandals broke in the early 2000’s. It’s been a 40-50 year trend. 

I’ve heard of two working theories. 

One is that Christianity is too hard, and increasingly, we’re part of a soft and lazy culture. 

Now there’s no doubt that we’re in a soft and increasingly lazy culture! We now have remote controls for stereo systems in cars—apparently it's too hard for us to lean forward and change the controls on our dashboard!  The restaurant business is booming because it takes too long to cook our own food and do the dishes.  Now we have fast food because we’re too impatient to wait for it.  And now we have drive-through lanes because it’s way too much work to actually get out of the car!  I bet you could think of many more examples of how lazy we're becoming. 

No doubt our faith has been affected by growing up in a lazy, pampered culture. But not because, as I see it, that our faith is too hard in comparison. It’s because our faith has become just as soft as our culture—that we’ve watered down the more radical claims of the gospel and made being a Christian the equivalent of attending a garden club. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian living in Germany during the rise of Naziism, wrote a book called “The Cost of Discipleship,” which was critical of the religion of many mainline Christian churches because, as he called it, theirs was the religion of “cheap grace,” grace which didn’t cost the Christian anything. We come to Church on Sunday, “fill up our tanks” with cheap grace, then go about our business for the rest of the week, indistinguishable from anyone else. “Costly grace,” by comparison, is the grace that challenges us, that changes us, that exposes us to risk in following the gospel. Bonhoeffer practiced what he preached—he was open critical of the Nazi regime, arrested, put in a concentration camp and was later executed. 

My experience of youth—my experience of you—is that you want your faith to mean something, to put demands on you. You’re not interested in a spineless Church—what’s the point? You want to be challenged, just as you positively respond to other challenges in your life. It’s why you join athletic teams, even though that means you will be running suicides in basketball or running 8-10 miles in the middle of the summer on the cross country team. It's why you take A.P. and honors classes. You want your faith to challenge you similarly, to call you to something outside of yourselves. You want your faith to be, in the words of Pope Francis, “counter-cultural.” 

So maybe the reason there’s a rise in the “nones” isn’t that our faith is too hard, but that it’s not hard enough. 

The second theory is that our faith is boring. Not, so much, that our Masses or Church services are boring—yes, that may be true from time to time, but we understand that's part of any organization. Worse, we fear that WE’D be boring if we practiced our faith. That being Christian is a boring life that makes us boring people. 

That strikes me as a much more accurate fear to describe why youth are turning away from the faith. 

Is the life of a Christian a boring life? 

There are reasons to think so. The Holy Spirit—that animating force of God’s love in our life—his presence to us, is symbolized by a “dove.” Doves are quiet, gentle creatures; we even use the expression “gentle as a dove.” I believe our image of God and the Holy Spirit working in our lives is shaped by that image—a gentle force that quietly coos at us.

But in Celtic Christianity—in Ireland and Scotland—the symbol of the Holy Spirit is not a dove but a wild goose—unpredictable, untamed, free. A wild goose doesn’t coo, it honks. It seems to have its own mind, which may or may not agree with our own. When I took my grand-daughters to the park to feed bread to the geese, one goose the size of my granddaughter came up to her, stared at her a minute,  then snatched the bread out of our hand. 

The Christian journey is not walk down a tired, well-worn path; rather, we’re on a wild goose chase! In the vernacular, that expression means we’re chasing after something which is elusive. But in terms of faith, it means we don’t know the twists and turns of our life and cannot predict where the Holy Spirit will take us, but if we give our lives over to him, our lives will indeed become an adventure: full of love, disappointment, hope, sorrow and mystery.

We often hear that our lives are a journey, a story. That may be true,  but as main characters,  we don’t usually understand what's happening to us. It's especially true in the chapters of our life which are entitled "The early years."  Typical of novels, each of the early chapters seem unrelated to each other, and it’s only in the later chapters that all these separate strands of our life begin to connect. 

There’s part of us, the part that likes to plan things, that wants to know what the future holds for us 20 years out. We’re guilty of making you think that way in schools, too! Seniors, how many times have you been asked "What are you going to major in?” Translation: “What are you going to do for the rest of your life?” No pressure, seniors, just let us know how you intend to live the entirety of your adult life. 

The truth is, we may THINK we want to know the future, but in the words of John Dunne, CSC, that would be the “deadly clear path” which would rob our lives of adventure, wonder, awe. Instead, we are like cars driving down a windy road at night, with the headlights only illuminating a patch of darkness before us. The only way to see beyond that patch is to keep driving forward. That’s the excitement of life, the thrill, the journey--no telling where the wild goose may lead us.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.