I can't imagine facing teenage years at my age. New parents think the baby and toddler stage is hard. These people are living in a fool's paradise. Those years were a cake walk! Sure those early years required a lot of running around. That took energy. No doubt. What sucked the real energy was when they hit teenhood. That's when the dance began.
A parent needs to be on their game in the world we live in. Kids are dealing with temptations we couldn't have imagined. It isn't just sex, alcohol and drugs. It's the kind of sex, alcohol and drugs. It's the amount of sex, alcohol and drugs. When I was young we drank 2 litre bottles of cheap wine coolers and we liked it. Actually, it caused horrible headaches and induced much vomiting, but it was cheap and plentiful. Now kids are pounding back Jagermeister bombs until they go blind. They chase that down with energy drinks until they are so wired that you have to peel them off the ceiling. I can't understand how they can mix booze and energy drinks. When your mix comes with medical warnings, you know you're in trouble.
When we were young, we kept our sex private. Or kind of private. Pretty private. We all knew for sure who the one person was who was having sex. She'd be the only one pregnant during the entirety of our high school years. I still remember the ONE girl I knew who got pregnant during my high school years. That's how unique it was. Now you can't swing a dead cat with out hitting a pregnant teen. Where is the good old fashioned shame that is supposed to come with sex? Maybe I feel that way because I was raised in a Catholic/Mennonite household where shame was dealt out by the heaping spoonful. Kids are doing stuff now that would make Jenna Jameson blush. They hand it out like candy. I can't help but feel a little sad for them. You shouldn't have done everything by the time you hit 16. What the hell are you going to do for the rest of your adult life. Makes me shudder. This summer I went camping. The couple in the next tent couldn't have been more than 19. They started the show at about 10:00 pm. The young lady kept up a running dialogue so me and the tent mate knew everything going on. A couple of 19 year old kids shouldn't be doing stuff like that. Stuff like that takes professionals. Requires training, stretching, safety nets and harnesses. I needed a cigarette when they were done and I'm pretty sure she wasn't having as much fun as she was leading him to believe.
It's the drugs that scare me the most. Kids have lulled themselves into such a state of false comfort. They are fooling themselves about how benign the effects of drugs are. They think they are smoking pot that's left over from the 60's. They don't understand that the chemical make-up of pot has changed drastically. It comes with a host of truly horrific potential health problems. Doctors are seeing a rise in serious psychological problems linked to pot use. That's just pot! I can't even wrap my mind around the other stuff they choose to snort, smoke or inject. It's so damn easy to get too. When I was young, you had to look for stuff. Now, it seems so easy. They can find something to help cut them off from reality by sending a simple text. In the end, I think that is what puzzles me the most. Why they feel the need to cut themselves off from reality. What has their reality become that they seem so desperate to escape it?
As parents, I think we have fooled ourselves into believing that we've made our kid's lives easier by giving them so much stuff. Cell phones, computers, cars, trips, expensive clothing, blah, blah, blah. Like if we throw enough stuff at them, they'll be happy. That doesn't seem to be working. I certainly don't have the answers. We've made a host of mistakes. We're pretty honest about them too. We hope by being honest we might give other parents a clearer view of what they might be facing. As well, we believe that parents need to stop fooling themselves into thinking that if they follow everything in the parenting books, they'll be home free. In the end, there is no guarantee. You put your years in and hope for the best. Be there for them when things get bad but don't help them out of every stupid situation they get into. I think they learn the most from digging themselves out of their own holes.
During particularly bleak periods we've made jokes about how we should have half-assed parenting. All that time spent nursing, reading books, coaching their teams, cooking meals from scratch, family vacations, being a stay-at-home mom and homemade Halloween costumes could have been spent sitting on a couch in the front yard drinking beer. Scratching ourselves as we yelled at our kids without ever moving our asses off said couch. Ah, hindsight.
