Fighting Four Ways

Sneaky Is As Sneaky Does

Is your teen sneaky? I'm guessing yes. Not all the time, but definitely sometimes, like when he/she says they're doing their homework at the computer, but really facebook is up and running. Or maybe when you have asked whether they have any homework, and he/she says:" I did it in study. Or when you tell them to stop texting and get to work, and he/she says "I AM!"

Here is the thing, expecting that your teen will have the willpower to shut down, and shut off on their own accord is unrealistic. It is way more fun than doing their homework. And basically you have set them up to lie. And then rather than being mad at them for being on facebook and texting when they are supposed to be doing their homework, it turns into a much bigger fight about lying.

I suggest calling your phone carrier and have the phone shut off for a few hours every evening while they do their homework. This way you do not have to get into a power struggle as in : "give me your phone! No! Give me your phone! No, I will do my homework, just leave me alone!" And so on and so on and so on. If the cell phone gods just magically shut it off for a few hours, which cell phone carriers will let you schedule now, then the power struggle will never take place. Its like in a prison when the lights go off automatically, you don't need the guards to go around and say lights out.

Addiction is a tough issue to tackle, and if your teen is getting all bent out of shape when the phone gets shut off for just a few hours, you have an addicted teen. All joking aside. This really is getting to be a serious problem, and your teen cannot deal with this on their own. The I get it moment is to say to your teen; " I get how important it is for you to stay in touch with your friends, and I get that even a few hours feels like forever, but it just has to happen. It is my job to help you get done what needs to get done in the best way possible. The phone will be turned back on at (whatever time gives them a two hour break), and that is that." Let them vent, they will be angry, no need to defend your decision, just a,  "I know this feels hard," give them the shoulder shrug, and you are done! The same technique can be employed with social networking sites. Call the geek squad and have them help you set it up.

As for the homework dilemma wondering in fact whether they really did do it in study,  here is what you can do. You only need to do this if in fact there is a problem. I know mid year report cards come out in a week or two and you will know if their grade has been affected by missing homework assignments. Please read the blog on the "homework avoider" for a more detailed explanation of this issue, but if grades are being effected by missing assignments try this. Meet with your teen's guidance counselor or e-mail those teachers directly in whose classes your teen is missing assignments on a regular basis. Ask them to e-mail you on Fridays about any missing assignments. Let your teen know that if you get a "clean bill of health" from the teacher you will pay for 5 music downloads or whatever feels right. Kids seem to love their music, and unless you have given them a credit card, you are completely in control of  their ability to download music or videos. If there are missing assignments, no music downloads, and the cell phone will be turned off for one whole evening (perhaps that following Monday) until the assignment is handed in. If two assignments are missing, then the cellphone stays turned off for two nights and so on. Some kids really need incentives. Nothing wrong with that, most of us do. The real goal is to get your kids to hopefully see that they can get a lot more done and much more quickly when they are not distracted by the phone and the computer. These are skills they will need to take with them to college and beyond. So get crackin!

The best friend break-up: I love her, I hate her

A parent called me the other day worried about her 13 year old daughter. Like most girls her age she had her posse of four "besties." After school it seems a delegate from this elite group was chosen to deliver the message. No mincing of words here, "we don't like you anymore." There is no more brutal assault. The daughter was bereft, sobbing and humiliated vowing never to return to school. The mom, feeling every bit as much pain as her daughter wanted to do something, to fix it. "Should I call the school, should I call the parents of the other girls, what should I do?" she asks feeling desperate to make it "all better."

There is a simple answer. Nothing. There is honestly nothing a parent can do to make this better. Best friends on Monday, enemies on Tuesday, best friends again by Friday. There is no rhyme or reason for this fickleness. Kids in middle school are especially susceptible to this jockeying for friends. They are in the midst of going to what I call the "buffet of friends." In elementary school, friends are often chosen by default. Perhaps your best friend has kids the same age, and by default your kids become "best friends." Or maybe your neighborhood is full of kids the same age, and since kindergarten they have been hanging at the bus stop together, taking the bus together, and getting off the bus together and by default end up at each others' house after school, so easy. Think of this like taking your kids to a Chinese buffet. When they are young and overwhelmed by the options, you make their plate up with those things they will eat, chicken wings, fried rice and spare ribs. Now as they get older, they go up to the buffet themselves and are astounded and excited about all the choices, and are anxious to give them a try. Choosing friends in middle school and again in 9th and 10th grade is like going to the buffet for the first time. Wow, look at all these options. I think I would like to try this friend, or that friend.

This means that some kids will do the leaving, and some kids will be left behind. Now that these teen brains are working on overtime, they are thinking more deeply about who these people are they call friends. Whereas in elementary school they only need a warm body for "playing", now they look for friends to talk to, and  to share common interests with. They are less interested in what you have to play with and more with what do you have to offer me? Do I like your personality? Are you too quiet, too loud, to bossy too pretty, not pretty enough? etc etc. Are you fun, do we like to do the same things together? Often in middle school and then again in 9th grade, some kids are ready to transition to more teenagery like behaviors, partying, experimentation with the opposite sex, drugs and alcohol, while some kids are happy with less riskyish behavior.

All this is a set up for feelings of betrayal and exclusion. It is painful, and the good news, is they will get over it. As for your role, there is not much more to do than understanding their pain, and providing tons of TLC. If you insinuate yourself into these friend dynamics you will regret it. Perhaps you have never liked the girl who has just defriended your daughter, and you tell her so. Thinking you are making it better, you wax on and on about what a bad friend this girl has been,  and good bye to bad rubbish! The only problem with this is that the next day, when the girls have made up, your daughter now knows you hate this kid, and will never talk to you again about her.

I talked to a mom about this yesterday at one of my "Ask The Expert" parties whose daughter was experiencing all these friend complications. She said that her daughter would come to her crying and in her effort to make her feel better would try to solve the problem for her, by giving her all kinds of strategies. The daughter, not looking for help, just a shoulder to cry on, then gets angry at mom for interfering. Thats' what I am saying. Stay out of it!!!!! Your kids need to learn to figure this all out for themselves. Obviously if it is more of a bullying situation, it may require a different strategy, but if it is old-fashioned cat-fighting, just let it be. Your kids will have a lifetime of friendships for which they are now in training. It's a bit like basic training. In the beginning, you never think you'll get through it, and then you get stronger and smarter, and you get better at figuring it all out. Just be patient, they'll have to sweat a little.

Pleeese can I, pleeese, everybody is?

When your kids were little, as bedtime approached, your kids would whine, "just 5 more minutes pleeeese!!  Now fast-forward ten years and the whine is still there, but now it's about computer/video/phone time and curfew. A parent related the following story to me yesterday. As Monday was a school holiday, her 16 year old daughter was off to a party on Sunday night. The agreed upon curfew was 11:15 PM. The ride home was prearranged, a call to the home of the party to confirm that parents would be supervising the party had been made, and all was well in the land.  Mom and Dad confident that the plan for the night was in place awaited their daughter's return. At precisely 11:15 the phone rings. " Hi guys, can I sleep over, every one's sleeping over, pleeese!!! M&D are not pleased. The "everybody else's parents says its alright" defense never plays well with them, and how come she waited till the exact minute she was to be home to call with the request. There was a resounding "NO" from the parenting unit. The posturing went on for some time, the arguing, and the you better get your "a## home capped off the multiple phone calls, and that was that. The daughter returned home an hour later than the agreed upon curfew. Parents, too tired to deal with consequences took their daughters cellphone away and were prepared to ground her for a TBD which they would hand down the following morning. For now..bed.

OK, yes this whole incident is annoying. Why is it that kids can't seem to be on top of this time thing and wait till the last minute to inform/request changes? Sometime it's because they are completely unaware of time living wholly in the moment.  Sometimes it's because they know that when they wait till the last minute, they have a better chance to get what they want, leaving you fewer options. Either you cave to the "everybody else's parents say its OK" or you tell then to get their a##es home, but either way they have stayed out later than the agreed upon time and you have been played.

Here is a simple solution. Let your kids know that if they wait to call you for curfew/plan adjustments until the time they were supposed to be home, they answer will always be NO. This makes life very simple. If they call you within an hour of the previously agreed upon time, you will at least listen to the request. Here is your 'I get it" moment. You say to your teen: I get that plans change, and that you may need some adjustment in when you need to get home. But if you wait till the time you are supposed to be home to call and ask, I will always say no. You need to give me some notice, what works for you, 30 minutes before curfew, 1 hour you decide. But here is the thing, if you call me at curfew time, the answer will be no, and however late you are for curfew, you will be docked next time out."

Curfew times should be fluid in general to avoid this kind of interaction altogether. Deciding together using the "4 questions" discussed in What Kind Of Parent Are You-part 4 will help. But as in the example above, if the system had been in place, the daughter would have had to call by 10:45 or 10:15 for the request to have even been considered. The work here is teaching kids to be responsible for their behavior. This is not just for when they are teenagers but also as they move into adulthood. Consideration and responsibility are qualities you hope your teen develops in abundance. How many adults do you know who are always late for your dinners or change plans with you at the last minute?  I'm guessing that as teens they were not held accountable for their time, and now feel free to make and keep their own timetables. This is not about taking control as a parent, but it is about teaching consideration.

The Drama Of Mid-Year Exams: A Hopeful Strategy

For many high schools, Monday begins the dreaded mid-year exam period. This exam period is dreaded by parents and teens alike. For many teens, this weekend will be a time for cramming. Oh I remember when I was in high school, that weekend before exams when I would sit on my bed and start to read chapter after chapter in some boring United States History textbook,  attempt to memorize random french vocabulary, buy and read every available cliff notes on the books I was supposed to have read for English, memorize that table in Chemistry of all the elements, and then basically thrown the towel in on Geometry theorems, knowing that was just a lost cause. It makes me anxious just writing all that down, and makes me supremely grateful to be a grown-up, and free from memorizing anything.

For parents, the dread of mid-years comes from knowing what this weekend will be like for you. You are gearing up to play multiple roles as a motivational speaker, prison guard, therapist, and tutor. You go from saying:" You can do it, you're a bright kid," to "shut off that damn phone, get off facebook, how do you expect to get anything accomplished, you have a lot to do," to "honey, I know your anxious, exams can be scary," to   lets go over this together, I'll quiz you.  Your teen both needs you and hates you. So be prepared for a Dr. Jeckel and Mr. Hyde experience.

Just as I am overwhelmed thinking back to those years, your teen is overwhelmed just thinking of all that has to be studied. Of course, knowing what we know now as adults, that if they had only kept up all along with their work, this mid-year exam thing would just be a matter of reviewing not learning material for the first time. But we only know that because we have had 30 or 40 years to reflect on it. So first of all, lecturing on what they should have done has no place in this weekend's festivities. Lets start from where they are. Your teen will need some help in finding the forest through the trees. Everything he/she has to study begins to look like one huge amount of material, a mountain to big to even climb, their own personal Mount Everest. So, first things first. Help them to divide and conquer. Help them to come up with a structure and time frame for each subject, working in breaks for food, facebook and texting time. I implore you to bribe them in any way you can to give you their phones for short bursts of time to concentrate fully. The research on teens and multi-tasking is conclusive, though they can manage physically to text, facebook and read simultaneously, their brain cannot. I would recommend 45 minute work segments, with a 15 minute break.

Use your 'I get it" moments to get this process started. 'I get this will be a tough weekend for you. I know  how overwhelming it must feel to prepare for all these different subjects, lets come up with a kind of schedule to break it down so it won't feel so overwhelming."The research shows that it is better to study a subject for a shorter period, let it sit, and then come back to it, rather than giving each subject several hours, and then moving on. So the schedule of study should reflect this. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and repeat.

For kids in 9th and 10th grade, this whole idea of mid-years is new and scary. They feel anxious about their own expectations,  they are anxious about your expectations, and they are anxious about how they will measure up as compared to their friends. Thats a lot of worry. In today's Boston Globe there was an interesting article that your kids might find helpful. The headline reads:"Writing exercise said to prevent test anxiety." The article describes a recent study in the journal of science where prior to an exam they had high school and college students write for 10 minutes prior to the test "about their thoughts feelings and worries" respective to the aforementioned test. The premise being that "test anxiety can lead to poorer grades and lower scores." Their findings are pretty powerful, they found that kids who were prone to test anxiety improved nearly one full grade if they were given 10 minutes before an exam to write down their feelings." The researchers believe that "worrying competes for computing power in the brain's working memory" Simply put, if the brain is working on the worrying, than it can't also work on retrieving information needed for the test. The writing exercise literally empties the brain so it can give its full power to the test. it sounds good to me!

You are all in survival mode. You are the helicopter that brings in life saving food and water. Keep it positive, and keep it calm. The bottom line, there isn't that much you can do. You can lead your teen to water, but you can't make em drink!!

Remember when....musings of a snow day

Yesterday my husband and I were shoveling out from our second snow storm in 2 weeks. As the sweat was dripping and freezing off my brow, the tendinitis in my elbow, and the pain in my lower back screaming, and the town plow going by undoing the last hour of shoveling, I wondered, "where the hell are all the kids?"  Back in the days of my childhood( god I sound like my 88 year old aunt telling me one of her stories of yore) just as the snow started falling, the neighborhood would be filled with kids, mostly boys, going from house to house with their shovels looking to make some cash by shoveling walks and driveways. Ah...the 50's. My brother, 16 years old, would get up at the crack of dawn, put his snow blower in the back of the car, and head off to his customers for a day of snow clean-up. Very entrepreneurial he had smartly bought a snow blower, knowing that he would be able to pay it off from a few storms. He did and then went on to make extremely good money in the winters. Spring, Summer and Fall, he turned away from the snow blower, and bought a lawn-mower, and off he would go all over town mowing lawns. The rest of our family headed out to shovel in winter and rake in the fall. I have some very visceral memories of the family all out there together working towards a common purpose. I'm sure I was complaining the whole time, and whining about the cold, but the idea of a family working together really resonates.

It got me a-thinkin about how much has changed. How few opportunities there are now for families to work together like this, side by side as equals toward a common purpose. Most families are busy, and look to hire companies to do the work that families used to do together. We have the landscapers for the lawn and leaves, the snow-plow company for the driveway,  and the house cleaners for the house. Then kids looked for opportunities to make money, not afraid of working hard,  boys would go off with their rakes and shovels to earn some money, and girls would line up babysitting jobs.

Mary Pipher, the author of  The Shelter of Each Other talks about the most important ingredients for what she calls "sheltering families": time, rituals, celebrations, stories and connections. You'll notice that most of these require active, face to face activities, far from the glare of the computer or the IPhone screen. These are the kinds of things that we remember fondly from our childhood and then try to recreate in our families. It just seems like its a lot harder now, so many gadgets, distractions and busy schedules.  This becomes especially hard as children who clamor for these opportunities when young, now as teens shun them. Even family vacations become somewhat splintered affairs, teens texting away, maybe a parent off on the golf course,  while another is off at the pool. Not much family time really.

The challenge here is to find those moments of connection. Maybe it isn't shoveling out together after the next storm, who likes shoveling anyway, nothing romantic about that. But figuring out together a time for everyone to hang and be equals, pursuing a common goal. Maybe its eating, or walking or watching a movie, or cooking together, or maybe cleaning out the garage together, or a basement or attic. The goal is not to "make" your teen want to do something with you, as in "you are part of this family, and you WILL spend time with this family", but try to find something that everyone can and will want to buy into.

Family can be a heavenly shelter from all kinds of storms. These are the moments that your kids do remember and cherish, and that you can call on when things get tough. Remembering those moments of connections helps to transcend those moments of crisis.

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook

Facebook, my old friend, its time for another lecture.  How many time have I told you not to post things that mock, threaten, or humiliate. Last week there were two, yes two articles in the paper about posts that did just that. The first headline read: "Nevada girls arrested in teacher threat case." Facebook, really, you let 6 middle school kids invite their fellow students to take part in a "Attack a teacher day." I know they said they were only fooling around, but really, I'm guessing that the teachers that were mentioned didn't think it was funny.

 And then what about the two students from the town cited in this article from my local paper:"Students held in alleged threats." Thank god an attentive parent found this conversation on his son's facebook wall. " let's commit a mass homicide and use gallons of gasoline and use thousands of syringes full of bear tranquilizers, and hey how about shooting some guns at children," these two high school students bantered. The kids through their lawyer said they were only kidding: "Can't you tell, where would they get bear tranquilizers?" I guess they aren't laughing now facebook, since they were arrested and slapped with a $10,000 bail and expulsion from school.

I know, kids will be kids, hahahaha, but seriously, between Columbine, Virginia Tech, and now this latest shooting in Tucson, how do you know when someone is "just kidding".  Please, please, please facebook, can you tell parents to keep up with what their kids are posting on their wall. Truly, "kids know not what they do." They probably are kidding and fooling around, and just trying to out-outrageous their friends, and look hip and cool. But what they aren't getting is that other people read those posts and maybe don't know for sure if they are kidding. And maybe readers will notify someone just to make sure, which is really the right thing to do.

I know facebook is fun, I think its fun. I'm glad we have facebook, or where else would I be able to post this blog, but I am aware of the consequences. Unfortunately most teens are so swept up in their moment of "fun" that they don't take the time to answer these few simple questions. Maybe we can work together to help parents remind their kids to monitor their posts as they write them. Maybe put a big poster tacked to a wall with these four question. It could help.

Will this post hurt someone's feelings?
Will this post feel threatening to anyone?
Does this post give too much information about myself?
Is there anything in this post that another person could read and misinterpret?

Kids aren't by nature "meanies", but they feel the power of "the word". And it is fun to shock. The problem is teens don't have enough life experience to know that sometimes shock creates fear, and fear creates action. Please parents continue to educate not punish your teens about facebook and its power, the good, the bad and the ugly!