Family Matters

Here is a typical scene in many homes these days: you come in the door, pass by the living room and see the TV on and one or two kids holding something in their hand, with a wire leading to just under the TV. They kids are totally absorbed in what is happening on the screen and ignore you completely, while pressing buttons and pushing little levers on the box in their hands.

A young man in a 4-wheel drive was stuck in a remote desert place. He got out of his car and was very disappointed to see his front tire blown. He hurried to the back of his car for the spare tire.

When I tell people my mom is a chef, they look at me in respect. It is natural. As a daughter to a chef, people think you have the advantage of knowing all the trade secrets. In the old days, knowledge went from parents to children and special knowledge in cooking was a woman’s way of finding a match. My mom always said to me that the way to a man’s heart was through his belly. This worked well for her, because my dad loves her cooking.

I remember it from the time I was young. We loved celebrating the holidays with my mom’s side of the family, where there were many kids and lots of space. Grandpa and Grandma gave us candy and we slept on the floor and stayed awake until late at night, sharing silly jokes. Dad’s side of the family was not as much fun and every year, when the time came and dad said we were celebrating with his family, we were counting the seconds for the holiday to end.

It was Monday morning and I had just taken my 7-year-old daughter to school. On the way back, I passed my son’s high school. As usual, the high school intersection was full of parents dropping their kids off. I turned left after a motorcycle. A parked car started making a U-turn and hit the motorcycle! The rider flew in the air over 30 meters and his motorcycle dragged on the ground after him. It looked like a scene from a stunt movie but this time it was real - no stunts, no practice - a young man was on the ground, next to the traffic light, surrounded by dozens of high school student who had crossed the street to go to school.

Last week, I wrote about the things that parents say that turn off communication between them and their teens. Today, I would like to talk about the buttons teens push to set their parents off and “make” them lose their minds.

From their early years, kids have an inherent sense of their parents’ weaknesses. They learn it by themselves - they do not need to go to school to study what works and what does not work. They are so sophisticated, they can tell you what works on Daddy and what works on Mommy, even if they are very different.

Whether we like it or not, parents a human beings. What can we do?

So sometimes, we have bad days. Sometimes, we need something to be proud about, because otherwise, we would feel pretty bad about ourselves. Sometimes, we just need reassurance that things will get better, preferably thanks to us. This is why we have kids.

Somewhere between parents and teens, the messages of love and caring get lost. Bringing fear and anxiety from their own experiences, parents sometimes forget what works and what doesn’t. It is amazing to find that the sentences we say to our teens are the same sentences we hated when our parents said to us.

Only 1% of abortions occur because of rape, only 6% occur because there is a health risk to the mother or the baby. 93% of abortions take place for social reasons.

How do you feel about abortions?

This week, I had a talk with my 19-year-old daughter about leaving home. Because some of her friends had left home and then had to come back due to financial difficulties, we talked about the emotional aspect of “going back home”. When we talked, she told me about the feelings of shame, failure, disappointment and many other negative feelings that would be associated with having to go back home. It was after this talk that I realized there is one more thing I want my kids to know.