Family Matters

Someone very close to us lost her son to teen suicide. Her son was 18 years old, a great kid who took his dad’s gun one day, sat in his parents’ car in a park and shot himself to death.

He is gone and is probably not suffering anymore, but a whole family he left behind is still picking up the pieces of their shattered life and cannot find comfort.

I am writing to you because I pray you never have to be in the same position.

Many studies have been done on the influence of TV on viewers (in fact there have been 4,000 studies on the effect on children alone, which you should not read if you love watching TV). Excessive TV viewing raises concerns in five major areas: Health, Behavior, Outlook on life, Relationship and Education

Two weeks ago, I had a session with Ben, one of my clients, who talked about his daughter misbehaving, throwing temper tantrums and being very disrespectful. I think what hit me was when he said, “You know, teens are just hormonal”.

Although my mom could not read properly, my dad read a lot of books. He was a crossword puzzle and word search person and eagerly solved everything in the daily and weekend papers when I was a kid. Most of the books in our home library he won by sending his answers to the newspapers. Inside each one was a sticker saying he had won this book as a first, second or third prize. So you see, for me, books were rewards since before I was able to read.

Teenagers have been asked about the attitudes of their parents that are the source of their bad relationships. It was amazing that they all expressed the same frustrations, same difficulties, same attitudes they hate. To them, all parents were the same. Here is a list of things parents do or say that teens find frustrating.

Over the years, many people have said to me, “Just wait until you have teens, then you will really have a hard time”. I usually smile and say, “Thank you for the compliment”, because they think I look young, but I already have 2 teenagers – 19 and (nearly) 13 years old – and there was nothing horrible to wait for. Their teen years are just as pleasant and fulfilling for me as a parent as their early childhood, if not more.

For children, what seems like a simple thing might be a horrible problem. We have good friends whose 18-year-old son took a gun and shot himself in the head because he was not accepted to the course he wanted. After it happened, it does not help any of us to ask why a successful, normal, gentle kid, with a wonderful family, decided that not getting into a course is “the end of the world”.

It was the third birthday our daughter had refused to celebrate with friends. For her 17th birthday, she invited a couple of girls to go out for a movie. For her 18th birthday, she spent the day crying because it was her grandmother’s funeral (and her dad was away to attend). When she approached her 19th birthday, we had the same discussions about a party all over again.

When I was kid, most of the kids wanted to have a party, at least on their birthdays. Only the “rich” kids could have parties every year. Some rare kids had parties more than once a year and those were obviously the most popular.

Pride is a selfish feeling. It is the reward we give ourselves for the love, the dedication, the heartache, the fears, the support, the caring, the worries and the sleepless nights (although I did not have too many sleepless nights with any of my kids). On every Journey we need rewards to help us keep moving forward. In parenting, pride is the best reward. It helps us convince ourselves parenting is worthwhile.

Find the answers to all the good questions I was asked about my first teen book “Be Special, Be Yourself for Teenagers”.