How to actually raise teenagers

A lot of digital ink gets spilled over what it’s really like to raise older kids. I mean really, truly, no jokes, just the unvarnished truth.

We currently have four teenagers, and I’ve tried, myself, to put down some useful words on the topic, but the truth is, nothing scrambles your brain or flattens your ability to function like raising kids this age, these days. And yet it must be done. So here’s my contribution:

Writing about teenagers tends to fall into two categories.

The first comes across like a final report discovered decades later from deep inside a sealed bunker. You know the kind : “They have taken the bridge and the Second Hall. We have barred the gates but cannot hold them for long. We cannot get out. They are coming” kind of thing.

Poor miserable souls these parents are, for so many years they clung to the illusion that their own children would be different, and that they alone would maintain discipline and order and even an amicable relationship with their offspring.

But they suffer the same fate as everyone else. Their kids are absolute sociopaths, and the parents can’t wait to warn their peers about the fate that awaits them. They hang around at maternity wards just to gloat. They turn up at kindergarten graduations of strangers and throw tomatoes at the stage, because these kids may look adorable now, but they know what’s coming as soon as puberty sets in.

So that’s one kind of advice you’ll get from parents of teens. The other type valiantly pushes back against these tired tropes of the surly, smelly, antisocial adolescent. These parents insist that it’s neither necessary nor normal for teenagers to behave so poorly. Give them some higher expectations and a little guidance, and they’ll grow and bear fruit like the most elegant of topiaries.

They themselves have an entire phalanx of teenagers in their house right now, they will tell you, and the only way you’d guess it is because of the sounds of the viola wafting up through the floorboards as they willingly practice their arpeggios. One teen is tutoring his younger brother, two are about to come home from work at the Fine Young Man Store, and one is sitting at the desk he built himself, writing a letter to apologise to his elderly neighbour for how unevenly he chopped the shallots in last Sunday’s boeuf en croûte.

It is simply a matter of having the right expectations, and you must simply expect your children to be as inexhaustibly fabulous as you are yourself, and the job’s halfway done.

(The other half happens at boarding school, it turns out, which the grandparents pay for. Also the kids spend their weekends at the grandparents’ house. The grandparents themselves live in a metal trailer in the desert, desperately petitioning the courts to terminate their visitation rights.)

I joke, I joke. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Teenagers are by no means natural sociopaths, but neither are they [excuse me while I get up and make sure my door is locked] especially willing and eager to be formed into useful members of society. Not. Especially. Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly

Image source PXhere (public domain)

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6 thoughts on “How to actually raise teenagers”

  1. We have done well with Philly area’s approach–a few very firm non-negotiables clearly communicated, and then flexibility with the rest. I hate working for a micromanager, so I assume my kids wouldn’t want to be raised by one. One of my kids is also very articulate when he complains about his friends’ parents, and that has been useful insight. They have free will, and they will do inexplicable things sometimes, but they are their own people and God loves them and wants them to succeed as decent humans even more than I do.

  2. We give our teens a few very hard rules and then we give them space to find their way. So far, so good, but with kids of any age you never know and all you can do is pray, pray, pray. I’ve heard that you can expect your teen to act similarly to the way he did when he was a “terrible twos” toddler. We haven’t really found that to be the case, but I still find the theory interesting.

    1. Ohmigosh are you serious? For us, two was fine but we get kids with a horrific case of “threenager” hood and ((shudder)) you’re saying that is what’s coming again. ((Sob)) lol oh mercy. Guardian angels protect us all!

  3. I’m in the young adult phase of parenting, watching my two beautiful children sometimes make choices completely unfathomable a few years ago. I keep telling myself that there is nowhere they can go that God isn’t there. I take comfort in the fact that God loves them and knows them more intimately than I ever could. But it does seem so hard these days when the culture swirling around them is whispering lies dripping in honey. It feels like at times I’m living the live version of “The Screwtape Letters”.

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