Final Word For Parents...for Now

Okay, this is the last chapter for parents, for now anyway. The important thing to realize is that your teenage son is not the little boy he used to be. This is not to say that you need to treat him with kid gloves, just be aware that your role in his life is changing. You need to stop being the one making his choices for him, and start letting him make more of his own choices. He needs to make some mistakes, and you need to give him the freedom to make those mistakes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it means that he makes those mistakes in a situation where you can help him correct them, and he makes them before they really start counting against him.

Putting it another way: At this stage of the game, stealing apples is still seen as cute, and any good farmer allows for a certain loss. Also, defeating the farmer's security measures shows initiative and ingenuity. Am I encouraging the theft of someone else's livelihood? No, and I would expect for any decent parents to punish the kid if he gets caught. However, it would be sort of unusual to levy the same punishment (getting shot at, jail time) that you would for older offenders; the motivation for the two is not only completely different (solving a puzzle, get a reward versus survival) but they understand the situation differently (the kids see a challenge whereas the older offender sees it as a selfish situation).

Good parents hope that they can help their kids as much as possible. Bad ones, not so much. The good parents see the kids as extensions of themselves, and that they represent another chance, however vicarious, to see what they would have done. But there is also the fun of seeing kids plot their own courses and see where they would end up; to see what decisions are the same, which are different, and to look at the decision-making promise as it develops. It has been said that kids are getting smarter every year; IQ tests need to be reset every twenty years or so because of this. And yet, kids still make the same stupid decisions that they have been making for the last millennia. Kids still get hurt doing stupid things, kids still get pregnant, and kids still tick off their parents; this will probably never change. Parents eyes roll, they swear at their progeny, they still wonder what they ever did to deserve this; this also will probably never change.

So do parents do it? Because for every tear there is a laugh, for every swear there is praise, and for every moment of frustration there is one of enlightenment. But this is isn't a zero sum game; parents get plenty back from their investment. If nothing else they find someone they enjoy being around, someone to help hold off the darkness a little while longer, someone that can make their life a little more interesting. And for most, that makes it all worthwhile.

If all else fails, they can always try again. Possibly adopting this time...