

The Accidental Parent, Part V

You don’t have to believe in heaven, but if you think there is no hell, you’ve not parented a middle schooler. Life for a tween/teen is hell. Social hell, biological hell, physical hell, parental hell. And, as a parent, it hurts to watch. Don’t believe me? Ask your mom for a picture of you when you were thirteen. She doesn’t have any.

If you’re just joining us, read The Accidental Parent: What I learned from 37 Years of Mistakes.

Two things will happen when your children are between the ages of ten and fifteen: 1– He/she will be humiliated to the point of tears; 2 – You will lose your demigod status (oh well).

Sound depressing? Don’t worry. It’s all part of Mother Nature’s plan.

Biosphere 2 is a science experiment deep in the desert of Arizona. It was built to simulate the self-contained atmospheres that would be required for inter-planetary space travel. Inside the sealed space, they grew hardwood trees that ended up looking like bushes: soft, floppy, and droopy. After extensive analysis, they learned that hardwoods will not grow tall, straight, and strong without winds and storms.

Middle school provides your child with wind and storms. No girl matriculates without explosive girl-drama. Boys cannot avoid emasculating humiliation.* It is a rite of passage that fuels movies from A Christmas Story to How to Eat Fried Worms.

As a parent, you will suffer more than your child. Don’t try to fix or avoid it. I’ve seen perfectly good relationships between families go to hell over what two twelve-year-old girls said to each other than any other cause.

Here are a few tips that I’ve learned from three round trips in middle school:

1) Boys will get into trouble in middle school. Don’t have a cow, man. Measure your responses. Disappointment is your best weapon. If the school hands out punishments, don’t double them. Believe it or not, educators have dealt with middle school boys before and have some great ideas. If your son doesn’t get into trouble, he’s probably a social misfit (and that’s OK too – look at Bill Gates).

2) Girls will have fights with their circle of friends. Don’t get involved. Work with her at home to help her find solutions. Let it go. The Human Alpha Female is the most powerful person on earth, middle school girls are just cutting their teeth on how to become one or serve one. If you get involved, you will mess up her learning process.

3) Do NOT solve your children’s problems. Homework, Friends, Shoplifting, Drugs, Charity, Manners. Tweens are becoming independent thinkers. Help them think things through, but let them find the answers. As parents, there is nothing so fulfilling as rescuing your child. If you do that in middle school, you will not have a healthy, sentient, competent high schooler.

4) Do NOT blame other children and/or parents. Your child will do stupid things. Stupider things will be done to your child. Don’t get involved. When you do, you become the stupid 13-year-old. Do not call Mr./Mrs. Johnson and tell him/her what a first class bitch/asshole he/she’s raising. You will regret it. Believe me, there is a completely separate world of Karma that revolves around middle school parents. It doesn’t matter if you have a Nobel Prize or cured AIDS, if you blame a middle school parent for his/her child’s behavior, karma will hit you instantly—and it will be ugly. Life ain’t fair.

5) When people blame you, smile.

6) Children will change best friends almost entirely. Your daughter/son’s best friend in first grade used to play Star Wars/Barbie with her/him, which means (s)he has a bank vault full of potentially embarrassing anecdotes with which (s)he can humiliate your child. In the interest of reducing that liability, your child will drop said friend and find a new one. It’s OK.

7) Your life used to revolve around your child. Get a life. First of all, you deserve one. Second of all, your child (as part of the natural breaking-away process) will come to believe that everything you’ve ever told him/her is a lie. If you’re busy doing things like feeding the homeless, hosting grown-up dinner parties, going to movies with people your own age, volunteering at the library, staying fit, your child will actually respect you behind your back. (But don’t disappear, one or two nights a week are yours, the rest require your presence.)

8) Give them room to make mistakes. You have bigger responsibilities—you make bigger mistakes and you’re better at covering them up. Your children will make mistakes and will no doubt learn from them. Keep them out of the gun closet and liquor cabinet and relax about the rest of it. Make life a bowling lane with limits on either side but plenty of space down the middle to do what they can and judge the results for themselves.

9) You will be disrespected because you’re a total moron. Five years ago, I had dinner with the sharpest guy I know, along with our families. My friend said something about soccer and his twelve-year-old son interrupted him, “Dad, you’re so stupid.” The boy continued on, correcting his father’s minor misunderstanding. I laughed out loud, and told the boy, “You just told your father he was stupid. Good luck getting a car out of him four years from now.” The boy looked chastised for the moment, but he still thinks his dad is dim. Bear in mind that this is one of the smartest, most well behaved boys I’ve ever known—and his dad gave him a car when he turned sixteen anyway. Learn to take a few punches, smile, and move on.

10) Limits are critical. You might want a low-stress household, but children do appreciate curfews, TV restrictions, and away-from-home limits. That means you have to enforce them. Just be flexible about less-than-dangerous transgressions.

The best parenting advice I’ve ever heard came to me from a janitor at my engagement party. He said, “Remember, if everything goes right, the kids will leave you and the wife won’t.”

Peace, Seeley

* Don’t worry, by the time they get to college, they will have forgotten all about those horrors because ‘sex’ problems will eclipse everything else.