Teenagers

LetsHikeToday · November 2011

Im so bummed out. I just found Out a boy I used to babysit was the passenger in a car accident. The driver was drunk, 17, and it was his second DUI. The boy I babysat has major brain injuries and they don't know if he will wake up. The driver knocked on my parents's friend's house asking for bread to soak up the alcohol. It took him 15 minutes to tell her the boy was hurt in his car.

Then another kid died from a DUI the next night.

What is going on with kids??

Avion22 · November 2011

Oh, that's so sad. I'll be praying for him.

shayNnik · November 2011

Parents. I am very opinionated about this because I grew up in a small town where we lost over 10 teenagers in my 4 years of high school to car accidents, and one girl is now paralyzed from the waist down. Some of them were because of alcohol, but all of them were because of stupid decisions. My parents were srtict. They had harsh rules that I of course broke, but I knew what would happen if they found out and I was more afraid of them than the law. Of course I drank, smoke, lied about where I was-but I never, not even once, got behind the wheel or got in the car with someone behind the wheel after drinking. If we were headed out to the lake at midnight instead of staying at a friend's house(like my parents thought) we made sure we all wore seatbelts, drove the speed limit, and drove carefully on the dirt/gravel roads. We knew there was no fun to be had if our parents had to be woke up at 2am by ER personnel, and if we survived any type of wreck they would do worse damage to us than the accident.

I know some people try to be strict with their teens, and the kids just rebel. It's all how you start. If you never lay down ground rules, expectations, and consequences, it's too late when they're 14-17 and doing stupid shiiit. It's this generation of teens, however that we see as we start our familes and it helps shape our parenting skills so that we raise better children, a better generation. The cycle will continue and in another 30 years or so we'll start to see it all over again and we'll be the old grandparents talking about 'kids these days' as we try to tell our children how to parent effectively. Kids don't raise themselves, but some people don't realize that until it's too late.

LetsHikeToday · November 2011

Shay- I just was texting a fellow lifeguard (how we knew the boys family) about this. We kept coming back to the fact that we never did that stuff in high school. Sure we smoked and drank but we waited for someone's parents to go out of town. We would have 5 or 6 people over and sleep there. We never, in a million years, thought about driving. I just searched for the boys sister, who I also babysat, on twitter. Her tweets are all about getting high and stoned. She's 18 in her first year of college. I'll tell you what, when we have kids I will be following them on twitter and their friends on Facebook. How can parents be this closed off??

calindi · November 2011

That's so terribly sad. I'm sorry, Hike! I hope he gets better - sometimes there are really surprising and amazing recoveries, and I hope he has one of those and is no worse for the wear in the long term. And I hope that driver goes to jail for manslaughter.

My parents did it right, I think. I'm definitely going to try to do what they did. Like Shay, I knew the rules so I was generally a very good kid. But they also had some set rules - I could always (whenever, wherever) call them for a ride if either myself or my friend who was supposed to drive me had drank anything at all (even one drink, or completely black-out drunk) and if I called them, they would always come or pay for a cab home. I would not get a lecture, but I would be grounded for a few days. Simple, safe. I did it once or twice, and they were very fair. They also told me if I ever knowingly got in the car with anyone who had been drinking, or if I had drank even one drink, they would take my keys and my phone and ground me indefinitely. It wasn't worth it.

Also, they were super understanding - they knew there were parties I'd want to go to, and that they couldn't control everything or else I'd rebel and not tell them anything, so they had a trust policy - they'd trust me until I lied to them. If I told them where I was going, what I expected would be going on (parents/no parents, alcohol, pot, etc.), they'd let me go. I remember saying, "I want to go to this party - there's going to be booze and pot. I'll probably drink a bit, I won't smoke. Can I go?" And they said yes. And I knew that if I got arrested for underage drinking, they'd make me spend the night in jail before bailing me out (we lived in a nice small town, so it wasn't like a bad jail, not that I ever had to find out). Basically, I knew that there were consequences to my actions, but my parents were very reasonable as long as I was honest with them. So I was always honest, and I had a lot of freedom, but it also made me feel like I needed to be accountable. I plan to do exactly what they did.

divinemsbee · November 2011

I'm late on this one, but FI and I spent all day yesterday with a marathon of "Beyond Scared Straight" on TV. Some of the parents do seem like total fuckwits with no control or ability to discipline, but a few of them genuinely seem like they have no idea how much more they can do. They set boundaries, they call the cops, they lock them in the house, they do everything short of actual physical violence, and the kids just keep going. I honestly don't know what I'd do at that point (except send them to one of these programs, which seem to work for the kids with involved parents). It's kind of like a "what can I do?" thing. I'm not talking about people who have done nothing and are all out of options, but I saw parents who, short of denying their kids education/schooling, had done everything I could think of.

I'm terrified I'll end up with one of those "just bad" kids.

LetsHikeToday · November 2011

I don't want this to come out as harsh but were the kids on meds?

I've taught "bad kids". It's pretty crazy looking at how awesome their families are. Sometimes it's more about depression than being bad, you know?

divinemsbee · November 2011

Good call, I can definitely see it being depression for a few of them, I think for most of the boys (and it was mostly boys) it's all about that he-man "show me some respect" or that the reason they act out is that "someone disrespected me." Which is just asinine. I felt really bad for this one kid's mom who had raised him and his brothers by herself and the other kids were really doing well, but this kid just kept harping on how it "takes a man to raise a man." I just felt really bad for her, because she seemed to have done a really good job with her other kids, and it was obvious she felt like such a failure.

calindi · November 2011

I had a friend who worked at one of those camps for "challenging youth" - the one she worked at wouldn't accept kids with serious drug problems or arrests or a history of violence, it was more kids who skipped school, had authority issues, drank/smoked pot, got bad grades because they didn't care. Those programs can seriously do some massive improvements on kids who need guidance in their lives. I was trying to get FI to get his Mom to send his 16-year-old sister to my friend's camp since I think it would provide the guidance her Mom doesn't (in this case, it is purely a situation of bad parenting - it's got to be so much more frustrating when the parents are actually good and the kid just isn't responding).

DMB - that kid had to have heard that from somewhere. A friend's father, would be my guess. Or a friend. No one just makes up "It takes a man to raise a man". Outside influences outside of the home are always challenging because you can't control them as much. My brother ran with a bunch of kids who were kinda losers in middle school and early high school - not bad kids, but most of them ended up not graduating high school or dropping out of college, and a few had small arrests for underage drinking or marijuana or selling pills like Vicodin and Aderall. My parents put him in a different school, which he hated at first, but it ended up being awesome for him - he made friends with kids who have all graduated college, most going on in the immediate future for graduate work, no arrests or drug issues. My bro is super successful and doing awesome, but he had the most going against him - he was also dyslexic, so it would have been easy for him to give up. I think the people your kid surrounds themself with have nearly as big an influence as the families.

LetsHikeToday · November 2011

Cal- I agree with outside influences being HUGE!

At Thanksgiving, two of H's second cousins (who are 11 and 13) kept saying "you're gay, that's gay" whatever.

The dad kept laughing. Are you kidding me. They said it every other sentence to actually make fun of gay people. Ugh.

calindi · November 2011

In Response to <a href="http://forums.theknot.com/Sites/theknot/Pages/Main.aspx/special-topic-wedding-boards_military-brides_teenagers?plckFindPostKey=Cat:Special%20Topic%20Wedding%20BoardsForum:13Discussion:654c595a-d8c5-4189-ae53-0b46b6419ef5Post:c680d83e-d837-4116-8b4c-6dfd80c3fb07">Re: Teenagers</a>:
[QUOTE]Cal- I agree with outside influences being HUGE! At Thanksgiving, two of H's second cousins (who are 11 and 13) kept saying "you're gay, that's gay" whatever. The dad kept laughing. Are you kidding me. They said it every other sentence to actually make fun of gay people. Ugh.
Posted by LetsHikeToday[/QUOTE]

I was at a friends' house on Thanksgiving evening, and they're very religious and their friends who were there are also very religious. And they all kept using the words "retarded" and "gay" - ack! My skin crawls every time I hear that type of word used. I can't believe they spend so much time and effort focused on being good moral people (these are the "don't live together before marriage, tithe as you should, confession before Sunday" type of couples) and yet they still use those words.

Teenagers

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