Domestic Psychology

Extremely literal

// August 31st, 2010 // 1 Comment » // teenagers

Nurse: “What grade will you be in next year?”
Noah: “Tenth.”
Me: “You’ve only been in school a week. I think she wants to know about THIS year’s grade.”
Noah: “She asked about NEXT year.”

Noah: “Dad? Mom just texted me asking where we are.”
Doug: “So tell her.”
Noah: “What do I tell her?”
Doug: <- looks around bewildered -> “We are on a dock.”
Noah: “But . . . that doesn’t tell her WHERE we are. I mean, that’s kind of vague and ….”
Doug: “Never mind Noah. I just texted her. Then, I sent her a picture.”

school pictures

// August 18th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // school, teenagers

It is school picture time again. Freshmen pictures had to be pre-ordered and paid for sight unseen. Unbeknown to me, the high school freshman made a last minute change to his wardrobe and chose the same color shirt as the color I specified for a background. His picture will look like a weatherman in a green shirt aka floaty hands and head. When they get the picture at Christmas, it should be fun for the older relatives to choose between complaining about the length of the teen’s hair and the teen’s missing torso.

Senior pictures are four full pages of proofs and decisions that are weightier than they should be because of the heavy price tag. For $500 I could have them on a CD, but since I don’t have half a grand for pictures, I’d still have to pay extra for prints and we still have to buy graduation announcements, I think I’ll spend more time staring at the proofs. It’s easy to stare at them, because they are great pictures. Even though it’s a treat to see the girl teen without her face hidden or sticking out her tongue, she looks absolutely beautiful. The pictures that include one of our dogs are funny and I have to have them just because the dog posed for only a few minutes before trotting off to frolic in the creek while pictures continued sans dog. One of my favorite poses is on a green screen.

Let’s look at the backgrounds that can be added as an afterthought. There’s are five different versions of crumbling brick or cinder-block walls for anyone who spent their school years painting, cleaning and fund raising to salvage their deteriorating school building. If your student minored in train car and overpass tagging, there are eight graffiti background choices for you to remember their unbridled creativity. There are only five beach and pier options for students whose parents have a coastal timeshare, but they also have two extremely tropical backgrounds for families with serious island property. There’s a paint splattered warehouse door background for art students and a fire damaged curtain background that looks like it survived The Phantom of the Opera for theater students. There are several indescribably odd backgrounds, like some kind of sideways log cabin wall with a whiskey barrel in front of it or the one with train tracks and a train coming toward the student. There are four tree backgrounds that seem appropriate for our area, but since the candid photos include REAL trees, that seems an unlikely choice.

I wonder if we can just use the green screen as a background.

Noah voted

// August 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // kid quotes, politics, teenagers

Until they invent a “family” sized voting machine that all the children can squish together and watch, the children take turns accompanying us to the voting machine. Last week, Noah was my voting buddy.
“Why isn’t it a touch screen?”
“Where’s the keyboard?”
“How old is this machine?”
“What if you don’t like either one?”
“If only one person is running, why do they put them on there?”
“You want ME to push the big button? Is that legal?”

This year, our school system has decided two of the school days will have special themes. One is Constitution Day and the other is Civics Education Day. Either day will be the perfect day to put voting machines in the schools and let all students turn the dial and ask questions. Have a school-wide election about a relevant issue, like selling ice cream during lunch. Let’s raise a generation of of voters.

early graduation

// August 10th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // school, teenagers

“They said I can graduate early if I skip guard this year.”

Those words were the tap that sent dominoes falling without a way to stop and with no do-over option. Once you tell a teenager that they don’t have to be at school . . . they have no intention of being at school. Meetings with school counselors are no help because they clearly want students out of the school. “Why should she be here if she doesn’t need to be here?” Not just my child, but all the parents who tweeted that their children were also told they should graduate early. Parents who, not so coincidentally, have children at the exact same school as my child.

Here’s the thing that teenagers don’t recognize. No matter how draconian the administration, high school is safer and easier than life after high school. Yes, the safety part comes at the loss of potential fun and freedom. Doing dangerous and stupid things in a quest to declare your adulthood isn’t supposed to come until the end of twelfth grade, which happens about the same time as your eighteenth birthday. Four years of high school are for learning and maturing. Leaving school early eliminates the precious time that teenagers NEED to develop things like self-control, time management and the oh-so-important recognition that you are not invulnerable.

Schools should be motivating students to take more classes and explore new subjects. Schools should not be shoving teenagers out the door. Leaving school early means missed opportunities for education. Education that provides the foundation for a successful college experience.

Are these early graduates starting college or vocational education earlier than their peers? Last spring, I ran into a teenager from the exact same school as my child and the other children who are being encouraged to leave early. She was working in a restaurant where I was eating lunch. I asked her if she was taking college classes. “No. I’m waiting for everyone else to graduate so we can all start together in the fall.” Instead of being in high school or college, she was enjoying getting to “stay out late and sleep all day when they don’t need me at work.” Does that sound more than a little bit more dangerous than being in high school with your peers? Does this extra semester of party instead of learning make her more or less prepared for college?

My child isn’t being given the option to spend a semester playing. When she leaves high school, she will begin college. She’ll be starting in January instead of August, when freshmen are normally welcomed into the social community connected to college. She won’t have the luxury of going into the college of her dreams. Since she’ll be months away from her eighteenth birthday, she is going to have to be in a school close to home for her first semester. Everything about this is awkward and complicated instead of natural and appropriate. The counselor who knocked over that first domino did my child a disservice. They are hurting instead of helping their students. They have all lost sight of the purpose and gift that is high school.

need more Calgon

// July 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // parenting, teenagers

We have a pile of old, rusty paint cans that have too much leftover paint to waste. After seeing it day after day for several years, I decided to find a purpose for the paint. This week, the leftover paint from 2002′s staircase railing project became the new color of some kitchen shelves that have stored my food since before Tommy was born. That’s a long way of saying that I painted some shelves.

Covered in splatters of paint and with hands aching from gripping a paint roller for hours, I indulged in a hot bath. I leaned back to relax in the steamy water as the dogs curled up against each other for a nap on the cool bathroom floor. The heartsick teen walked in and sat down between the dogs. Then, the middle child and the two littles squeezed into the crowded room.

“<- sob -> Well, I don’t have anything to lose, so I’m just going to do what I want. I’m not a child any more. I’m seventeen! <- sniffle, sob ->
“You just got yourself grounded. Noah! Please come get this spider.”
“What? What spider?”
“There’s a spider above the bathtub. Please get it before it falls in the water.”
“<- sniffle -> I’ll never give up. You can’t hold me back any more.”
“I hold you back? You hold yourself back by eliminating every single college in the state of Tennessee. Noah, please don’t just grab it. You know it will jump and fall and then there will be spider legs floating in my bath, so put your other hand under the spider.”
“You want me stuck in Tennessee forever!”
<- badeep, badoop ... badeep, badoop ->
“No. You can leave the state once you are 18. It’s in the water! Get it out! Get it out!”
<- badeep, badoop ... badeep, badoop ->
“I hear a phone ringing! Can I answer it?”
“Get what out? What’s in the water?”
<- badeep, badoop ... badeep, badoop ->
“I dropped a spider in the bathtub.”
“A spider? I wanna hold it!”
“Eeeeeverybody thinks you are being completely irrational. <-sob ->”
<- badeep, badoop ... badeep, badoop ->
“The spider is dead. You can’t hold it.”
“Everybody is not your parent. I am. Ew, yuck! There’s a spider leg in here! Everybody needs to clear out of this room so I can get dressed.”

<- badeep, badoop ... badeep, badoop ->
“Hello.”
“D and W have been trying to call you. Why didn’t you answer the phone?”

the world is shrinking

// June 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // local, teenagers

Sarah: “Everybody knew Justin and Adam. Oh, and Z used to be friends with the guy that beat Henry. A bunch of my friends are going to Sundown tonight. Can I go too?”

Can I just lock the doors and keep the children home?

How to dance like a 14-year-old

// May 24th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // flickr, play, teenagers

Step one: Girls dance while boys hide at the snack table.
Step two: Girls physically drag boys to dance floor (and photographer).
Step three: Boys lump together on one side of the dance floor while girls lump together on the other side.
Step four: Brilliant DJ gets everyone to line dance.
Step five: Boys and girls mash together until there is no way to step in any direction.
Step six: Everyone jumps like a pogo stick to the beat of the music.
Step seven: Fall asleep on the car ride home.

Psst! Happy 14th Birthday Noah!

small people, big phones

// May 19th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // parenting, technology, teenagers

My children have cell phones. Their friends have cell phones. Cell phones serve a purpose and I don’t want to argue about what others have said so clearly. I do want to point out two things.

First, parents need to have identifying information in their child’s phone so that it can be returned to the rightful owner if it is misplaced. I have “ICE” listed in the address book on all the cell phones in our house. The original purpose of ICE was to let emergency personnel know who to contact in case of an emergency, but it would have made returning the phone that someone left in the elementary school’s lost and found easier and quicker.

Second and more importantly, even though American Tourister needs to make cell phones for tweens/teens, breakage is not the worst thing that can happen to your child’s phone. Insurance accommodates phones soaked in pockets while practicing marching band in the pouring rain. It’s not even the dreaded cell phone thieves that are absolutely everywhere. Remember how upset Marsha was about the possibility of someone else reading her diary? Cell phones are the new diary. They are filled with facebook posts, text messages and pictures. Middle school boys have learned that “borrowing” a girl’s cell can reveal all kinds of embarrassing details. Nobody wants the entire school to know that, “if u lk me pls lt me knw cuz i lk u.” Aside from the embarrassing lack of English comprehension glimpses into your soul, there is the very real possibility that a girl’s phone has pictures you wouldn’t find published in the school yearbook.

There were more tears shed over a single missing cell phone at the middle school dance than all the histrionic drama about boys. Eventually the phone was found on a counter in the boys’ bathroom. It wasn’t stolen. It was used for espionage. Putting ICE in the phone is easy. Teaching hormonal teens that anything they write, type, text or photo is potentially public is much, much more complicated. It’s not just teens that struggle to understand this. Full grown adults are still whining about facebook not respecting their privacy.

wounded confidence

// April 6th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // teenagers

Although she was a passenger in a minor accident (thanks to a quick thinking driver), Sarah has demonstrated excellent driving skills. She backs down our steep, narrow driveway to park. She travels Interstates and the twisty, dangerous roads of Knoxville without fear. She doesn’t just drive safely, she likes to drive. She drives siblings to and from schools and activities. She drives herself to friends’ and family members’ homes effortlessly. Sarah takes herself shopping. Sarah thrives as her own person. She transitioned to independence with complete ease. Sarah is no longer the immature, insecure child who needs her mother by her side. Everything was going hunky-dory until one late night during Spring Break when she missed our driveway. Completely missed it.

The wheels getting stuck in the dirt and slipping on long flower petals actually saved the car from dropping off the retaining wall. The mailbox that I would have rejoiced at the opportunity to replace was untouched. It was, by all definitions, a harmless mistake. It should have been over as soon as Dad rescued the car from its’ silly non-parking spot. Instead, it has left a bruise on Sarah’s confidence. She avoids backing down the driveway, even though she is incredibly capable. In my head, I know this was one of life’s easy lessons and she will emerge stronger and more aware. My heart just wants to put a cartoon bandaid on her knee and give it a magic kiss to make everything better.

leaving them to starve

// March 18th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // food, teenagers

As a rule, I try to always be at *home on school nights and be a part of the evening routines. As frantic as the evenings are, I can’t imagine not getting to tuck my children in bed at night. It’s probably much more important to me than it is to them. Don’t tell the children I still peek at them while they are sleeping every night. Tonight, I am making a rare exception and attending a meeting. Instead of preparing a healthy meal before I leave, since I really hate cooking, I’m leaving two boxes of organic mac ‘n cheese for the babysitter (aka the 16-y-o) to prepare. The question is, will she-who-shuns-organic prepare the mac ‘n cheese or will the children forage the fridge for crusty leftovers? Place your bets now.

*Why, oh, why can’t the social media folks have their gatherings on the weekends?