Temporary Insanity - the Teen Years

Teens are nuts occasionally, at least according to parental reports.    Is there a cure?

Over coffee at work, my friend tells me about her young daughter.  She'd had a meltdown when told to add a clothing item to what she was wearing.  The rule was about tights (jeggings?) being worn with a skirt; it's Mom's standard for propriety.  When the youngster was reminded of the requirement, she exploded in profuse tears, began throwing clothing out of her closet and around her room, wailing, "I don't have anything to wear!" She's ten years old.

Two things worth our notice.
First.  The transition to adulthood is underway in the pre-teen years -- and it opens up an unknown realm for the emerging person.  Never having done it before, you now want to categorize and orchestrate the parts of life yourself. Difficulties emerge with the discovery that everything is of absolute maximum importance!  E.g., "I can't find my socks! My life is over!"

It takes a few years for a youngster to sort out what's important and what's not, what deserves a fifteen second discussion and what deserves a few days of deliberation.  Youthful inexperience can lead to tantrum events where unimportant details get undeserved attention.  (Data tags still needed: priority, precedence, significance, relevance, context, granularity, and so on.)

Second.  Okay, the second thing is that kids begin learning the process of discussion and negotiation long before their own verbal skills are fully developed.*  They hear adult conversation and acquire huge chunks of information about how to make a point or get a result.  It's just pieces of life skill they notice and file away without any deliberation or evaluation.

Analysis:

Cause: kids in transition are learning to be adults, managing the details of life, but everything is super-important until they learn otherwise.

Cure: demonstrate and teach the skills of negotiation and good manners.  Do it deliberately, beginning in the very early years, and compliment them when they get it right.  Please and thank you, "Mother, may I?", "Would it be ok if...?"; all of that is the 'how' of dealing with things.  When a mega-boom happens, de-escalate.  Talk it through calmly in practical terms of importance and problem solving.

Safety Note:  avoid escalation, anger, and the power play.  They separate the participants and make matters worse by lessening your access to your child's learning process.  On the other side, getting it right can be an extraordinarily positive experience for parent and child and bring them closer.  A quick review of how mom and dad handle life details might be helpful.

The young mom telling me about her ten-year-old (above) was laughing at how bizarrely difficult it is to be a parent. Mom is a professional, accustomed to problem solving and decision making, but she notes that kids don't come with an instruction manual.  Fortunately, Grandma was around that morning to lend a hand.  A few minutes after she left for work, Mom got a text from Grandma, "She had five pieces of toast.  Everything is fine now.  P.S. You need bread."

There's lots of fun along the way.  The ten-year old girl mentioned has an older brother who spends hours on the phone with his friends discussing relationships with girls, what to do, what it means when she says this or that, and how to impress, giving each other advice.  He's twelve. Giving each other advice!  But that's another story.

*An eighteen-month old toddler was playing on the floor while her mom and dad and friends chatted about travel pictures scrolling by on the wall screen, places they'd been and things they'd seen.  When Mom used the term "travel pictures", the toddler began walking around and waving her hands with a big smile saying excitedly, "I traveling, I traveling!"  Small children enjoy listening to adult conversation, and they grasp much more than you might expect.

You might appreciate Mommy Wisdom

The Goal in 96 Seconds

Cahoots, and other places

Back to work after a few days with good friends in a distant, quiet place.  Peaceful, but too brief.

Conformed

Or not, perhaps.  

We've been carried along for quite a distance. Any chance of recovery?

Choosing to go counter-common is high-risk and a guarantee of difficulty.  Should we even make the attempt?

None of us are normal, centered, or balanced in our understanding. Each is bent by culture and circumstance, by self and others, even after a lifetime of thoughtful growth and refined thinking.

The very best we might hope for is continued instruction and breaking change where we're the part that gets broken.  How many things could be profitably broken out of our thinking?

• self things that shouldn't come first
• status things that shouldn't matter
• winning ... when coming alongside is the better choice
• judging ... when understanding might make a difference
• looking down on others as though we were above, somehow
• reaching for more ... when giving would be so much better

Even at our best, we don't get it right every time.  Each still has room for more change, and getting it right, even just occasionally, is such a joy.

Preaching to myself again.

Short attention span

Competition for our attention often leaves us with information overload.

How do we solve the problem?         

There are things that deserve more thought than others, we know.  Our environment can pile on distractions, however, from short story sequences on the news to interruptions on top of interruptions at school or the office.

Have you noticed?

Advertisers don't do long commercials any more.  Now you get five or ten commercials in what used to be a short break with just one.


If you're still reading this and haven't wandered off, you're unusually focused.

Does such a torrent of distraction and information derail our lives?  Of course it does.  Much like interrupting a language course interferes with our desired mastery, our cultural norm of continual subject change interrupts the productivity of a dedicated life. Chances are, years may pass with little progress where it's needed.  (This is an actual simulation of the modern distraction model.)

Change the outcome.  Know your goals, invest significantly and practically in the values you've chosen.  Deliberately get up and do instead of sitting and talking.  And forgetting.

  Schedule it and follow through.

We have to fight a bit to get above the distraction, don't we.


(He said, preaching yet again to himself)

A world without fashion

Imagine life with just two kinds of clothes, work and play.  Two pairs of shoes, two belts, maybe two kinds of socks ... kind of like when we were children.

Everyone could wear pretty much the same kinds of clothes for work and travel and socializing regardless of the occasion.  It could be really simple and much less troublesome.

Early feminists spoke against the fashion culture. “It was associated with triviality, and blamed for confining women to frilly subjects instead of loftier matters. An interest in fashion was perceived as pandering to the male gaze.”

Women are still criticized for the time they spend on fashion and wardrobe.  It's suggested that women would come into their own in society if they quit focusing on being attractive.  Studies reveal that some women do indeed spend much of each day deciding what to wear and thinking wishfully about the couture they might accumulate.  Some women, but not all.

Why would a woman force herself to endure high-heeled shoes? Painful, harmful, and expensive, they deform the bone structure over time, yet she chooses to play the game.  And why would she allow a size zero model on the runway to set the standard for her own self image?  Is it just women?

Of course not. Men are aware of such things but perhaps they respond in more subtle ways.  'Dress for success' has its own set of rules from cuff and collar to manicure and accessory brand.

On the up-side, a portion of the adult population gives but little attention to fashion and style issues.  Their lives are full enough of things that actually deserve their attention. Somewhere along the way, they realized that their clothing had absolutely nothing to do with their worth or their benefit to others.

A successful businesswoman explained her choice of apparel as, "It needs only to not distract."  Another said a bit more firmly, "If they need me to dress to impress them, they don't get my attention."

A world without fashion ... "Would you find it liberating? Finally - never having to wonder what to wear because no one will care. People would see you for the person that you are and not dismiss you because they didn't like your shoes." 

An interesting note; we respect and admire people for their skill, their intellect, their courage and grace, their willingness and ability to serve. We don't admire them for their appearance.  At most, we're entertained or perhaps envious, but there's neither respect nor admiration involved.

We shouldn't expect the fashion/advertising industry to help us or our children think clearly or live a worthwhile life.  It should receive but little attention and no respect at all.  

From another perspective, the way we dress is a form

of nonverbal communication. We choose a particular message

we intend to convey, perhaps. But that's another subject entirely.