Showing respect to our teens and using humor keeps the parent-child connection strong.

I love my teen and I love the countless adventures of day-to-day life while parenting a teen. I love being a mom and being part of the memorable and silly, albeit unexpected, situations that are part of a teen’s maturing process. I also love and find respectful humor in teen logic when they are so excited about trying to make something work that is going awry:

On Thanksgiving afternoon after a busy day with family and lots of driving, my son and I embarked on a drive to drop him off at a sleepover that he and two other boys had planned. I drove an hour (considered a long drive by New England standards) in setting sun only to discover that my son and the two other boys involved had loosely set up the sleepover without informing the parents of Boy #3, the home where I surmised the actual sleepover was to be held! However, that wasn’t the worst part; the real problem was that Boy #3 and his family had left the state for the entire day to visit family for Thanksgiving! Boy #2 had no idea when they were returning. [...]

Laurie and her teen son: Attachment Parenting is embracing nature’s intent for children

Humans have become a species that have lost almost complete awareness of our nature and of our mammal instincts. In our efforts to prove superior to nature, we have created a twisted wreck of an alternate reality, where we kill anything “nature” inside of ourselves and in others and we replace it with a synthetic, prosthetic lie. When the “nature” in us whispers and the void begins to burn, we violently attempt to drown the thirst and gorge the hunger with more of our plastic paradigms, our digital addictions, our helpless civilizations and our neophyte attempts to transcend biology, holism and life itself. We have reduced our awareness of our nature to some nice patch of green outside of ourselves. Our nature has become a foreign backdrop where we visit, snap cellphone photos and condescend the “pretty” sights and creatures like some museum of what we’ve rejected and drugged ourselves to believe we’ve improved upon. [...]

Laurie and her 17 year old son

So many Attachment Parents start out so passionate about giving very young children the best start possible in life- Moms birth naturally, spare their sons the trauma of circumcision by keeping them intact, breastfeed for at least three years or longer, carry their babies at all times, cosleep for several years and they ideally are gentle and nurturing to their young ones as the children begin to assert their wants and express upset emotions.

Sadly, however, something happens between the ages of seven and 12 in far too many families who started out as “attachment”-minded families: Moms and dads stop parenting for attachment and connection and start letting the mainstream lifestyle creep in. This often translates into sending children to school to suffer with all of its toxic elements, passively allowing children to become saturated and enslaved by the media, consumerism, pop culture and peer culture… And most tragically, moms pull away emotionally and physically from their older children.

If children as young as ages seven to 12 are being slowly absorbed into the mainstream cultural ideals of consuming and “individuating”, where does that leave our teenaged children? Very lost and disconnected, for sure! [...]

This evening I read the first sentences of an online article speaking of teachers in almost fantastical, iconic-like terms, painting a picture of nurturing, loving caretakers wiping away children’s tears, inspiring the passion of youth and shaping the future. I felt the indignation and frustration of years of working with children ages 3 to 18, whose spirits, bodies and psyches have been mangled by traditional schooling, often at the hands of teachers.

Contrary to the sentimental, somewhat maudlin cultural imagery of school teachers pouring out selfless nurturance, tending to the needs of youth or lighting the passionate fires of inspiration in grinning, alert children, the youth I have worked with and met over the years have painted me a very different picture. And it ain’t no Mary Cassatt. For six plus hours every day traditional teachers indoctrinate, control, coerce, punish and regiment. They deny children their basic physical and emotional needs, hold children hostage against their will, stifle creativity and freedom of movement and force-feed them irrelevant, dull, boring theories and biased “facts” prefabbed by the government. They ooze ubiquitously into children’s home and free time with homework expectations that strangle play, exploration and family time. When children cannot tolerate the terrible, developmentally inappropriate environment of schooling, teachers are often the arm of the school system that coerces parents into believing their children are “disabled” and are thus in need of chemical restraint (aka: “medication”). [...]