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"Mom, I’m a soldier now"

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I’m at the playground with my four-year-old son. He’s swinging and sliding down the new equipment in our local park. He whizzes past me, getting rid of all the energy he’s stored in his small body from a day of pre-school rules.

He picks up a small stick, and pretends he’s fighting the bad guys. I’ve seen boys all over the world play this game. “Mom, look at me, I’m a soldier,” he says.

My sixteen-year-old son at NMMI New Mexico Military Institute

Yesterday, my cell phone rang and I heard these words again, only this time, his voice was deep.
“Mom, I’m a soldier now,” he said with such pride.
“Congratulations,” was all I could say at that moment. He had a plane to catch and I would see him later that evening at the airport.
What went through my mind was a mixture of emotions: fear, pride, love, loss, sadness and happiness.
My seventeen-year-old son enlisted with the National Guard. He wanted this more than anything.
This summer he will attend a nine week training course before returning to high school to finish his senior year. After that, he plans to attend college and continue training during those years.

When I gave birth and held him in my arms, it never occurred to me that one day he would become a soldier. I’m sure it’s different for families who have grown up in the military, but for me, this is new, and I shall have to learn to put my fears aside.

Perhaps I just need to be a Gutsy mom, and stop worrying.

How about you? Do you think about what your children will become when they grow up? If they already are adults, did they end up becoming who you thought they would?

Are kids copying their parents when they lie?

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98% of kids think that lying is morally wrong, yet 98% of kids lie. Why?

It starts very young as a way to avoid punishment. Some kids have mastered lying as young as two or three, and this can be linked to a sign of intelligence, according to Dr. Victoria Talwar, a leading expert on children’s lying behavior. Lying is a more advanced skill than truthfulness, as a child has to recognize the truth first, then manipulate the facts and convincingly sell their story to another person. So does this mean if your child or grandchild is a good liar, you should be proud? Not exactly. Most parents assume kids will stop lying once they get older, however, Talwar says the opposite is true: kids grow into it. A four-year-old will lie once every two hours, while a six-year-old will lie about once every hour and a half.

Are parents to blame?

We teach our kids to lie according to Talwar. “We don’t explicitly tell them to lie, but they see us do it. They see us tell the telemarketer, ‘I’m just a guest here.’ They see us boast and lie to smooth social relationships.”

If you’re like me and most other parents, you probably taught your kids to be polite and grateful for receiving a gift, even if it was something they didn’t like. Talwar states that about a quarter of preschoolers are able to lie that they like the gift and by elementary school, about half. Most of us are secretly proud when our child comes up with the white lie. We see it as being polite rather than recognizing that white lies are still lies.

Adults and lying.

Adults were asked to keep diaries of their social interactions and discovered they lied about once per day. The vast majority of these lies are white lies, like saying, “Of course this is my natural hair color.” Without realizing it we’re teaching our children that “honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict.” Now it’s easier to see why a kid when asked, “I told you, you’re not allowed to waste your allowance on Pokémon cards!” will probably make up a white-lie scenario to make his parents feel better by telling them the cards were extras from a friend. (I remember that one when my sons were little.)

Teenagers and lying

In a representative study conducted by Dr. Nancy Darling at Penn State University, 96 % of teens reported lying to their parents, not because they wanted to stay out of trouble, but claimed, “I’m trying to protect the relationship with my parents; I don’t want them to be disappointed in me.” Being an honors student did not make them less likely to lie.

“Many parents today believe the best way to get teens to disclose is to be more permissive and not set rules,” Darling says. But Darling discovered that permissive parents don’t seem to learn more about their kids and because they are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do, the children take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don’t care and that they really don’t want the job of being the parent.

Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth. “That actually doesn’t happen,” remarks Darling. She found that most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them. “It’s too much work,” says Darling. “It’s a lot harder to enforce three rules than to set twenty rules.”

A few parents managed to live up to the stereotype of the oppressive parent, perhaps if you’ve read, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom by Amy Chua, you’ll recognize her extreme parenting of her two daughters with lots of psychological intrusion. Darling says that teens of oppressive parents “weren’t rebelling. They were obedient. And depressed.” Not exactly the case with Chua’s youngest daughter.

So what kind of parenting is best for teenagers?

  • Set a few key rules you enforce.
  • Explain why these rules are important.
  • Expect your teen to obey the key rules.
  • Support your teen’s autonomy in other areas.
  • Allow them freedom to make their own decisions.
  • Have warm conversations with your kids.

The kids of these parents lied the least. Rather than hiding twelve areas from their parents, they might be hiding as few as five.

What are your thoughts on why kids and teenagers lie? Is it because we teach them to?

If interested, please read the following article in New York magazine by Po Bronson’s article for more information.

Why do we let young girls dress like that?

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Have you noticed how more and more teenagers and tweens are dressing provocatively or is it just me?

In an article by Jennifer Moses in the Wall Street Journal, she poses the question, “Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we’re being honest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?” This controversial article and interview has 280 comments since it was published on Saturday March 19th. Many of those who commented were angry at Jennifer Moses, however, she does have a point: the media is bombarding young girls with role models like Miley Cyrus and Paris Hilton and tween catalogs are advertising clothing as “sexy and flirty.” In another article entitled “Too Sexy Too Soon,” you can see how the fashion industry is putting pressure on tweens to look sexy.

There is nothing new to the fact that young girls want to be cute and flirty, however, I’ve seen some eleven-year-old girls dress so provocatively that you question, “What is their intention? Jennifer Moses asks, “What are they saying? I’ve got them, come and get them?” She admits that some mothers are better at guiding their daughters than others, and that she has had problems with her own daughter while trying to bond during a shopping trip.  Excuses like, “It’s no big deal mom, everyone is dressing like that,” or “Just cause I dress like that doesn’t mean I’m having sex,” are common. She admits that teenagers will drive you crazy, and you end up giving in.

There are some moms and dads contributing to this behavior by shopping with their daughters and throwing them parties at clubs. It’s almost like they’re saying, ‘Look how hot my daughter is.'” But why? One mother says, “It’s a bonding thing. It starts with the mommy-daughter manicure and goes on from there.” On the other hand, Jennifer Moses who grew up at the tail-end of the hippie generation, brings her own theory. She says, “It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret.” She continues, “We are the first moms in history to have grown up with widely available birth control, the first who didn’t have to worry about getting knocked up.”

When asked what about her message, Jennifer Moses believes we need to make kids aware of the following:

  1. TV is a fantasy
  2. We’re living in a pornographic society with a debased cheap culture
  3. You won’t get my credit card to buy stuff I don’t agree with.

If you’re a parent of a tween or teenager, to what extent do you think it’s the media’s fault? What can and should we do as parents?

Lazy Gutsy Writer Shows a Video

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Oxnard Shores Beach, California Febraury 21st, 2011
 
I’m on time. It’s still Monday and I spent my weekend visiting my twenty-year-old son, Austin, at UCSB, (University of California Santa Barbara) and then my cousin who lives in Oxnard, about one hour south of Santa Barbara. Look at the weather and how lucky we are in southern California.

Oxnard Harbor

I had forgotten how “poor” students live. My son doesn’t eat fresh vegetables or fruits. Just spaghetti and frozen pizza and I took him shopping for apples, bananas and grapes, hoping to pump him up with some fiber and vitamins. We also bought a frying pan and a saucepan. His frying pan had deep ridges and grooves like dry valleys in the desert. I wonder how much Teflon he’s swallowed in the last few months.

Do you remember stories from when you were a student? What about your children?

"Skins" Is there a problem with this show?

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“Skins” watch trailer HERE

 

Call me naive, or a recent empty-nester, but this is the first I’ve heard of the teenage series “Skins” which premiered on January 17, 2011, drawing in 3.3 million viewers, with 1.2 million of them under 18.

“‘Skins’ is the American adaptation of a UK hit about the sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll lifestyle of a group of teenagers. The PTC (Parents Television Council), a TV watchdog group, thinks the program might actually be child pornography, as many of the actors playing wayward teens are under 18 themselves. The group has persuaded a number of advertisers to pull out of the show, and called for a federal investigation,” according to today’s article by Dr. Harold Koplewicz in the Huffington Post.

Dr. Koplewicz talks about “the apparent lack of consequences,” on the show which portrays extreme behavior involving drinking, sex, and pill-popping. Teens drive under the influence, get involved in drug deals, and generally skirt death, and I can understand why the PTC would declare “Skins” as perhaps, “the most dangerous television show for children that we have ever seen.”

Though I haven’t watched an episode of “Skins,” I agree with Dr. Koplewicz when he mentions, “a world where parents and adults are mostly ineffectual, not to be trusted, or simply absent. This isn’t a good message to send — but it’s sadly accurate for many kids whose parents, well-intentioned though they may be, are out of touch with their teenagers.”

When our son started dating, my husband and I struggled with the complete lack of parental involvement and supervision from the girlfriend’s side. Many of the parents were divorced and looking to date themselves, forgetting to act as parents. Peer pressures and problem teenagers was another reason we chose to uproot our kids and get out of Orange County, California, and start over in Belize in Central America.

The third episode shows the toll that having no available parents takes on one of the characters. “His mother has checked out, leaving only a thousand dollars in cash; his father has a new life and wants nothing to do with him. Hurt and abandoned, he tries to party those feelings away.”

So what does “Skins” offer teenagers? Perhaps a way for those who are struggling to, “see their very real emotions taken seriously,”

What are your thoughts?  “Skins”?  Comments?

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