A few thoughts from when my home was invaded by adolescents

That was a long time ago, but I'm thinking now about a couple of specific things we heard at the girls’ school in those days.

One was a seminar titled something like “When an Adolescent Invades Your Home”—I mentioned it in this post (written when both girls were in college). The presenter said that for quite a few years, children live largely unconsciously, with the lights off (he turned off the classroom lights to illustrate). Then, he said, a wonderful thing starts to happen: the lights come on (he flipped the switch to on) for a while (he turned the lights off). He didn't play with the switch much longer, but we got the idea.

This rang true, as I remembered doing really stupid things when I was younger, and yes I do feel very fortunate to be alive. Even today, the lights aren’t on for me all the time… but enough about me :). The point, though, is that for junior high kids (and even high school kids), the lights aren’t always on.

Another thing from that seminar iirc is that the onset of puberty has been happening earlier and earlier in the United States. One guess is that it's related to the hormones we feed to livestock to get them to mature faster. Anyway, the lights aren’t coming on necessarily sooner, but the hormones are raging earlier. So it’s more challenging now than it was a half-century ago.

The other thing that stuck in my mind was something their junior-high school Principal said in a graduation speech (probably in 2005). As parents, we have many roles with our kids. We supervise, guide, teach them, coach them, and so on. But what stuck in my mind was his comment that from here on out it’s mostly cheerleading; by now their habits are largely already set. From here on out (this was 8th grade graduation), we are not going to change their minds about many things, or get them to develop or drop many habits.

In other words, the time for most (key word, that: most) of that has already passed. Which is actually kind of scary, considering that the lights are still off a fair amount of the time and that their hormones are probably raging more than ours were at their age.

But then nobody said it would be easy.