Tame Your Teenager

I love all kinds of different sports and athletic competitions. Having competed myself in several different arenas, I have a great appreciation of what athletes who compete on a high level put themselves through both mentally and physically. And there are few events that I like more to see this displayed than the Olympics.

I know that there are a lot of skeptics out there that really have a tendency to focus on the controversies of the Olympics that surround any world-class sport. However, in my mind, it is as close to pure competition that we will find today at that level.

One of the things that I love about the Olympics is that for 99% of the athletes it is humbling to be there and they are so proud to represent something bigger then themselves. Most of them toil at their respective sports in virtual obscurity for years. No big contracts, or endorsements, or becoming household names, but holding on to the dream of one day competing for that elusive Olympic Metal.

I found it hilarious last week when I heard that some professional football players had gone to the NFL’s head office and complained that their pre-season training camp was too hard. An ex-football player/sportscaster could not believe it either but felt that some of the younger players in the league were concerned with getting hurt and thus devaluing them as players for future contracts. Obviously not Olympic athletes.

Olympic athletes have taken certain virtues to a level that most of us will never comprehend let alone experience.

The first virtue is passion. Whether it is love, fear, or hate, most Olympians are driven. At this point in their lives they have nailed down what they love and what defines them and they have harnessed that drive and will ride it to the end.

It saddens me to see however that in our watered-down-instant-gratification society, that few adults are passionate about anything (including their marriages and their children), which leaves a void of good models for our young people to help them understand how to work hard for something that doesn’t have a reset button.

But even if they had passion, that alone would not take them to where they want to go without discipline. The Apostle Paul, who was familiar with the ancient Greek Olympics wrote, “I beat my body and make it my slave so that…I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” When the “feeling” of passion fades and the Olympian cannot imagine getting out of bed at 4:30am for the 2,637^th time to beat his body into submission one more time, it is discipline that puts his feet back on the floor.

In addition, it is important to know that the weak minded don’t make it to the Olympics. Discipline requires mental toughness. The ability to train your mind to focus only on the goal. Not giving in to external or internal distractions under the most stressful and adverse conditions. Whether that is extreme physical pain, emotional pain, the jeering of an angry crowd, or complete silence in front of 15,000 people as you have one dive left that you must nail to be on the awards podium.

That is why I love the Olympics. Because I know that each person that has earned his or her way there has sacrificed much more than I will ever understand. And it inspires me to search my heart and define what my passions are. And then to set goals and establish disciplines in my life to reach those goals. And when the going gets tough, and I become distracted by all the things that this world has to throw at me, I strain to become mentally tougher so that I am disciplined enough to … “beat my body and make it my slave so that…I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.”

This has been on my to-do list for quite some time, and on July 15th I was able to pull it off and summit Mt. Whitney. It didn’t work out for others to go with me so, not wanting to miss an opportunity, I decided to go the 22 mile round trip trek to 14,497 feet alone (sort of, believe me there were plenty of people on the trail).

My morning got going at the trailhead at 4:00am. It was amazing. It had rained the night before and the aromas and the moisture on my face just added to the sensory overload of waterfalls happening just beyond my headlamp and the visual of the stars and hikers with their headlamps way up a head of me making their way up the side of the mountain.

Being alone for most of the twelve and a half hours of the trip I had plenty of time to think. One of the main things I thought about was what we do as parents, how joyful it can be, how difficult, and how insurmountable it can seem at times and the similarities there was with climbing this large mountain.

There were definitely different stages to my day, times when I felt really good and thrilled to be alive and doing the climb, and other times when I was feeling it and thinking, “what am I doing here.” One of the tactics I used when I started feeling the pain was to stop and refocus on the moment, to take a look around and take in the large-scale mountains, the vastness of the view, and to just be in the moment and take it all in.

What a lesson I can bring back to my parenting. It all goes by so fast and we get caught up in the frustrations, the struggles and the inconveniences of parenting and miss days at a time without just stopping, focusing on the positives and taking in the vastness of the task at hand and how much you really do love this maturing human being.

The other thing that struck me while climbing was actually seeing parents on the trail with their teenagers how they were creating a memory in a fashion I like to call Trauma Bonding. Being able to endure a very difficult event together that really bonds two people (in this case a parent with their teen) by having a unique, shared experience at that moment in time that no one else can relate to.

I stopped a couple of these families and interviewed the kids and got their take on what made their dad’s so special. You can see what they had to share in the couple of short videos below.

I also taped (see the video above) a short encouragement to parents from the summit of Mt. Whitney, just recognizing the difficult and critically important role we play in our kid’s lives and not to give up on making it great for them and for us.

And whether it is climbing Mt. Whitney or climbing the mountain we call parenting, I love what Tom Hanks had to say in a League of Their Own when Gina Davis complained that it just got too hard. His retort was, “It is suppose to be hard. The hard is what makes it great. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it.”

Never give up and never stop climbing toward parenting success.

This last week I had the incredible experience to climb to the summit of Mt. Whitney, 14,497.61 feet, or 4,418.87 meters for my euro and aussie friends, the highest peak in the lower continental United States, the second highest in the U.S. only behind Denali in Alaska, and you know what I found? I found two fathers with their teenage children, well, Kate just turned twenty, and I wanted to glean from the wisdom of the kids about what made their dad so great. Listen to the two videos and see what they had to say.

Please excuse the huffing and puffing on my part and a couple of mixed up words, after all, I was breathing less than half the oxygen that I am accustom to (I thought it was a good excuse).

So the big question of the above video is, ‘Do we blame the video game?’

My first answer is that I would find it hard to go back to the creators of the video game and tell them that they will be held liable for ‘poisoning the minds of our youth.’ Mainly because we as a society have allowed the graphic violence and total disregard for authority and other individuals that these games exploit to seep into our homes and lives. The developers have tapped into a vein that intrigues our imaginations and people are out there paying big bucks for the games as they fly off the shelves.

My second answer is that everything that we are exposed to influences us, our decisions and ultimately our actions. Good or Bad.

Is every kid that watches grand theft auto going to go out on a crime spree? No. Has every kid that goes out on a crime spree such as these young men been exposed to violence in the past? Yes.

If you are a parent of a teen and/or a pre-teen, and you are having difficulties with their attitude toward you, if they are aggressive and easily agitated, and disrespectful to others and authority, you may want to do some house keeping and check the media that they are being exposed to. It is important to check the music on their Ipods and go online and look up lyrics. Check the rating scale of the games and movies they are allowed to view. Remember, everything they are exposed to will influence them to some degree. The brain takes it and files it away and it becomes a part of them to varying degrees.

It amazes me how many 8 and 9 year olds are allowed to watch R-rated movies and play M-rated games, and then parents come to me because their kids are disrespectful, defiant, aggressive, and are experimenting with things they shouldn’t be.

 Be pro-active, know the influences in your kid’s life and work to emphasis positive ones, and if you need some help contact me.

You really need no formal training at all to know that boys and girls are different, especially if you have at least one of each. For you parents who have tried to keep weaponry out of the house and away from your boys, you know first hand that a carefully chewed cookie easily becomes a revolver. Likewise, your little girl continues to hone her social skills in the absence of friends by throwing a tea party with her fifty-two favorite stuffed animals.

The reality of these differences is never more telling then in how children resolve conflict. Two seven-year-old boys who get in a scrape on the baseball field one afternoon are back the next day playing on the same field. However, if you have three third grade girls who one day are the best of friends, and the next day two of the girls decided to ostracize the third, they will have the uncanny ability to carry that grudge through graduation and to their twenty-year high school reunion.

Girls have a very tough row to hoe. Never has there been such a complex social system for girls as young as middle school and even elementary school.

As parents, we can’t stand to see other kids bulling or acting with total disregard to our child’s emotional and physical well-being. It is easy to get angry with the other child and even the other child’s parents. Typically your first inclination is to jump in and solve the problem. This usually comes in the form of intimidating the other child into backing off from your girl. Or you make threats to the other child’s parents that they “need to keep their monster under control.” Both inappropriate approaches may seem to fix the problem in the short run but it does little for your girl in the long run.

I strongly believe that the sooner children learn how to resolve conflict with their peers, the more successful they will be at negotiating the complex social waters of adolescence.

In her book, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and other Realities of Adolescence, Rosalind Wiseman outlines four steps that parents should instill in their young daughters in order to stand up for themselves, and then stand behind them and be their champion.

Your daughter should first write down the events that have happened. This will help her clarify exactly what is happening that she doesn’t like and help her pick the battles she wants to fight.

Secondly, she should confront the girl one on one. If the girl is surrounded by her friends, there will be much more posturing and it will dramatically decrease the chance of coming to an understanding or resolution.

Thirdly, your daughter needs to say exactly what is happening that she doesn’t like and request what she would like to see changed. This seems like an obvious point, but it is amazing, even with adults, how often this step gets left out.

And finally, your daughter needs to affirm or deny the relationship. Either party should feel comfortable with walking away from the relationship if they don’t agree on the terms. This is a hard lesson for young girls to grasp on to. They can’t always expect relationships to work out but it is critical for them to set boundaries on how they will be treated and to stand up for what is right.