When I was your age.....

Oh no! Not this, anything but this. I know you are thinking to yourself, okay, here come the stories of my grandparents. WRONG! But be honest, how many of us really paid a lot of attention to the stories we heard over and over and over again. They were all the same except the distance changed, or the medical condition was worse. Most of us will find ourselves repeating history with our own stories to grandkids of our own. But kids don’t want to hear this. They know at some point and time that we were their age. The statement I hear most often when talking to kids is “My parents just don’t understand what things are like these days.” Each generation has it’s own problems. Each generation has to face something new, something different, and something worse than when our grandparents were kids. For example, I remember being told that if a girl was pregnant when my mom was in school, she had better be married already. When I was growing up, inter-racial marriages were a big deal. Kids these days have to face things like AIDS. Sure, all of these examples are in each generation, but one is always more in the spotlight than the other.
I’ve been able to talk to a lot of kids about any number of things from having sex, to smoking, to fear of a stepparent or their first heartbreak. Why do kids feel they can talk to me? Easy, I don’t start what point I want to make with “When I was your age..”. I let them tell me the situation. Then I look for a way to turn the worst to something not quite so bad, without letting them off the hook. For instance, I had a young girl that went to school with my daughters. Her parents had gotten divorced before I really knew her. She was an only child, and lived with her mother. But her mother had to provide for her the best she could, so she worked a lot. This girl was alone a lot. When she did get to be with her mom, she wanted all of mom’s attention. The day finally came when her mother met someone she wanted to spend time with. The girl was very hurt because her time with her mom had been cut in half and was shared most of the time. The girl was very upset. She came home with my daughter one afternoon in tears. She said this man was taking her mother away from her and she didn’t like him. Her mother also started enforcing her father’s visitation rights, so our friend was forced to spend time with not only her dad, whom she had anger against for leaving them, but with a step-mom and 2 younger step-sisters. She felt she was all alone. She didn’t think her mother loved her anymore and was going to leave her as well. She also started saying that her mother’s new boyfriend was mean and hateful to her. She was getting into trouble at home and was grounded a lot. She didn’t understand how her mother could do this to her. The advice I gave this girl after letting her cry on my shoulder for over an hour was this. If her mother’s boyfriend really was hurting her, go to her counselor at school. Let them take pictures if there were physical marks; let her counselor hear what emotional trauma she was suffering. These people are qualified to help her, and could get the right departments involved to change the situation. On the other hand, if she was being hateful at home, it was possible she was being treated as she was acting. Perhaps she could try doing something nice for her mom and boyfriend like cooking dinner for them one evening. It wasn’t long, and the situation had changed. The boyfriend was no longer so bad, and mom was back to paying attention to her. The complaints stopped, and even the time she was spending with her dad was becoming easier to bear. I didn’t tell this girl that when I was her age divorces were hush hush, and she should be lucky for any attention she was getting. I turned the tables and offered her a legal way out of the situation, as well as, forced her to look inside herself to see if that was where the problem was. Of course, if I had seen any type of physical marks, I would have called authorities myself, but I hadn’t. Nor did she offer to show me any.
Another example would be about a girl I met in church several years ago. I was teaching the 3-4 year olds Sunday school class, and this girl had a sister in my class. She would sit behind us in the auditorium during the sermon and pull her sister’s hair or pinch her neck. She would physically hurt this 4 year old. The parents of this child did not come to the services, but the kids were there every Sunday. I took the older sibling outside and asked her why she insisted on hurting her sister. She told me that it was how you kept kids in line. It was how you made kids behave. I started watching her when she didn’t know it, and the girl was very physical and I suspected abuse. I talked our minister about it, and it was found that their father was abusing the kids. They were placed in foster care and the last I heard, they were doing very well. It doesn’t always work out for the best, but in this case, if I hadn’t taken the time to ask, I would never have been there to help these kids.
Now the other side of this situation is our kids do need to know that things were different when we were young. Times do change. My kids had heard stories of us riding our bikes for hours on end without worry or having to check in every hour or so. They couldn’t understand why they had to when we live in the same neighborhood I grew up in. The only way I could express my concern of not knowing where they were was to tell them that the neighborhood had changed a lot since I was a kid their age. Kids didn’t carry guns or knives with them; people in the neighborhood knew each other. Things such as this just didn’t happen in everyday America in those days. But everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone else, or at the very least they looked out for each other’s kids. Of course today, we know who the people are next door, and the girls know the kids they go to school with, but adults are so busy trying to get wherever they are going in life, time for visits with the neighbors is almost gone. Single parent households are so much more common that my generation has grown into adults who don’t really trust people they know, let alone someone who lives 2 doors down. Once I told the girls the differences in the neighborhood now and when I was a kid, they understood. It wasn’t that my parents cared less for my brother and me; it was just safer back then.
It’s sad to think that if we adults would take the time to get to know the neighbor just down the street, things might be different for our own children. Realistically, all we can do is pay attention when a kid comes to us and is distressed. Take the time to assess the situation before reacting. Listen to the whole story, ask questions, and LISTEN to the answer, the whole answer, both verbal and non-verbal.