The other night I went to a talk at my daughter’s high school by Dr. Meyran Boniel-Nissim. Boniel-Nissim is a Haifa University researcher on teen internet usage and its psycho-social connotations.
In the old days, teens had to get out of the house to get into trouble. Now they can do it from the comfort of their bedrooms. Parents think that as long as they know where their children are, everything is fine. But the reality is different.
A reader writes:
I had 3 sons when my oldest daughter was born. When the boys became teens everyone told me, “Just wait till your daughter reaches that age.” I was worried about mother/daughter issues, clothing, boundary issues, surliness, rebellion. Now she is 12 and what I’ve gotten instead is sudden, unexplained, intense sadness, usually in the evening hours. It’s not every day, and I haven’t found a pattern. I’ve done blood tests and thank G-d all is fine. In general she is a happy, friendly, busy, responsible, independent kid.
Read more on Stepping Off Your Teen’s Emotional Rollercoaster…
As my family grew from a small to a large one with six children, I developed efficient ways to save money. Some items that were small expenses with two small children became bigger as the family grew.
Read more on Frugal Strategies for Young Families that Pay Off as Your Children Grow…
When I mentioned that I needed to take the meat out the freezer on Monday to allow it to defrost in the refrigerator, my 5-year-old suggested that I put it outside the window like she had seen the neighbor do. I said it was safer to use the refrigerator. Then my 19-year-old spoke up. “Other people do things for convenience or because they see everyone else doing it that way, but Ima knows how you’re really supposed to do things.”
An interview with the author appears below.
Chaya Rosen is a young woman living in Israel. She recently published Backstage with CBC: The Chaverim Boys Choir Live (Targum Press), a book for religious preteens.
Read more on New Jewish Book for Pre-Teens: Review and Interview…
My brother-in-law wrote his report about our annual Chanukah party here. He has to be nice, because he knows I read his blog. (I even send him the occasional unsolicited suggestion.) It was my idea to blog about the dancing on the side of the road.
Aaron was quoted today in the Wall Street Journal, in an article on poems about the economic downturn:
Read more on Brother-in-law quoted in WSJ and a family party game…
Coming soon to this blog, bli neder: (Mis)adventures in International Travel.
In the meantime:
Have you ever felt untzniusdik when wearing a stunning Shabbat or Yom Tov outfit on the street? Wolfish Musings and Parsha Blog have the solution.
Follow-up (Hebrew) to the Modiin Azrieli Mall “nursing in public” fiasco. The management changed its policy and claims to be reeducating staff on the subject. I don’t know why the article mentions that the mother making the complaint was religious. Hat tip: Nursing in the Negev.
Can you spot a nursing mother in this picture?
Lion of Zion refers to my post on the jailed teenagers, in the context of early marriage among Jews. He writes, “As an aside, I would like to know where all the Israeli/Jewish human rights advocates were while the (minor) settlerettes sat in jail.” I believe that Yitzchak Kadman, Israel’s best-known child advocate, did speak out on the subject at the time.
Read more on Links on tzniut, teenage maturity, nursing in public…
Never one to turn down free professional advice, I didn’t hesitate when blogger Therapy Doc suggested an interview here on my blog. Coincidentally, while “visiting” my blog TD and her husband are in Israel visiting their son in yeshiva; see here (the end of the post) and here.
Feel free to leave questions for Therapy Doc in the comments. My own questions are in bold.
How did you manage the demands of work vs. family when your children were small?
How did I juggle work and family? A lot didn’t get done.
My kids would probably say I put patients first, and that’s true. My kids seemed okay, but my patients did not.
But it’s not so simple. Both require quite a bit of attention. I was the parent that slithered in at the back of the auditorium late for the school play or for whatever ceremony they had (and they used to have tons of those) and the one who never participated in PTA.
I was extremely lucky, poo, poo, poo, kineyenhara (these are anti-voodoo measures) in that my first degrees seemed to prefer Benevolent Neglect. It’s my world view that the less input the better, when people are struggling to determine who they are. People (see, kids are just small people) subliminally know who they are and it’s their job and delight to fine-tune that. The line, “You had your life” is one of my favorites.
Parents and teachers, of course, should help, should make suggestions based upon obvious aptitudes. They should look out for real potential and encourage a child’s aspirations. I think it’s good to let them try, however, to do the things they think they want to do, even when you’re pretty sure they’ll fail.
And you can’t coach too much. Children who get a steady diet of coaching tend to tune it out. Wouldn’t you?
How did you meet your own personal needs during that time?
What? I had personal needs?
What was your biggest challenge as a mother of school-aged children? A mother of teens? As a grandmother?
We all have them, challenges, and I’m grateful for them. I’ve been pulled in so many directions (including east, Jerusalem). I think deciding where to establish my life and the lives of my children, Israel or America, surely took up a lot of RAM. Still does.
As a parent of school-aged children, I was mostly on the lookout for their emotional health, which was hard because, in case you haven’t noticed, kids fight, and kids are mean, and if they’re stopped in one way, they’ll get you another.
The challenge with teens for me didn’t have anything to do with my own children who seemed pretty well put together and talked to us freely (when they weren’t not talking to us).
My worries were about their friends, so we always had kids over, talked to them when they would let us, encouraged them to hang out at our house. I didn’t have this concept of bad influence. All children are good. They need more influence to get through life. They’re all our children.
Everyone knows (if they’ve been reading my blog) that my greatest challenge as a grandmother is managing my feelings of separation.
A word to other grandmothers, those who do have the opportunity to mentor and enjoy their ainiclech (grandchildren) every day, every week: Be sensitive to those of us who miss ours.
What do you think is the biggest concern of parents today? In the Orthodox Jewish community? Are there issues that should be getting more attention?
Probably the hardest and most important challenge for parents today is teaching kids about healthy relationships and sex. (Use the word, go ahead, it’ll free you.) They’re exposed to so much that is NOT healthy. It’s in the air, the shmutz. It’s everywhere.
Are eating disorders becoming more common and do you have any suggestions for preventing them?
I don’t know if they’re more common or not. I worked with a professor at Hebrew University and translated a study that compared anorexia in the kibbutz from the fifties to the sixties and seventies. Anorexia was virtually nonexistent on the early kibbutzim, where a person’s worth had to do with how much he could give, not how good he could look. In the sixties, when Israel became more industrialized, this changed. Now, of course, anorexia and the other eating disorders, including obesity, are prevalent and have been for years.
To prevent it, I tell parents to eat well themselves, shun the garbage, exercise, and MOST important, teach their daughters real sports at a young age. Let them throw the ball, run the bases, enjoy their bodies. It’s more about being in touch with one’s body and what feels good than anything else (except when there are really good psychological reasons, and I’m not going there today). Empty feels Good.
What do you mean by that?
I think most of us like that empty feeling. We feel good after a fast, we feel good when we’re hungry after exercise. We feel good in the morning, too, before we eat. Some of us don’t like breakfast for that very reason.
It’s one of the reasons that those who really like food, but stay thin, take their eating slowly. They take the time to savor, to enjoy the sense of taste. Kids who are “anorexic” as teenagers often stop voluntary fasting (anorexia) when they get married. That’s another story, and sure, I’ll get to the eating disorders one day. For now suffice it to say that eating is healthy. Not eating is healthy. It’s a matter of timing.
Any words of wisdom for those of us with challenging teenagers?
Yeah. Keep an eye on them. Buy a leash. And listen to them without falling to that temptation to answer back. Always ask another question. Assume you know NOTHING. They often think that you do.
And get therapy, sure. For everybody.
Therapy Doc, thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. Enjoy the rest of your trip.
Read more on Teens, Sex and Eating Disorders: An Interview with the Therapy Doc…
I’ve been too preoccupied to blog, so I invite you to read this excellent article from New York Magazine called Learning to Lie, summarizing recent research on lying. I found useful information for parenting both small children and teens.
Hat tip: Serandez
A while back I asked, “Where are the parents?” Well, they’ve turned up, protesting the treatment their children received in jail.
According to Arutz 7:
The girls were held in jail for several weeks and were released after the courts caved in to public pressure. Soon after, the story of abuse and humiliation the girls experienced while incarcerated came out, including their being denied sleep, and stripped and searched for drugs in the presence of a male officer.
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