Juggling Teenagers
Sometimes inspiration strikes and boy am I glad of it when it does.
One of my themes at the moment is to keep improving relations with my children, daughter in particular. I have a host of fears which arise now and then about negotiating our way through the next few years of teendom. I am sure that a good strong relationship is key; being able to enjoy each others company and to spend happy times together will I hope antidote the more tumultuous times.
I have read Rites for Girls and think the idea of a regular date with my daughter is an excellent one. I had however been struggling about what. She usually just shrugs when asked what she’d like to do.
After asking the question on Rites for Girls community forum and getting the answer that I know best what my daughter likes, I decided to let go and allow the notion to swim around in my unconscious for a while.
Juggling, was the answer, or so I’ve discovered.
Monday morning home education began with watching a TED talk video about juggling. “Amazing”, “Cool”, “Wow”, were some of the comments so I knew I was onto a winner.
My son had some juggling balls given to him for Christmas and I had made some for my daughter (squares sacks filled with mung beans), I used tangerines.
Off we went and what a laugh we had. Dad joined in too. They loved it so much that it was hard to get them to do anything else that day. They even worked out how to juggle two balls each back and forth between them.
Not only did we have a some belly clutching laughs together we learned a new skill AND it opened the doorway to me spending the evening watching a girly film and painting nails with my daughter. Booya! as she would say.
This has led to another planned outing to get lip-gloss as the one she wanted to show me turned out to be broken.
Simpler than I thought!
MairiStones
I’m about to talk to you like your granny … are you braced!! There came a time when we stopped being parents and became a friend. This happened to me early on in our weans teen years, sometime in Robbie’s first year, probably because I grew up far too early and got myself in scrapes when I was far too immature to deal with it. I shared storys with both children for example how I had dunked off school with a friend in 2nd year, gone back to her house (her mum was a head teacher in another school!) to find this friends younger brother sniffing glue-he went unconscious later that afternoon- and how I found I was in a corner..didn’t like where I was, wasn’t supposed to be there, didn’t have the confidence to leave and felt I couldn’t shout for help. I told them that if they were ever in a similar situation then they could call me, I would collect them from a place of their choice and bring them home with no questions asked whatsoever. I also told them that I would go to the moon should that be where they needed me to collect them. Also I told them that I trusted them completely having taught them how to look after themselves and that actually would they mind not telling me any stuff I might worry about unless they knew I would find it humorous. Looking back on it, John and I became their safe place without realising it. We also moved on from telling them our plans to speaking to them about our ideas and asking their advice and ideas. They were also repeatedly told that our home was their home and were in this ol’ life as a team. We are very fortunate in that we have family near by who value family and extended family and know how to laugh together.
The family sailing experience was fab for us as we were able to learn to get on with each other and gave all of us a real sense of danger.
Your question was “what do you do” my response is don’t do, be. Just simply be together.
I’ve just remembered, when they were in primary school, we used to have “meetings” where we set a time apart to get together and eat cake and discuss items on the agenda – a list which we could all add to pinned on the wall. We made these times fun and if it all got too serious we laughed about it – probably the only rule was we had to let everyone have their say. John and I always put things on the agenda which were aimed at truly enhancing them (and us)which would help them learn the life skills we value ..which made us really think hard about how to do that and how to present it to them!
My granny advice is to have fun at all times and if it isn’t fun, think of a way which would make it even one more point on the scale of upping the fun. Also, it is not written in stone anywhere that Thy Children Will Rebel…honest!x
Written in haste and with every best wish and blessing…and with no intention of being “preachy”!
Thanks Granny, very helpful and sensible advice, now, can I follow it, that is the question! Fun such a good idea, and of course to BE…..always my downfall to be looking at what to DO!
About to publish a post about screens, maybe need to inject a little humour into all that me thinks!
May pick your brains some more at some point. X
I love the juggling idea – I’m going to copy you.
It’s great fun Kim, good luck with that. X