I have begun to worry about my two little girls becoming teenagers in a short amount of time. It seems like books and magazine articles about how to hopefully raise them correctly keep popping up in front of me. I'm worried because there is a fine line that parents walk between being too strict and being too loose. I see examples of that every day at my high school. I see girls every day that I think, "Oh, what did their parents do right?" or "Oh, they had better not end up like that!" I see girls get in situations and I wonder "If their parents had done X, would things have been different?"
Three times now I've observed a situation that scares me a tad. In my neighborhood, the bus picks up the high schoolers about the time I leave for school. There is a stop sign where about 8 or 9 kids gather to wait for the bus. Three times now I have been behind a black Explorer that pulls up to the stop sign, and a girl who HAS to be a freshman or sophomore leaves the pack of girls and jumps into the backseat of the Explorer. Tires squealing, Explorer peels off. The other girls longingly watch the Explorer speed away.
Now, it could be a totally innocent situation. But it might not be either. And that poor momma thinks her sweet little daughter is riding the bus to school, and instead she is riding with who know who, and doing who knows what. What option does that poor momma have? Drive her teenager to school everyday? That's where you walk that fine line between being too strict and being too loose--driving a high schooler to school is the highest form of humilation for a teenager.
"Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." That's all I can do-set the foundation now, and hope it stays strong through the next turbulent ten years.
Deep thoughts from my heart on a Friday.
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