Dear ones, Lisa is actually the teenage time expert, but my children are almost 15 and almost 12 and are already in or on the verge of puberty, so I’m writing another post today.
So far, there have been no major puberty fights with our older daughter. Alcohol, smoking and love affairs don’t play a role yet and the topic of „going out“ is also really manageable so far. In fact, I would describe our relationship as really close and I’m pleased that she shares a lot of her thoughts and feelings with me.
In the last few weeks, however, I’ve noticed that the big one is becoming more and more mature. She organised her first school internship completely on her own and now works in a patisserie with an attached café. She decided to train as a youth leader (so that she can later accompany children and youth groups as a counsellor) and simply went to the training course for five days with lots of new faces. And she signed up for the Spanish exchange programme in the spring. Wow, I thought, here we go, now she wants to explore the world.
What was my own teenage years like?
As this is all happening for us for the first time, I always try to remember what I was like at that age. And then I always realise (with horror) that I moved out just one year later and went to boarding school until I finished school.
And of course those were different times and I didn’t have a mobile phone yet, which meant that I had really little contact with my parents. I usually called home once a week, always from a phone box, because there were no mobile phones yet. I only travelled home every 4-6 weeks, which I didn’t think was bad at the time, but now I find it REALLY annoying…
I wouldn’t say that I wouldn’t have described my relationship with my parents as close. Above all, I knew that I would always get help from them with any problem; I still have a deep, basic trust in my parents to this day. But I sorted out all the day-to-day stuff with myself and my friends at home. My parents didn’t know when I was writing which exam or whether I had studied. They didn’t know who I was having a row with and later on they didn’t know that I occasionally had one too many drinks and had to spend the night in the loo.
I learned early on to manage my money well, do my laundry, keep my room clean and somehow organise myself at school so that I managed to get a good A-level without too much effort. I was able to try things out pretty much unobserved, sometimes going overboard, but I also learnt very quickly from the mistakes I made. Without parental interference, I was able to recognise for myself what was good for me and what wasn’t, how much effort I put into what.
The biggest difference was certainly that there wasn’t this non-stop contact between my parents and me because it wasn’t possible without mobile phones. How often do I get a photo from my children today when I send them shopping because they’re not sure if it’s the right product? How often do they call quickly to ask me something? „The mobile phone is the extended umbilical cord and deprives our children of the opportunity to find solutions on their own“, a friend of mine once said quite aptly. I had to have a really big problem before I made my way to the phone box to call my parents…
This is definitely not meant to be a „Everything used to be better“- text. Because of course not everything was better in the past. But sometimes I wish my children had a bit more of that 1990/2000 feeling. Messing up without anyone posting it online on social media. More independence from us parents, more self-experimentation. Less comparisons via Instagram and TikTok, less accessibility, more self-efficacy.
And for myself, I would also like to have a little more of the ability that my parents seemed to have developed: to let go. To have confidence that everything is fine, even if I don’t let them know once a day. Because, and I’ll admit it – I still have room for improvement!
