Tag Archives: teen

Respect In Proper Proportions

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Some of us are born leaders, some are born followers, most of us are in between sharing traits from each end of the spectrum. Knowing when to follow, when to lead, and when to follow your own advice make us the individuals we are. Determining what is our correct choice for each situation is important to our happiness.

Leading is perhaps the diciest undertaking of the three choices. You determine an action, and start going in that direction. You hope that most people around you will follow you. If it is a reasonable thing you are trying to do, it is likely that some of the people around you will follow your lead.

When people go their own way, it is a one person decision. Going your own way may mean you have a bigger priority at the moment that you want to follow to its end. Or it may mean you are making a poor decision.

The easiest and most difficult undertaking is to become a follower. Followers once they decide to follow, follow blindly. It is almost as if one becomes an extension of the leader. What the leader wants and thinks is what followers want and think.

Following can lead to dramatic changes in our behavior,  both positive and negative. A simple example is joining your friends for a soda. That behavior opens the door for other non standard behaviors to be observed by the members of the friends group. Seen often enough even bad behavior can become one of those, everyone is doing it so why not me too excuses we use to justify our actions.

Being too much of a follower is also a self limiting behavior. Self limiting behaviors are behaviors we engage in that over time effect us in a negative way. That effect may be missed opportunity, missed interaction with friends and family, or unknowingly turning away from those people who have your best interest at heart.

How this happens is easily understood through what we think of as typical Teenage behavior. You want to go out and be with your friends on a weekend night. Your parents are resistant to the idea, probably for good reasons which we do not understand being the Teen. What we perceive is our Parents are being too strict, and never want us to have any fun.

Initially we respect our parents wishes and follow their rules. One weekend, for no obvious reason, something happens that makes our Parents desires less important than our own, and those of our friends. We ignore the rules of our Parents and we do exactly what we want, stay out later than we should with our friends.

The next day our Parents are most unhappy, and upon reflection, staying out the night before does not now feel as good as it did last night. From this moment on we either start growing up and take responsibility, or we continue to justify why we were right and our parents are wrong.

What we really did was violate a trust. We have channeled the respect for our Parents over to our Friends. Suddenly, our friends have taken our Parents place at the top of the respect tree. The respect we have for our Parents is below the respect we give our friends.

Of course to us, it feels as if this is exactly as it should be. Our friends are always there for us. They share more of our time than our Parents do, and they are always ready to share the wisdom of their knowledge with us. Our Parents want to stifle us, and keep us from growing up.

Respect is one of our most valuable personal assets, and it needs to be given out carefully. Giving too much respect to people who have little direct interest in our well being is one of the quickest ways to ruin our life and fill the lives of those around us with the problems we cause.

Misdirected respect is wasted respect. Misdirected respect does nothing to improve our life. Misdirected respect only brings eventual conflict and pain. Our poor decision becomes obvious only after it is too late and we have damaged close relationships.

Fortunately most of us grow up and come to understand the tried and true value of giving our respect to those who have or had the most influence in our life. We learn not give respect to people who’s real interest in our life is selfishness in self centered relationship.

Giving more respect to casual people in your life than you do to those who always want the best for you is a major life miss. Respect your Family and close Friends, but give that respect with your eyes open and your brain thinking.

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Teenage frustration and awkwardness

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I found as I was growing up the years between thirteen and my twenties to be very awkward times. I think a lot of teens find this time of their life to be very difficult. I first noticed the change because I enjoyed fighting as a kid. Around the age of thirteen the nature of fighting started to change. Fights were no longer about who was the strongest. Fights were changing to who could hurt the other person more.

The second thing I noticed was I no longer heard I was cute any more. And the things I used to do to get my way were not working so well any more. At nine I could go from door to door asking for something to do for money and people would overpay me for doing the simplest tasks. About the age of twelve or thirteen work started becoming scarce, and the payment for work accomplished started shrinking.

Then I noticed the other kids in school were changing. It was hard to figure out what was changing at first. It was like they were trying harder to be adult, even though none of us had any real idea what being adult really was.

Girls were a problem too during my teenage years. When I was younger than maybe ten, we would all play together and have fun as a group. Slowly us boy and those girls pulled apart from each other and started distancing ourselves apart from one another. About the same time I started noticing there was a distinct difference between myself and girls. Something beyond the obvious physical differences, something that attracted me, and made me feel awkward at the same time.

Thinking of awkward, it was also a time when my body was growing faster and doing things it had never done before. One week I was out playing and having fun, and the next week my bones would hurt and my pants were shrinking. My school never did a good job of explaining this growth spurt to us, not were they very good at explaining I would start to have a sex drive that I would not understand, even though it took center stage in much of my thinking and cause more than a little personal embarrassment in the life of a thirteen year old.

The differences in the way I was being treated by the adults in my world, had a large effect on how and what I thought from moment to moment. I was slowly being introduced to life into the adult world, and I did not know what the rules were. Much of what i took for granted all my life in the way adults in my world responded to me changed. Of course at this age I was internalizing everything, deciding it was somehow my fault.

I think at this point when I started internalizing everything is where many teens get stuck in their lives. This is the time in their life when they start thinking they are nobody, everyone hates them, or they are worthless. In fact nothing could be farther from the truth. What is changing in the life of a teen at this time in their life is everything is changing and no one has bothered to tell you about it. Life rules are changing for you and no one told you.

No matter how awkward, unloved, or useless you may feel, you need to know that these thoughts are what you think people think about you. In fact everyone in your life loves and cherishes you as much as they ever have, but they are getting you ready for the adult world. Your friends if they were not going through the same things themselves would not be changing. In a few years, just as you learned how to walk and talk, you will have the tools you need to live and thrive in the adult world. Be patient, and remember almost everyone feels just like you do even if they act like everything is great, it probably is not…just like you.

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Thinking and making good decisions, pass it on!

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One of the great things about life is the longer you get to live it, the better your knowledge base for making decisions. Having a larger collection of memories makes it simpler to understand why something happened, or why something may happen. When we are young, we do not have any memory base to share from so our decision making is not very good.

When I was a child, and I would be stopped from doing something, or punished after the fact, I would sit and cry, or feel sorry for myself. I was not able to look over a series of similar situations to mine, and see I was doing something wrong, or that could hurt me.

As a teenager, I started to realize there was a connection of sorts between past experience, and present, or future results. I could go to my friends and ask them about it too, which added to my decision making knowledge, although their knowledge was incomplete. So while my knowledge base was better as a teenager, it was not enough to be of real value because most experiences were still new to me.

It is really not until children come into our lives until we realize our system is not quite as perfect as we thought it was. We may notice some of our decisions are flawed. We act in the same manner we were treated at that age, without really thinking. We hear our parents sayings coming out of our mouth. Decisions are made like, “It was good enough in our Grandparents day, so it is good enough now”, or “Because I said so”. It is not until we are questioned that we start to realize that we have to temper our responses with some thought about how they were arrived there in the first place.

Children and telephones is a good example. When I was a child, being found touching, or playing with the telephone brought about swift, negative reinforcement. Children had no business touching a telephone. Each phone call cost money, and most parents did not waste money on their kids to play with telephones. Times change, and these days it is important for a child to know how to use any phone, perhaps to call an emergency number if they have to.

Having survived through our own children, we now are pretty much experts (if we take time to think) on making good life decisions. We have been through everything – growing up, dating, heartache, divorce, family death, family birth, and everything else that makes up our life. What we do not do so well however is pass on this knowledge to our children. I think it is rare for a child to be raised where a parent(s) has actually taken time to teach their children how a decision was arrived at and why.

If we did, most ‘why not, or why can’t I’ discussion would no longer [really] be about who is in charge. It would now be a discussion of is that a good decision – and why or why not. How nice it would be not to be forcing your children to obey, but rather having them go through a sound process for a decision. Talk about defusing an argument, and enjoying a healthier home life!

Most of us with children rarely get around to teaching our children how to think, and make good decisions. Possibly because we were never taught how ourselves. Or we think it is something school does. Thinking, and sound decision making is not that hard. We should not live almost half of our lives before we learn how to make good decisions instead of good guesses, nor should your children.

In the sciences everything we know from the past is written down and studied. It is dated, referenced, and commented on. We should be like this with our children. Taking the time to show our children how to make good decisions, and how to think. This would be would be a precious gift for any child. Think how much easier life could be for you, if you took the time to teach your children how to think, and make good decisions?

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