Teenagers who mutate into alien beings? Not only a challenge in Corona times. Nevertheless, our author Till Raether thinks: Don't be afraid of adolescents, let's rather learn from them.
There is a very strange fear lurking in the back of the mind of parents of young children. So, I had them, some others I know have them. Such a looming fear, which is expressed in the old-fashioned saying: "Small children, small worries – big children, big worries." And newfangled in an entire branch of the entertainment industry that thrives on demonizing older children who are no longer really funny characters. Or to be tricked as the devil. And to call them "puberty" or "puberty". As if puberty was that phase on the way to becoming human when you are the least human and more likely to be an animal or a terrorist. Adolescents are particularly delightful people, the time with them is particularly beautiful and precious, and parents can only learn from them and their wonderful craziness, their absent-mindedness, their thoughtlessness, their abundance of emotions.
Pubescent teach an acceptance
In the last few weeks I've had to spend a lot of time with two pubescent children, so: allowed to. This is the opposite of what you normally do with pubescent children because they like to withdraw: they sit in their rooms, think, listen to music, are sad or happy and do not want to be disturbed. This is, under normal circumstances, a great benefit in adolescents. They don't stand next to you every five minutes and want you to pull Lego blocks out of their noses or play wellness oasis with the stuffed animals.
Every now and then new problems arise that need to be dealt with (damage to property, disturbance of the peace, alcohol abuse and so on), and I don't want to downplay these problems. However, they can usually be dealt with in less time than the problems of smaller children. Because the problems of smaller children repeat themselves at short intervals: pooping, not falling asleep, not sleeping through the night, waking up early, getting cold and so on. That costs a lot of time and is of little use. With big children you have big conversations, threaten big consequences and think big, but all of this is in a way limited in time because: You can just do less from week to week. Pubescent teach an acceptance.
So, on the one hand, I like something about adolescents that I never realized before that my future was waiting for me: having more time for myself. Unless they arrive suddenly and are IMMEDIATELY hungry and you have to take care of that right away, but I understand that because, if I'm honest, it's also roughly the way I eat: impatient, anti-cyclical and in batches.
Big kids – enthusiastic and sensitive
But now, in the last few weeks, the two big children, almost 13 and almost 16, had no opportunity to withdraw permanently. And for a change, I've seen pretty much around the clock what is wonderful about adolescents. They are often very funny because their behavior is sometimes so bizarre that they have no choice but to laugh at it themselves. They overlook and forget so many things that on the one hand I have a lot to do with reminding them or doing things myself. On the other hand, I've been watching this with a certain awe for weeks two or three, sitting on top of each other, and from week four I start to follow an example of it. Maybe not about leaving dishes and not taking out the garbage, but about being so absorbed in something that you forget everyday things.
I admire how absorbed they are, in small screens, maybe even in a book, doodles, some kind of projects, DIYs, or just sitting there. Every now and then they are so absorbed that they let themselves be kissed on the neck as they walk past. Whenever I dared do that with the six- or nine-year-olds, I was always immediately drawn into a game that I didn't understand anything about except that I was going to lose.
Above all, I let myself be carried away by how enthusiastic and how sensitive the older children are: Being with them teaches me how nice it is to let things get closer to you and not always run away or turn them off like me. And, a variant of it: how they get very small again for a few minutes and are amazed themselves, and then someone who is already five-foot-five throws himself on the sofa and on me and clings to me until I can't breathe, and a thirteen-year-old who no longer goes to the movies with me at normal times suddenly wants to fight me as if we were both seven again.
Looking forward to puberty
These are all the things that, in my experience, puberty is mostly made up of. You can really look forward to it when your children are younger. Unless you were so horrible pubescent yourself that you can't really imagine it any more than that, that your children will also become like you then. But even then I have to say: I was a terrible smelly boot when I was as old as my children, I don't think I talked to anyone in my family for three years, stole hard money from my mother for cigarettes and cut my sister in the schoolyard, I shoved dirty dishes under my bed, explained the world to my German teacher with imperious arrogance and howled with rage when my favorite jeans weren't dry – and even I have had funny adolescents. So why not you too.
Till Raether also writes in his book "I'll be … news from the middle of life" about parenting. It contains texts from the MOM as well as news about family life. (12 euros, rororo)
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