It turns out that all little kids grow up. It’s just that I always thought about having kids and when I pictured family life, I didn’t really ever picture them as teenagers. It is quite difficult to wrap my head around the fact that I don’t have little kids anymore. My baby boy, the one that completed our family, the one I wasn’t sure would get to have, the one that took a little extra time to get here is thirteen! People said “the days are long but the years are short” and I heard them but it isn’t until now that I understood what that really meant.
Raising children is different from raising them into adulthood. Yes, we lay the foundation down in childhood for adulthood, but it becomes more apparent in the teen years that they are starting to become adults. When they are little we teach them to say “please and thank you,” we teach them how to look people in the eye, how to be kind. When they turn into teenagers they practice using those skills in the real world without us.
Admittedly I have taken a different approach with each of my children when it comes to independence. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but my son had much more freedom to go out on his own than my daughter did at his age. He will bike or skate to school on his own, he will navigate the neighborhood with friends for hours at a time, and he has a sense of responsibility to get places on time that he takes seriously. I don’t know if I was overprotective with my daughter, if it was because she became a teen during Covid, or if I treated the issue differently because she is female, but she wouldn’t go out independently until much later.
I also encourage my son to have as much freedom as he does because it keeps him out of the house and off of devices. The last year or so he has discovered the world wide web in ways I don’t even begin to understand. If left to his own devices, which so far don’t include a phone yet thankfully, he would be scrolling mountain bike and skateboard videos for hours. It could be worse I know, but better is when he actually mountain bikes or skateboards as opposed to watching others do it. This is the culture these days and even when he is skating with this skate group he is part of now, the coach provides videos of them in order for the skaters to have good footage to post. I’d rather keep him off a screen and on the street than the other way around. He has learned and practiced good street smarts living in the city so I am happy for him to get out.
Hands down the biggest challenge for me is redirecting him off of screen time. There is a time and a place for it, but so many of us spend way too much time on it. Reminding him that what he posts is out for everyone to see forever is always on my mind. It didn’t help that days after his birthday I watched “Adolescence” which was incredibly shot, riveting and hits you to your core. It also demonstrates how the internet can snowball into an avalanche if we aren’t careful.
As my boy, I mean my kid, my teen begins this thirteenth year, he has one hand in silly kid life and the other in maturity. He will be having his Bar Mitzvah in about a month and watching him practice and dedicate his time to what it means to him has been wonderful. He is coming out of his shell socially and facing fears head on. He never used to like to do activities unless he had a friend and recently when no one was available to bike with he went out on his own. He used to go to skate competitions and watch his friends compete, now he wants to sign up and get on out on his own. While I am sad my little boy is getting bigger right in front of my eyes, I am also so in awe of who he is becoming.