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#11
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Privacy vs safety: teen level
Nathan Jones wrote in message . ..
I would certainly agree to not tell the other parents. Safety should always come first. I would argue that it is also a matter of short-term safety versus long term safety. In the short-term, silence indeed helps ensure that the teens get home safely. In the long-term, you are depriving a family from being able to develop strategies for dealing with their teen's problem drinking. I'm always astonished at the complexity of the love-hate relationship between parents and teens. We were hosting a group of girls some years ago, and in the morning while everyone was showering, I went out running, returning in plenty of time to cook breakfast. "Oh, that's so cool that you were exercising," one of the girls said. "I want to be like you when I grow up, not like my mother." The other girls burst out with protests, because apparently her mom is really "cool." And I've met her mom, and I concur. But to one's own offspring, it may be impossible to be cool. Imagine a family were the parents are uncaring tyrants who don't appreciate their teenager's individuality, who interfere in their young person's choices, assign chores that are tantamount to slave labor and who would punish the teen severely if they ever learned about substance abuse. Then imagine a family where caring parents try to connect with their kid, when each attempt at contact is met by cold silence and rolling eyes, where the teenager routinely hastens from the front door of the home to the closed door of the bedroom, talking to friends on the phone for hours but offering only grudging monosyllables in reply to the parents' concerned queries. Now imagine that these two families are really the same one, only seen from two different perspectives. That is the reality in many homes, and part of the problem in deciding what to do in cases like this. When a young person tells you that their parents would "kill them" if they knew, one has no way of telling if they really would kill them, of if the youth is horribilizing. Colleen Kay Porter |
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