Raising Teens Quotes

If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.

It’s normal to like guys who seem to like you; it’s normal to want to be loved.” Kami raised her eyebrows. “I’m sixteen,” she said. “I’m not looking for love.” “Oh,” said Liz. “Uh, what are you looking for?” “Cheap thrills, mostly,” said Kami.

WAKE Dealing with an alcoholic single mother and endless hours of working at Heather Nursing Home to raise money for college, high-school senior Janie Hannagan doesn’t need more problems. But inexplicably, since she was eight years old, she has been pulled in to people’s dreams, witnessing their recurring fears, fantasies and secrets. Through Miss Stubin at Heather Home, Janie discovers that she is a dream catcher with the ability to help others resolve their haunting dreams. After taking an interest in former bad boy Cabel, she must distinguish between the monster she sees in his nightmares and her romantic feelings for him. And when she learns more about Cabel’s covert identity, Janie just may be able to use her special dream powers to help solve crimes in a suspense-building ending with potential for a sequel. McMann lures teens in by piquing their interest in the mysteries of the unknown, and keeps them with quick-paced, gripping narration and supportive characters.

I raised my three teens with love, perseverance, tenacity, sweat, tears, prayers, lighting candles, and the list could go on.

The absolute best way to raise kind kids, is to be kind parents.

Wait,” Quinn said. “There’s one more thing.” I turned around and raised an eyebrow. His eyes were wary and he lacked his usual confidence. “Go to the Winter Dance with me.

He roars laughing as he raises our conjoined hands to his lips. “Have I told you lately that I love you?” “About ten thousand times.” I smile. “Get used to it, Alma Sadie,” he says, tucking an errant strand of hair back into my elegantly coiffed chignon. “Because I’ll never tire of telling you.

What’s More Important: Your Ego or Hearing Your Child?

Look, Anna,” she says in a panic, “I’ve raised you close to center. Don’t let anyone pull you to the outer edges.” She rushes to our front-room window. “Your grandfather is here. No matter what he says, don’t let him draw you into his imaginary world.

All my life, people have told me what to do or taken what's mine. The same is true for you! We've been raised among pirates who call themselves gentlemen. And I'm ready to turn the tables. I'm ready to take what's mine and maybe a few things that aren't.

This goes for giving instructions and directions, too. Write them down for your teens in addition to giving them orally, and limit the instructions to one or two points, not three, four, or five.

The most important part of the human brain—the place where actions are weighed, situations judged, and decisions made—is right behind the forehead, in the frontal lobes. This is the last part of the brain to develop, and that is why you need to be your teens’ frontal lobes until their brains are fully wired and hooked up and ready to go on their own.

Abbey," Sarah said, "life is to be lived. If you're living, you're going to stumble along the way." "All the time?" Abigail lept to her feet and began to pace. "I have such a bad temper and when I was in my teens, I wasn't above using my gift for revenge. None of you did that." Joley slowly raised her hand, sliding down in the chair as she did so. Hannah followed suit, though she didn't look in the least remorseful. Sarah shrugged her shoulders and raised her hand and glared at Elle, who just grinned sheepishly and put up a couple of fingers. Carol tossed her head and waved her arm with gusto.

When poor workers receive a pay raise, their health improves dramatically. Studies have found that when minimum wages go up, rates of child neglect, underage alcohol consumption, and teen births go down.[42] Smoking, too, decreases. Big Tobacco has long targeted low-income communities, but there is strong evidence that minimum wage increases are associated with decreased rates of smoking among low-income workers. Higher wages ease the grind of poverty, freeing people up to quit.

When poor workers receive a pay raise, their health improves dramatically. Studies have found that when minimum wages go up, rates of child neglect, underage alcohol consumption, and teen births go down.

Perception is of course intimately tied to preconception. I have, as is true for each of us, a pair of cultural eyeglasses that will determine to greater or lesser degree what will be in focus, what will be a blur, what gives me a headache, and what I cannot see. I was raised a Christian—the mythology resides deep in my bones—and I know the story of Jesus nearly as well as I know my own. Until my late teens I couldn’t see some of the darker acts perpetrated in the name of Christ. I still feel a twinge each time I say, “I am not a Christian,” a slight apprehension that I may have gone too far. Sometimes I look up, a small part of my upbringing still telling me that my blasphemy will call forth a bolt of lightning from the sky.

He ran his hand from my wrist up to the crook of my elbow and then to my shoulder. “When I was a little kid, my dad would come to my room at night to say a prayer with me. He used to say, ‘Lord, We know there’s a little girl out there who’s meant for Henry. Please protect her and raise her up right.’” His voice changed to something slower and more country when he mimicked his dad. He smiled at the memory, and then he put his mouth near my ear and whispered. “You were that little girl.

Sleep isn’t a luxury. Memory and learning are thought to be consolidated during sleep, so it’s a requirement for adolescents and as vital to their health as the air they breathe and the food they eat. In fact, sleep helps teens eat better. It also allows them to manage stress.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself. When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to chose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it. Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

But the best teens can be a handful. You have to raise them with a healthy dose of suspicion.

This is why it is so important for teens to get more than just a good night’s sleep before an exam. They need to get that good night’s sleep right after studying for the exam.

The most critical issue for teens is that THC disrupts the development of neural pathways.

We take a snapshot of our teens in their current phase and mistake it for the epic movie of their entire life.

times

Scientists have found that the amount of time spent milkshake-multitasking among American young people has increased by 120 percent in the last ten years. According to a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry, simultaneous exposure to electronic media during the teenage years—such as playing a computer game while watching television—appears to be associated with increased depression and anxiety in young adulthood, especially among men.[1] Considering that teens are exposed to an average of eight and a half hours of multitasking electronic media per day, we need to change something quickly.[2] Social Media Enthusiast or Addict? Another concern this raises is whether you are or your teen is a social media enthusiast or simply a

How cruel is the golden rule When the lives we lived are only golden-plated? And I knew that the lights of the city were too heavy for me Though I carried carats for everyone to see. And I saw God cry in the reflection of my enemies And all the lovers with no time for me And all of the mothers raise their babies To stay away from me. Tongues on the sockets of electric dreams Where the sewage of youth drowned the spark of my teens And I knew that the lights of the city were too heavy for me (too heavy for me) Though I carried carats for everyone to see (everyone to see). And pray they don't grow up to be

Sleep hygiene is a set of practices sleep experts recommend to obtain quality rest on a daily basis. Recommendations include low levels of stimulation in the evening, exercise and exposure to lots of natural light during the day, banning electronics from the bedroom, and sticking to a regular sleep-wake schedule. Children and teens who are stressed tend to have poor sleep hygiene if left to their own devices.

When he finally goes still, I raise my head with a sigh. “Really, dude? That was like two seconds. You have the stamina of a pre-teen.” His shoulders tremble as he rolls over on his side in hysterics. “I guess you’ve still got it,” he chokes out between laughs. Climbing up the mattress, I ease in behind him, yanking his big body toward me. He stiffens for a second, then relaxes, his taut ass nestling against my groin, his back flush to my chest.

Research shows that teens with empathetic parents actually have lower levels of systemic inflammation—a biological marker of emotional stress—but we tend to breeze right past offering empathy and instead serve up reassurance.

Drea, why don't you turn a circle and give us a good look?" the talker said, his chest all puffed out, as if he'd had something to do with making me perform. "Fuck you," I said, nice and clear, in spite of my fuller voice, so everyone could hear. A couple of teens near the back of the crowd laughed, but the mothers scowled and covered their children's ears. "Sorry about that, ladies and gentlemen," the talker called with an amiable chuckle. "Most of our exhibits were born and raised in the carnival, and they hear a lot of rough language." "Most of our handlers are full of shit," I added, drawing more laughter from the back of the crowd. "I learned to cuss the same place all of your kids did. In middle school.

Raising a child is tedious business. Sure, there are love and kisses when they’re little. There’s cuddling and genuine affection. Once they hit those pre-teen years, though, the sweet child you raised turns into a melodramatic demon overnight. Bay

He smirks, shaking his head and letting his eyes wander. I watch him carefully, wondering what I can say to get him to leave. “I’m not leaving until you answer some questions. Plus, I’m holding your sketchbook hostage, so you might want to cooperate.” I raise an eyebrow at him. I guess there isn’t much I can say. “This isn’t a hostage negotiation.” He chuckles half-heartedly as his eyes take me in, almost sizing me up. “I guess I should introduce myself.” He holds a hand out for me to shake. “I’m Nathan.” I stare at his hand for a moment. “Taylor,” I reply, meeting his eyes again without taking his hand. He lets his hand fall back to his side. “At least I got you to say something non-hostile.” “I haven’t been hostile,” I object. His eyebrows shoot up. “Oh, haven’t you?” “Why don’t you leave me alone?” I snap. “Leave and don’t come back.” I move passed him, heading for my apartment. He can’t follow and annoy me if I lock the door. “Where are you going?” he demands. I look back over my shoulder and roll my eyes at him, indicating the answer should be obvious: anywhere he isn’t. Once inside, I slam the door behind me. “That was totally not hostile!” he calls after me, sarcastically. I quickly head for my bedroom door, slamming it, too.

Children in father-absent homes are five times more likely to be poor. Infant mortality rates are 1.8 times higher for infants of unmarried mothers than for married mothers. Youths in father-absent households still had significantly higher odds of incarceration than those in mother-father families. Youths are more at risk of first substance use without a highly involved father. Being raised by a single mother raises the risk of teen pregnancy. Fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school.

Zane looks pensive, and then his lips twitch. “They say most girls end up marrying a guy just like their dad.” “Oh God … That’s so lame,” I say, spluttering as coffee dribbles down my chin. “I believe it’s a tried and tested theory,” he says, standing up and wiping my chin with the back of his hand. I jolt at his touch. “Now it’s a theory? I thought it was a saying? Next you’ll be telling me it’s a fact.” I flop back down on the couch. “Empirical evidence shows that sixty-eight percent of girls marry a guy who displays similar personality traits to her father ...” His voice trails off as I shake my head. “What?” he asks, his palms open and raised. “You really need to get out more. Where’d you glean that interesting nugget? The desperate men’s journal perhaps?

There is solid data to show that your IQ can change during your teen years, more than anyone had ever expected. Between thirteen and seventeen years of age, one-third of people stay the same, one-third of people decrease their IQ, and a remarkable one-third of people actually significantly raise their IQ.

We face the crowd near the fence and raise our fists. Like I’ve seen in old pictures of the Olympics in 1968, and the NoDAPL protests that have been going on for years, and women in India fighting for justice for rape victims, and the teens—just like me—at the March for Our Lives. It’s a simple gesture, and a beautiful one. It calls out through dusty pages of history and echoes from those whose shoulders I stand on—the ones who were hosed down but never retreated, who were beaten but persisted, and the ones whose voices were locked behind walls but whose spirits were never broken. The people united will never be defeated.

What children and teens need most in stressful situations, especially when they make mistakes, ‘misbehave,’ experience ‘failure,’ or cry for any reason (including what we might call a ‘temper tantrum’), is a hug and being told, “You matter to me, I love you so much. I’m here for you. Let’s figure this out together.

It’s critical to remember that by the time teens are telling us that they feel anxious or angry or sad or any other emotion they choose to put into words, they’re already using an effective strategy for helping themselves cope with it. As a psychologist, I know this through and through. As a parent, though, I often forget it.

The final goal of raising children both at home and school is to help them grow into good men and women. Childhood and teen years are a gift from God. They are the two life phases to learn the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. It is the chance to plant every noble value and meaning in life into these little souls.

You seriously raised all that estrogen?” “How I survived I do not know,” Will admitted, but he was looking at them with an indulgent smile. “But if you ever need parenting tips on the teen years, I could write a book. Your number one job?” “I know this one,” Tag said, holding up his hand. “Keep ’em off the pole.” “Gotta keep ’em off the pole,” Mitch said with a frown.

It seems like a good way to grow up,” I told her. “It was. But raising a child holds no guarantees. You can follow all the right steps, do all the right things, and still something can go wrong— Actually, no. That’s a word my husband would use. I won’t say wrong anymore, I’ll say differently than planned. That’s what happened to my daughter when she reached her teens.

Perhaps the most fundamental step you can take as a parent seeking to support your transgender or non-binary teen is to examine your own gender history. Everyone has a gender. Every one of us has been raised with particular ideas about gender instilled in us from the time we were born (and maybe even before!). Your experiences with gender impact your perceptions of your teen’s gender journey.

As children and into our tumultuous teen years, we feel our way through the world. We may be told our intuition is wrong by peers and family. We act on our intuition and are quieted, shushed, or made fun of. In abusive situations, children raise their voice in objection and are silenced by adults who supposedly know better. Our childhood intuition is stuffed down, ignored or suppressed. When you lie to a child, you send the message that their intuition is worthless and unreliable. This same child grows into adulthood questioning and doubting themselves. One of the most empowering things you can do is start to heal, trust and cultivate your intuition. You have the ability to reignite that candle inside yourself. You can reclaim your intuitive facilities. To do so is your birthright.

In the eyes of his contemporaries, Caesar was cast in the mold of a Catilina: bright, radical and scandalous. He had already acquired an exotic reputation. His adventures during his teens when he had been on the run from Sulla had been only the start. In his twenties, like many young upper-class Romans, he had gone soldiering in Asia and won the Civic Crown—an award analogous to the Medal of Honor—for conspicuous gallantry in action. He may also have had a brief love affair with the King of Bithynia, but it did not inhibit his vigorous sex life among the wives of his contemporaries back in Rome. A Senator once referred to him in a speech as “every woman’s man and every man’s woman” and for the rest of Caesar’s career he had to endure much heavy-handed jocularity about the incident. A few years later Caesar was captured by pirates, who were endemic in the Mediterranean; while waiting for his ransom to arrive he got onto friendly terms with his captors, but warned them that he would return and have them crucified. They thought he was joking. They were not the last to underestimate Caesar’s determination and regret it. AS soon as he was free, he raised a squadron on his own initiative, tracked down the pirates and executed them, just as he had promised.

“Alright, who’s first?” Crystal asked once Carrie was in the chair that she had instructed her to sit in. Everyone was quiet. “Who wants to draw straws?” Matt asked. Carrie hadn’t realized until this moment that the subtle smile on his face never faded. It was as though he found humor in everything that was going on. Will slowly raised his hand, his other hand was left shoved in the pocket of his blue jeans, “I’ll do it.”

A straight line can be drawn between family breakdown and youth violence. In Chicago’s poor black neighborhoods, criminal activity among the young has reached epidemic proportions. It’s a problem that no one, including the Chicago Police Department, seems able to solve. About 80 percent of black children in Chicago are born to single mothers. They grow up in a world where marriage is virtually unheard of and where no one expects a man to stick around and help raise a child.

I like to watch Peter when he doesn’t know I’m looking. I like to admire the straight line of his jaw, the curve of his cheekbone. There’s an openness to his face, an innocence--a certain kind of niceness. It’s the niceness that touches my heart the most. It’s Friday night at Gabe Rivera’s house after the lacrosse game. Our school won, so everyone is in very fine spirits, Peter most of all, because he scored the winning shot. He’s across the room playing poker with some of the guys from his team; he is sitting with his chair tipped back, his back against the wall. His hair is still wet from showering after the game. I’m on the couch with my friends Lucas Krapf and Pammy Subkoff, and they’re flipping through the latest issue of Teen Vogue, debating whether or not Pammy should get bangs. “What do you think, Lara Jean?” Pammy asks, running her fingers through her carrot-colored hair. Pammy is a new friend--I’ve gotten to know her because she dates Peter’s good friend Darrell. She has a face like a doll, round as a cake pan, and freckles dust her face and shoulders like sprinkles. “Um, I think bangs are a very big commitment and not to be decided on a whim. Depending on how fast your hair grows, you could be growing them out for a year or more. But if you’re serious, I think you should wait till fall, because it’ll be summer before you know it, and bangs in the summer can be sort of sticky and sweaty and annoying…” My eyes drift back to Peter, and he looks up and sees me looking at him, and raises his eyebrows questioningly. I just smile and shake my head. “So don’t get bangs?” My phone buzzes in my purse. It’s Peter. Do you want to go? No. Then why were you staring at me? Because I felt like it.

The result is that while teenagers can make decisions that are just as mature, reasoned, and rational as adults’ decisions in normal circumstances, their judgment can be fairly awful when they are feeling intense emotions or stress, conditions that psychologists call hot cognition. In those situations, teens are more likely to make decisions with the limbic system rather than the prefrontal cortex. The presence of peers is one of the things that raises the emotional stakes, making it more likely that teens will seek out risk and short-term reward without pausing to consider the consequences.

Juvenalius, 15 and gay, has been raised in a difficult family and has been held in his aunt's Diana suffocating iron grip for all of his life. He has been made to feel worthless and ashamed; with no freedom, only obedience. Yet this begins to change one day when he meets a boy named Davis at his high school who has drawn the meaningful letter 'C' on his right hand. Now Juvenalius has hope but his behavioral changes are seen as an act of defiance in his aunt's eyes until she catches Juvenalius and Davis kissing out back under the school's library windows. Then Juve's life is unexpectedly transformed.

The sum of Henry’s Japanese friends happened to be a number that rhymed with ‘hero’. His father wouldn’t allow it. He was a Chinese nationalist and had been quite a firebrand in his day, according to Henry’s mother. In his early teens, his father had played host to the famed revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen when he visited Seattle to raise money to help the fledgling Kuomintang army fight the Manchus. First through war bonds, then he’d helped them open up an actual office. Imagine that, an office for the Chinese army, right down the street. It was there that Henry’s father kept busy raising thousands of dollars to fight the Japanese back home. His home, not mine, Henry thought.

Kids are spending so much time communicating through technology, they're not developing basic communication skills that humans have used since forever,' says psychologist Jim Taylor, author of Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled World. "Communication is not just about words. It's about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheremones, all of which can't be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes." And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.

I also kept wondering, throughout that week in the summer of 2016, what if all I wanted to do was bang Nick Jonas (a question still) and maybe wrote a fifteen-hundred-word ode, talking about his chest and his ass and his dumb-sexy face and the fact I didn’t really like his music—would that have been a dis on Nick? Or what if a woman wanted to write about how she really hated Drake’s music but found him so physically hot and desirable that she was lusting for him anyway? Where would that put her? Where would that put me? Would either of these pieces raise any eyebrows? Were we then equal? No, not even close, because in our culture social-justice warriors always prefer women to be victims. The responses from Jezebel and Flavorwire and Teen Vogue all recast Ferreira as a victim, reinforcing her (supposed) violation at the hands of a male writer—the usual hall-of-mirrors loop people find themselves in when looking for something, anything, to get angry about, and one where they can occasionally, eventually, get tripped up. The reality is that men look at women, and men look at other men, and women look at men, and women especially size up other women and objectify them. Has anybody who’s ever been on a dating app recently not seen how our Darwinian impulses are gratified by a swipe or two?

Michelle Obama, spoke to supporters in rural Iowa about why she agreed to let her husband run. “Barack and I talked long and hard about this decision. This wasn’t an easy decision for us,” she explained, “because we’ve got two beautiful little girls and we have a wonderful life and everything was going fine, and there would have been nothing that would have been more disruptive than a decision to run for president of the United States. “And as more people talked to us about it, the question came up again and again, what people were most concerned about. They were afraid. It was fear. Fear again, raising its ugly head in one of the most important decisions that we would make. Fear of everything. Fear that we might lose. Fear that he might get hurt. Fear that this might get ugly. Fear that it would hurt our family. Fear. “You know the reason why I said ‘Yes’? Because I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of living in a country where every decision that we have made over the last ten years wasn’t for something, but it was because people told us we had to fear something. We had to fear people who looked different from us, fear people who believed in things that were different from us, fear one another right here in our own backyards. I am so tired of fear, and I don’t want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear.” May her words reverberate well into the future.

Lara Jean, just remember, the girl must always be the one to control how far things go. Boys think with their you-know-whats. It’s up to you to keep your head and protect what’s yours.” “I don’t know, Stormy. Isn’t that kind of sexist?” “Life is sexist. If you were to get pregnant, you’re the one whose life changes. Nothing of significance changes for the boy. You’re the one people whisper about. I’ve seen that show, Teen Moms. All those boys are worthless. Garbage!” “Are you saying I shouldn’t have sex?” This whole time, Stormy has been telling me to stop being such a stick-in-the-mud, to live life, to love boys. And now this? “I’m saying you should be careful. As careful as life and death, because that’s what it is.” She gives me a meaningful look. “And never trust the boy to bring the condom. A lady always brings her own.” I cough. “Your body is yours to protect and to enjoy.” She raises both eyebrows at me meaningfully. “Whoever you should choose to partake in that enjoyment, that is your choice, and choose wisely. Every man that ever got to touch me was afforded an honor. A privilege.” Stormy waves her hand over me. “All this? It’s a privilege to worship at this temple, do you understand my meaning? Not just any young fool can approach the throne. Remember my words, Lara Jean. You decide who, how far, and how often, if ever.” “I had no idea you were such a feminist,” I say. “Feminist?” Stormy makes a disgusted sound in her throat. “I’m no feminist. Really, Lara Jean!” “Stormy, don’t get worked up about it. All it means is that you believe men and women are equal, and should have equal rights.” “I don’t think any man is my equal. Women are far superior, and don’t you forget it. Don’t forget any of the things I just told you. In fact you should probably be writing it down for my memoirs.” She starts to hum “Stormy Weather.

She told him the origins of the “buck dance,” when “white people would come up and say ‘N____r, dance’, and then start shooting around the feet of blacks so that they would dance like everything.” 45 Big Ma was an important presence in Jimmy’s childhood and adolescence, and he credited her with giving him a unique and powerful sense of historical change. “When she talked about slavery,” he recalled, “she always talked not about how they freed the slaves, but about how [slaveholders] surrendered. There was a big difference. She saw the change as something that had been won by somebody, not something that had been given. She realized that there had been a struggle and that somebody had to lose.” 46 It would not take much for young Jimmy to see a historical connection and a continuity in struggle between these two moments—the buck dance that Big Ma witnessed in her childhood and the marauding Selma sheriff who came to town “shooting and raising Cain to see the colored folks run” during his childhood. Big Ma lived until the mid-1930s, when Jimmy was in his teens. By this time he could see new spaces of struggle emerging from shifts in the region’s economy and black people’s employment patterns. These shifts had impacted his family, specifically through his father’s work opportunities, and would shape his own prospects. Cotton continued to be an important part of the economy, both in the state and in the Black Belt region, but its significance declined relative to Alabama’s growing industrial economy. African Americans saw expanded employment opportunities, as labor shortages, strikes, and union organizing during the first two decades of the century led companies to open up jobs previously unavailable to black workers. The steel industry, which had previously satisfied its need for cheap labor with immigrant workers, came to rely heavily on black labor after World War I. 47

The lack of attention to Moses’s sons here and elsewhere in the Torah—essentially nothing is said about them—needs to be explained. And the explanation is probably this: They did not amount to much. This raises the interesting issue of the difficulty many children of great people face in leading successful and satisfying lives. In a book about Moses, ‘Overcoming Life’s Disappointments’, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes about this: Sometimes the father casts so large a shadow that he makes it hard for his children to find the sunshine they need to grow and flourish. Sometimes, the father’s achievements are so intimidating that the child just gives up any hope of equaling him. But mostly, I suspect, it takes so much of a man’s [the father’s] time and energy to be a great man—great in some ways but not in all—that he has too little time left to be a father. As the South African leader Nelson Mandela’s daughter was quoted as saying to him, ‘You are the father of all our people but you never had time to be a father to me.’ Kushner relates a remarkable story he read in a magazine geared toward clergy, a fictional account of a pastor in a mid-sized church who had a dream one night in which a voice said to him, ‘There are fifty teenagers in your church, and you have the ability to lead forty-nine of them to God and lose out on only one.’ Energized by the dream, the minister throws all his energy into youth work, organizing special classes and trips for the church’s teens. He eventually develops a national reputation in his denomination for his work with young people. ‘And then one night he discovers his sixteen-year-old son has been arrested for dealing drugs. The boy turned bitterly against the church and its teachings, resenting his father for having had time for every sixteen-year-old in town except him, and the father never noticed. His son was the fiftieth teenager, the one who got away.’ Of course, this was not necessarily true of Moses’s children, but the silence of the Torah concerning his children (which is not the case with the children of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Aaron) serves as an important reminder to parents who have achieved success to be sure to make time for their children. They need to try to ensure their children feel they occupy a special place in their parents’ hearts and no matter how pressing the parent’s responsibilities he or she will always find time for them.

It was the missionaries who became the brave storm troopers of Christianity, slashing their way through jungles, going where no one had gone before. Mission was now reserved for work among the unreached nations and no longer simply happened next door or around the corner. But the churches that had outsourced their missionary activity to the mission societies tended to drift languidly into the role of fund-raiser for the mission societies. This dilemma was seriously exacerbated when, after World War II, a number of parachurch societies, mainly aimed at reaching young people, were formed. These included Youth for Christ, the Navigators, Campus Crusade for Christ, and so on, and were aimed at reaching students and teens right under the noses of existing churches. Once again, mission was outsourced to specialist agencies, leaving the local church focused primarily around pastoral issues and Sunday worship. Not only did this create the great stepchild, the parachurch, it crippled the church’s witness beyond the Sunday gathering. And again, given the significant cultural effect of the postwar baby boom, we understand the historical reasons why such specialization of local mission occurred. But it only deepened the cleft between missionary activity and church activity. Again, long before all this happened, Roland Allen was deeply concerned. We may compare the relation of the societies to the Church with the institution of divorce in relation to marriage. Just as divorce was permitted for the hardness of men’s hearts because they were unable to observe the divine institution of marriage in its original perfection, so the organization of missionary societies was permitted for the hardness of our hearts, because we had lost the power to appreciate and to use the divine organization of the Church in its simplicity for the purpose for which it was first created.[155] In the end Allen himself despondently capitulated to this great divorce, concluding that “the divine perfection of the Church as a missionary society cannot be recovered simply by abolishing the missionary societies, and saying, let the Church be her own missionary society.”[156] Maybe not in 1926, but today there is an increasing unease with this “divorce” between mission and church. Allen was ahead of his time. He forecast the situation we now find ourselves in—with missionless churches and churchless missions, and neither one being all it should be. We contend that the whole missional church conversation was one that the church has been building toward for over a century. And now is the time to have it. A new generation of young Christians is desperate for the adventure of mission. They were raised in the hermetically sealed environment of missionless church, and those who have emerged with their faith still intact are hungry for the risk and ordeal that only true missional activity can offer.

Successful parenting is the rightful, God-ordained loss of control. The goal of parenting is to work ourselves out of a job. The goal of parenting is to raise children who were once totally dependent on us to be independent, mature people who, with reliance on God and proper connectedness to the Christian community, are able to stand on their own two feet.

So what do you think so far, Tiff?” I asked as I started combing my hair. “I’m thinking next year we need to have some sort of fund-raiser. These guys deserve better than old school buses.” “If anyone can make it happen, it’s Miss Teen Ragland.” “Next year, I’ll just be Tiffany.” She put on her cap, and I tugged on the brim. “I think Tiffany can make it happen, too.” “Especially since you and Bird will be on my committee.” She walked out before we could respond. “Did she just volunteer us?” Bird asked. “Yep.” I dropped my comb into my tote. I put my cap and sunglasses back on. Next year’s fund-raising committee was the last thing I wanted to think about. For the next couple of hours, I planned to focus on this year’s team, this year’s pitcher. Tonight’s date.

Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg has written a comprehensive and perhaps definitive text on building resilience in children—Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics.17 In it he teaches that resilience is comprised of competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control, which he terms the “7 C’s,” and which emanate from the positive youth movement, itself an outgrowth of the positive psychology movement. Taking

Computers, iPads, and DVDs have their place, but for small children through to teens, these electronic devices can warp the senses and affect brain development negatively, because they are all flat and clean and the same distance away. You don’t refocus your eyes or move about enough to develop the balance and activity centers of the brain. And

With this in mind, I’d started a leadership and mentoring program at the White House, inviting twenty sophomore and junior girls from high schools around Greater D.C. to join us for monthly get-togethers that included informal chats, field trips, and sessions on things like financial literacy and choosing a career. We kept the program largely behind closed doors, rather than thrusting these girls into the media fray. We paired each teen with a female mentor who would foster a personal relationship with her, sharing her resources and her life story. Valerie was a mentor. Cris Comerford, the White House’s first female executive chef, was a mentor. Jill Biden was, too, as were a number of senior women from both the East and the West Wing staffs. The students were nominated by their principals or guidance counselors and would stay with us until they graduated. We had girls from military families, girls from immigrant families, a teen mom, a girl who’d lived in a homeless shelter. They were smart, curious young women, all of them. No different from me. No different from my daughters. I watched over time as the girls formed friendships, finding a rapport with one another and with the adults around them. I spent hours talking with them in a big circle, munching popcorn and trading our thoughts about college applications, body image, and boys. No topic was off-limits. We ended up laughing a lot. More than anything, I hoped this was what they’d carry forward into the future—the ease, the sense of community, the encouragement to speak and be heard. My wish for them was the same one I had for Sasha and Malia—that in learning to feel comfortable at the White House, they’d go on to feel comfortable and confident in any room, sitting at any table, raising their voices inside any group.

the prefrontal cortex is not fully myelinated, while the neurons in the limbic system are. And that means that if two messages are sent simultaneously, one to the limbic system and one to the prefrontal cortex, then in the tween or teen brain the message going to the limbic system will arrive much faster—3,000 times faster. The prefrontal cortex just cannot be accessed as readily as the limbic system. And that means that our kids can and often will make emotional or impulsive decisions

Though familiar with the term white privilege, she foolishly hadn’t believed it applied to her. Privileged was the last word she would use to describe herself. She had grown up poor, with a teen mom, and she’d been a school dropout. Jerome had been raised in a loving family that gave him a firm foundation, an education, a solid career. Yet despite all the advantages, he and his boys struggled with matters she could barely imagine.

Empathy, attention, and calm provide a scaffold that steadies the teen's volatile emotions.

Those of us who work with troubled children have to guard constantly against our preconceptions about a situation; one person’s “troubled teen” may be another person’s “victim of sexual abuse,” and the label given to the child often determines how he is treated. A child seen as “bad” will be treated differently from one viewed as “mad,” and both will have their behavior seen in a very different light depending on whether the clinician sees a “victim” or a “perpetrator.” Further, depending upon one’s point of view, the exact same behavior can be framed as “running away” or “seeking help” and the perspective will profoundly affect decisions about what to do for and to the child.

until he is about ten or eleven, life for a boy is often all about his mother. And then the tide changes. When he enters preadolescence, he suddenly—dramatically—gets a glimpse of his future as a man. And he may start to wonder how his emotional comfort with his mother fits into his emerging manhood. He begins to question whether it’s manly to be so close to his mother. The answer can be elusive, and sons can find their confusion disturbing. From a son’s perspective, his feelings for his mother can be fairly messy stuff—even if we’ve tried to do everything right. We mothers must understand that every son feels this internal conflict as he enters the teen years. In addition to physically maturing, trying to figure out who he is becoming, and enduring emotional shifts that hormonal changes bring, he struggles with his feelings toward his mother. He wants to stay close, but something inside him is pulling away from her. These changes are all part of the process of becoming a man. Once we understand this, life becomes easier for us because we won’t take their changing behavior so personally.

school showed Geronimus something else. The girls weren’t losing out on higher education, careers, and other opportunities as a result of pregnancy. Those advantages didn’t exist in their communities. Plus, getting pregnant wasn’t necessarily a drag on the young women; many of them were experienced with raising children, having helped care for siblings and other family members. Inspired by the book All Our Kin, the anthropologist Carol B. Stack’s ethnography of three years in a low-income Black community, Geronimus understood that many of the young women lived in a warm embrace of family and community support, or kin, in stark contrast to the popular image of the “ghetto” as deficient and dysfunctional. She started to see that societal barriers, inequality, and lack of choices, not teen pregnancy, were the origin of the socioeconomic problems the Black community was struggling against.

You would argue that we’re not a parasitic life form?’ Arthur challenged. Morgan seemed wounded. ‘Do you think I’m parasitic, Arthur?’ asked Bedivere, his eyebrows raised. ‘No, but—’ ‘How about Gwen?’ he added, teasing. ‘Of course not, I didn’t say that the individual is parasitic, just our current way of life. Consumerism is destroying the planet. No, it has destroyed the planet. Why do you think half the world has starved to death? There’s not enough left to support everyone.’ ‘Says who?’ Morgan snapped. ‘Says common sense.’ He could feel the wine loosening his tongue. ‘People are lying when they say things aren’t that bad. What do you think all those wars were for? We were all just fighting over who got to eat the last éclair.’ Marvin’s stomach growled, and he awkwardly cleared his throat.

Ben learned guitar faster than I did, not (necessarily) because he’s smarter than I am (he is), but because infant and adolescent brains are extremely plastic. Plastic brains learn quickly, but they are also highly sensitive to the good and bad in their environment. This is a boon for learning, but it is also a dangerous, precarious time. During this transition from child to adult, adolescents are much more sensitive to negative environmental influences such as trauma, stress, social rejection, and sleep deprivation. “Plasticity is the process through which the outside world gets inside us and changes us,” writes adolescent psychologist Laurence Steinberg in his book Age of Opportunity.4 In other words, before your teen can strike out on her own to change the world, the world will change her.

Dissent in children looks like “disobedience” or a lack of cooperation. Our tendency is to double down on persuasion. In the old days, parents talked about a child’s obligation to obey parents, even when they didn’t understand the command. The child was literally taught that they were safer abandoning their critical thinking faculties in favor of trusting an adult authority. This kind of framework sets up a child for peer pressure in their teen years when a new authority emerges: the slightly older teenager! Today’s parents often believe they’re doing a better job than their parents. These parents don’t require obedience. They explain to the child why they, the parents, require cooperation from the child. I call this style of parenting “manipulative obedience.” The old and new parenting styles share the same goal: cooperation with a parent’s instruction. The difference now is that rather than cooperating for the sake of respecting authority, the child is also expected to agree with the parent’s reasoning. The space just got much smaller for critical thinking!

I kneeled about eight feet from the scene and photographed, shocked by what I was witnessing. What happened to “liberating the Iraqis”? I was waiting for one of the soldiers to step in and stop the madness when I noticed an old woman in an abaya in the right corner of my frame. She was about sixty years old. She raised a propane tank over her head and smashed it on a crouching soldier’s neck. I kept shooting. No one even noticed me. The Americans didn’t understand the value of honor and respect in an Arab culture. Young American soldiers, many of whom had never traveled abroad before, much less to a Muslim country, didn’t realize that a basic familiarity with Arab culture might help their cause. During night patrols, fresh-faced Americans in their late teens and early twenties would stop cars jam-packed with Iraqi family members—men, women, and children—shine their flashlights into the cars, and scream, “Get the fuck out of the car!” Armed to the teeth, they busted into private homes late in the night, pushing the men to the floor, screaming in their faces in English, and zip-tying their wrists while questioning them—often without interpreters and while the children stood, terrified, in the doorway. They would shine their flashlights on women in nightgowns, unveiled, track their dirty boots through people’s homes, soil their carpets and their dignity. For an Arab man, foreigners seeing his wife uncovered brought shame and dishonor to the family, and it merited revenge.

Come, dear, you must try this game. It’s silly but quite fun.” The girls, all of them unmarried, and ranging in age from their early teens to mid-twenties, moved to make room for the pair of them. While Daisy explained the rules, Evie was blindfolded, and the other girls proceeded to change the positions of the four glasses. “As you can see,” Daisy said, “one glass is filled with soap water, one with clear, and one with blue laundry water. The other, of course, is empty. The glasses will predict what kind of man you will marry.” They watched as Evie felt carefully for one of the glasses. Dipping her finger into the soap water, Evie waited for her blindfold to be drawn off, and viewed the results with chagrin, while the other girls erupted with giggles. “Choosing the soap water means she will marry a poor man,” Daisy explained. Wiping off her fingers, Evie exclaimed good-naturedly, “I s-suppose the fact that I’m going to be m-married at all is a good thing.” The next girl in line waited with an expectant smile as she was blindfolded, and the glasses were repositioned. She felt for the vessels, nearly overturning one, and dipped her fingers into the blue water. Upon viewing her choice, she seemed quite pleased. “The blue water means she’s going to marry a noted author,” Daisy told Lillian. “You try next!” Lillian gave her a speaking glance. “You don’t really believe in this, do you?” “Oh, don’t be cynical—have some fun!” Daisy took the blindfold and rose on her toes to tie it firmly around Lillian’s head. Bereft of sight, Lillian allowed herself to be guided to the table. She grinned at the encouraging cries of the young women around her. There was the sound of the glasses being moved in front of her, and she waited with her hands half raised in the air. “What happens if I pick the empty glass?” she asked. Evie’s voice came near her ear. “You die a sp-spinster!” she said, and everyone laughed. “No lifting the glasses to test their weight,” someone warned with a giggle. “You can’t avoid the empty glass, if it’s your fate!” “At the moment I want the empty glass,” Lillian replied, causing another round of laughter. Finding the smooth surface of a glass, she slid her fingers up the side and dipped them into the cool liquid. A general round of applause and cheering, and she asked, “Am I marrying an author, too?” “No, you chose the clear water,” Daisy said. “A rich, handsome husband is coming for you, dear!” “Oh, what a relief,” Lillian said flippantly, lowering the blindfold to peek over the edge. “Is it your turn now?” Her younger sister shook her head. “I was the first to try. I knocked over a glass twice in a row, and made a dreadful mess.” “What does that mean? That you won’t marry at all?” “It means that I’m clumsy,” Daisy replied cheerfully. “Other than that, who knows? Perhaps my fate has yet to be decided. The good news is that your husband seems to be on the way.” “If so, the bastard is late,” Lillian retorted, causing Daisy and Evie to laugh.

It is no better if your son rapes a woman than when your daughter gets raped. It is equally painful, may be more. ~ Rudransh Kashyap

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wise-minded mantra Sometimes we can’t make things better, but we can certainly make them worse.

Shifting role patterns over the last twenty-five years are central to theories on why BPD is identified more commonly in women. In the past, a woman had essentially one life course—getting married (usually in her late teens or early twenties), having children, staying in the home to raise those children, and repressing any career ambitions. Today, in contrast, a young woman is faced with a bewildering array of role models and expectations—from the single career woman, to the married career woman, to the traditional nurturing mother, to the “supermom,” who strives to combine marriage, career, and children successfully.

tolerant of your teens’ misadventures, but make sure you talk to them calmly about their mistakes.         • Don’t be shocked when your teens do something stupid and then say they don’t know why. You now know why, but explain that to them—how their prefrontal lobes haven’t quite come online yet. And remember, even the smartest, most obedient, meekest kids will do something stupid before “graduating” from adolescence.         • Communicate and relate: Emphasize the positive things in your teens’ lives and encourage them to try different activities and new ways of thinking about things. Reinforce that you are there for them when they need advice.         • Social networking tools and websites are an important avenue of communication with your teens. Some parents report that their most successful and meaningful “conversations” with their teens occurred while texting back and forth with them. And if you don’t know how to text yet, ask your teenager.

FIGURE 14. The Developmental Control of the Circadian System: Teens have a tendency to stay awake longer and sleep later. This graph compares teens’ sleep hours on the weekends, when study subjects slept for the amount of time their bodies wanted, with those during the week when they were “artificially” woken up for school by an alarm clock.

Although adolescents must be held responsible for their actions, they generally lack mature decision-making capability, have an inflated appetite for risk, are prone to influence by peers, and do not accurately assess future consequences. For the better part of this book I’ve provided scientific evidence supporting the notion that teen brains are different from adult brains. The question the high court was considering was how to weigh those differences in sentencing people for crimes committed when they were still adolescents.

other words, multitasking can wear us down, causing confusion, fatigue, and inflexibility. We continue to do it in large part because of habit, and habits for adolescents are particularly difficult to break; that is why as teens get used to multitasking, they are more likely to continue doing it.

Because adolescents are hypersensitive to dopamine, even small rewards, if they are immediate, trigger greater nucleus accumbens activity than larger, delayed rewards. Immediacy and emotion, in other words, are linked in the decision to take a risk and in the teen brain’s inability to delay gratification.

teenagers with a family history have roughly a 1-in-10 chance of developing the condition. Marijuana use, though, doubles that risk to 1-in-5. Teens with no family history, the researchers found, have a 7-in-1,000 chance of developing a psychotic illness, which doubles if they smoke pot on a regular basis.

Sean had never stared into as many blank-eyed faces before. Throughout the high school civics talk, he felt as if he were speaking to the kids in a foreign language, one they had no intention of learning. Scrambling for a way to reach his audience, he ad-libbed, tossing out anecdotes about his own years at Coral Beach High. He confessed that as a teenager his decision to run for student government had been little more than a wily excuse to approach the best-looking girls. But what ultimately hooked his interest in student government was the startling discovery that the kids at school, all so different—jocks, nerds, preppies, and brains—could unite behind a common cause. During his senior year, when he’d been president of the student council, Coral Beach High raised seven thousand dollars to aid Florida’s hurricane victims. Wouldn’t that be something to feel good about? Sean asked his teenage audience. The response he received was as rousing as a herd of cows chewing their cud. Except this group was blowing big pink bubbles with their gum. The question and answer period, too, turned out to be a joke. The teens’ main preoccupation: his salary and whether he got driven around town in a chauffeured limo. When they learned he was willing to work for peanuts and that he drove an eight-year-old convertible, he might as well have stamped a big fat L on his forehead. He was weak-kneed with relief when at last the principal mounted the auditorium steps and thanked Sean for his electrifying speech. While Sean was politically seasoned enough to put the morning’s snafus behind him, and not worry overmuch that the apathetic bunch he’d just talked to represented America’s future voters, it was the high school principal’s long-winded enthusiasm, telling Sean how much of an inspiration he was for these kids, that truly set Sean’s teeth on edge. And made him even later for the final meeting of the day, the coral reef advisory panel.

Andy remained seated. I chirped, “Sir, please tell me the reason for your visit. My guardian is fully aware of your proposal.” Struck by my candidness, Ozwalt stammered, “Very well, I will tell you the reason I’m here,” he raised his voice in displeasure. “Your counterproposal is deplorable!” My lover remarked aggressively, “What’s deplorable about Young wishing to be kept in the style he is accustomed to?” The Englishman exclaimed, “He’s not even of age to drive, and he wants a Lamborghini or a Ferrari? What is he thinking?!” “You offered him a city car,” my Valet countered. “He has every right to ask for what he desires.” The man repudiated defensively, “I offered him a city car upon his coming of age to drive, not before!” He was seething with anger. “Atop this, he demands a luxury penthouse in Mayfair or Park Lane, not to mention the live-in personal tutor! Is he insane? Most adults wouldn’t be able to afford a luxury flat and experienced educator, let alone an adolescent who is barely out of his teens.” “Sir, if you do not have the financial capabilities to accommodate the boy’s expectations, there are others who are perfectly capable of doing so,” my chaperone asserted. “Andy! Are you telling me that the lad has other well-endowed suitors willing to pay for such frivolousness?” My lover and I sniggered at the Englishman’s comment, but we managed to suppress our mirth. My guardian answered solemnly, “That, Sir, is none of your concern. I presume you’re here to discuss Young’s counterproposal, not the proposals of his other suitors.” He was taken aback by my mentor’s forthrightness. He raised his voice in retaliation. “I’m here to talk to Young. I would like Young to speak for himself.” I spoke unrelentingly, “I have asked Andy to negotiate on my behalf. I have heard everything he has said and challenge none of it. If my terms are not met, I’m afraid our arrangement is over. There is no further need for discussion.” By now, Ozwalt was on fire. He waved his fist at me and shouted, “You rapacious whore! You’re nothing but a self-indulgent sybaritic slut from a third-world country!” Before he could continue lambasting me with further insults, Wilhem entered. “What’s going on here?” my big-brother questioned. Mossey resumed berating my integrity, calling me a barrage of repugnant names while my chaperones carted him off the campus grounds to his waiting chauffeur and Bentley. Groups of students stood gaping at the wild man, speculating about the nature of the ruckus they were witnessing.

the image of my

According to one recent study, each teen sends an average of 3,300 texts every month. (Girls average more: 4,050 texts a month.) Researchers at a sleep disorders clinic at JFK Medical Center in New Jersey estimate that one in five teenagers actually interrupts his or her sleep in order to text. The

A group of researchers at Duke showed that in rats, nicotine exposure during adolescence damaged the pathways producing serotonin in the brain. As a result, there was less serotonin, and as serotonin deficiency is one of the leading mechanisms of depression, that may explain why depression is more frequent in people who have been heavy smokers as teens.

One conclusion, said researchers, is that alcohol use could inhibit the ability of the adolescent brain to consider multiple sources of information when making a decision, force them to use fewer strategies when learning new information, and impair their emotional functioning. Another study showed that white matter damage increased the longer a teen drank and the more withdrawal symptoms the teen experienced. Alcohol dependence has two

Adults have an advantage over children and teens in that their white matter is more extensive, meaning that they have more speedy connections between brain areas, such as the frontal lobes.

I truly believe that God hasn’t given us the kids we have merely so that we might raise them. He’s given us the exact kids he has in the exact birth order with the exact personalities so that they might also be used as his tools in our lives to mold us into the men and women he has created us to be.

What does it do to children when they are raised in a culture, where, to be noticed, you have to be the very best? And to be destroyed, you need only be caught making a mistake.

One 2023 paper in the Journal of Pediatrics concluded that “a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.

By the time they reach their teens, only 10 percent of American children report spending time outside every day, according to the Nature Conservancy.

Many parents, unfortunately, quit reading aloud to their children once the youngsters learn to read on their own. But others continue into the teen years, taking turns at reading increasingly sophisticated books. Like regular family meals, such habits provide assurance that parent and child will connect on a consistent basis to share something enjoyable.

Nanette raised her street sign. “Is that it? May I kill you now?” “No, no!” I said. “I am just, ah, letting Calypso sit so…so she can act as my chorus. A good Greek performance always needs a chorus.” Calypso’s hand looked like a crushed eggplant. Her ankle had swollen around the top of her sneaker. I didn’t see how she could stay conscious, much less act as a chorus, but she took a shaky breath and nodded. “Ready.” “Lo!” I said. “I arrived at Camp Half-Blood as Lester Papadopoulos!” “A pathetic mortal!” Calypso chorused. “Most worthless of teens!” I glared at her, but I didn’t dare stop my performance again. “I overcame many challenges with my companion, Meg McCaffrey!” “He means his master!” Calypso added. “A twelve-year-old girl! Behold her pathetic slave, Lester, most worthless of teens!” The policeman huffed impatiently. “We know all this. The emperor told us.” “Shh,” said Nanette. “Be polite.” I put my hand over my heart. “We secured the Grove of Dodona, an ancient Oracle, and thwarted the plans of Nero! But alas, Meg McCaffrey fled from me. Her evil stepfather had poisoned her mind!” “Poison!” Calypso cried. “Like the breath of Lester Papadopoulos, most worthless of teens!” I resisted the urge to push Calypso into the flower bed. Meanwhile, Leo was making his way toward the bulldozer under the guise of an interpretive dance routine, spinning and gasping and pantomiming my words. He looked like a hallucinating ballerina in boxer shorts, but the blemmyae politely got out of his way. “Lo!” I shouted. “From the Oracle of Dodona we received a prophecy—a limerick most terrible!” “Terrible!” Calypso chorused. “Like the skills of Lester, most worthless of teens.” “Vary your adjectives,” I grumbled, then continued for my audience: “We traveled west in search of another Oracle, along the way fighting many fearsome foes! The Cyclopes we brought low!” Leo jumped onto the running board of the bulldozer. He raised his staple gun dramatically, then stapled the bulldozer operator twice in the pectorals—right where his actual eyes would be. That could not have felt good—even for a tough species such as the blemmyae. The operator screamed and grabbed his chest. Leo kicked him out of the driver’s seat. The police officer yelled, “Hey!” “Wait!” I implored them. “Our friend is only giving you a dramatic interpretation of how we beat the Cyclopes. That’s totally allowed while telling a story!

But as he approached fifty, Kenny yearned to do something different. Someone told him that More Than Money—the same inheritors group Jeff Weissglass got involved with—was hiring an executive director. He landed the position and, in short order, discovered that his pregnant teens had at least one thing in common with these young heirs and heiresses: Society defined and stereotyped both groups by how much money they did or didn’t have. The foundations that funded adolescent pregnancy care assumed the girls were getting knocked up because they were poor, “which was not necessarily true,” Kenny says, whereas the inheritors were pegged as “entitled and spoiled and lazy—and there’s no basis for that.” The anti-inheritor bias proved so toxic that some of Kenny’s former colleagues shunned him after he took the new job. “They’re like, ‘What a sellout! What a cop-out! Why would you do that?’ ” he recalls. “What does it say about our culture that everyone wants to win the lottery in some way, shape, or form, and there’s a whole segment of our culture that hates people who win the big payout.” This is indeed a paradox. Oscar Mayer heir Chuck Collins gave away his $500,000 inheritance in 1986, when he was a young man. (Invested in the S&P 500, it would be worth about $14 million today.) He has since dedicated himself, through the Institute for Policy Studies, to educating the American public about inequality. His memoir, Born on Third Base, includes the following scene: Speaking to a crowd of about 350 people, he asks who among them feels rage toward the wealthiest 1 percent. Almost everyone raises a hand. He then asks, “How many of you wish you were in the wealthiest 1 percent?” They laugh, but again, almost everyone. “People are envious,” Kenny says. “And what you end up doing with envy is demeaning whoever it is that you envy, because they have what we think we deserve.” During his time at More Than Money, Kenny grew friendly with Paul Schervish, then the director of the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, and when Schervish offered him the associate director job, Kenny jumped. He’d seen how inheritors grappled with their unearned fortunes. Now he wanted to better understand their parents. Havens was the numbers guy “and I was in charge of: ‘I’d like to know what these people are thinking, and nobody ever asks them.’ 

I didn’t realize this building had a basement,” I said. “Basement might be a bit of an understatement.” He grinned over his shoulder. When I responded with a raised eyebrow, he said, “You’ll see.

Being God to your little boy or your teen son can change his life. It can literally keep him from going over the edge. That’s what Jackson told me about his mother.

You didn’t give us much choice.” Mitchell glared at her. “But once I saw your little Deathstar routine... Let’s just say I understood why.” “Told you I had a plan,” Marley beamed. “That’s the reference you get?” Reyna sighed as she dodged another attack. “Its Star Wars,” Marley shrugged. “Who doesn’t get Star Wars?” “She has a point,” Armie half-grinned as he darted away from a serpent’s mouth on his Skyboard. “Who doesn’t get Harry Potter?” Reyna asked, irritated. “So, does she,” Armie chuckled nervously. “Someone’s whipped.” Marley raised her eyebrow, bemused. “Nice to know some things never change.” “Apparently,” Mitchell rolled his eyes. “Now, if we could take a break from today’s installment of ‘The Teens Of Our Lives’ —