A Truth About Educating Teens

A truth universally unacknowledged, I might add...

Teens don’t care.

Try as you might, you can’t get them to care either.

I’m not saying they don’t have cares, or that they aren’t caring, or that they don’t care about what matters to them. What I want you to sit with is the defeat you feel when you read this three-word frank phrase: “teens don’t care.”

You want them to shower? They don’t care.

You want them to get up earlier? Nope, they don’t care about that either.

Studying the subjects you care about that they don’t? Right. They don’t care that you care about that. They don’t care that you care that they don’t care.

Your carefully worded articulation of your values that you expect to impart to them through your “non-coercive” coffee date—nix! They suss that out at ten paces. Not going to give you ground and pretend to care to make you feel like a more successful parent.

If we start from the premise that we can’t get a teen to care, we are much closer to creating a healthy learning environment.

Why? Because by the time you have a thirteen year old, you’ve got a kid who is mostly baked. And that kid is less likely to be molded to your idealized vision of who that child should be to prove to you that you’ve done a good job with them.

How then shall you homeschool (or even supervise traditional school) with a teen who doesn’t care in the ways you think that teen should?

That’s what we’re going to talk about right now.

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Reader Question

Becca asked:

How “different” should high school look from the early years? Should we be challenging them a bit or offering more “rigorous” work? I do not mean forcing them to do stuff, but maybe helping them step a toe outside their comfort zone, or taking something they do love and teaching them how to take it to the next level that they may not consider on their own or may be initially hesitant to try, but that ultimately they may enjoy or learn from. Should they be doing more subjects per day, or increasing their workload/attention span in a few select subjects? What about the value of being accountable?

How reasonable! Shouldn’t we be able to merely point our teens in the direction of their highest good and they’ll adopt those ideas as their own? And why wouldn’t they approve of our “accountability” structures that are only meant to prepare them for adulthood?

It is right here where every parent I’ve met makes the first teen-parenting mistake. We want to “guide” our teens to the path we see as best, but we know we don’t have the leverage that we had when our kids were younger.

So, we scheme to make the better path seem like the one teens should want for themselves. Parents use all kinds of tricks to do this:

• They do the stuff for the teen (research, create the lesson plan, make the phone call, set up the schedule, lay out the routine, correct the student work).

• They set boundaries: times to wake up, times to do chores, times to complete schoolwork, times to play online games, times to chat with friends.

• They try to be the cool parent that relaxes all expectations with the secret wish that the teen will reward them with sudden interest in the parent’s goals for them.

• They lecture or cajole or harangue.

• They restrict access to what the teen loves until the teen does what the parent thinks they should be doing.

Let’s call these what they are: manipulations.

The structure of the parent-teen relationship under these conditions is one of “power over” rather than “power with.” Yet as your teen emerges and grows, the only way they can envision leaving your house and living on their own is if they feel they have personal power with the occasional help of a parent (not a parent supervising and organizing them).

So the answer to Becca’s first question: How different should high school look from the early years? is: VERY different!

How does that look, you ask? Keep reading.