My own daughter just turned 10. ‘Double digits’ as she keeps reminding me. As I write this we are still in Corona-induced lockdown and so her Birthday was a shadow of the previous ones. But she got a Chromebook which she loves, we made a homemade cake which we have never managed before and she was the boss for a day (sort of).
But it has made me reflect, as she starts to become a teenager-lite, what life will be like to parent a teenager. I suspect far from easy. I remember listening to a podcast that explained teenagers just communicate differently, but they aren’t that different from everyone else. Fair enough. For some reason my brain joined the dots with a documentary I had once watched that explained when dogs and cats live together the dogs have to learn the body-language of cats as the cats refuse to acquiesce the other way round. So the pointless but hopefully mildly amusing end to all this mental walkabout was the remarkable similarities between teenagers and cats. Enjoy:
- You catch them staring silently at you from across a room
- They pretend to be indifferent to toys and then you catch them playing with them
- Affection is short lived and on their terms
- They often stop mid-activity to preen
- They seem to like sitting on stairs a lot (and don’t move for people trying to use them)
- They complain a lot if they aren’t allowed to stay out late
- They look the other way when talking to them (at least the cat’s ears selectively swivel backwards)
- They lay around a lot but act like they have hard lives
- They think they are the boss
- Aloof is a verb
The moral of the story is that as parents we are the dogs in this situation. We have to learn their language as they are far to pre-occupied for it work the other way around. And we need to understand that being under our feet it just another way of being near us.
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This post was previously published on A Parent Is Born and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Flickr