Teens? Gratitude?

If you are the parent of a teenager, I’m hoping this title may have caught your eye.

Your response may be… Ha!

Teenage reality

Well, I’m in it – the teenage reality tunnel. I have two girls, one about to reach the age of 14 and the other already 18 in a 12 year-old body.

It happens – if you have adult kids or are in this stage of parenthood, you know it does and there is no escaping.

Last weekend, my almost 14 year-old was tearful and distracted (what’s new?, I hear you ask). She told me she was having an existential crisis.

Existentialism and the teenage brain

Now I know I had a few of those as a teenager. I remember laying in bed at night horrified at the new world my brain was opening up to me.

The concept of death. The concept of relationships with boys. The concept of actually…doing…THAT with a boy.

I used to lay in bed and tell myself

“One day…I’ll be dead”.

And I’d try to imagine what that would be like. I managed to scare myself about it several times and I never talked about it with my mother.

Teenage times are tough

So remembering those difficult times and tough body adjustments I asked my teenager what was worrying her.

She said

“What is the point of living if we are all going to die?”

Deep scary breath from all parents present reading this.

First, perhaps like me, the alarm bells were going off somewhat. We’ve all heard of Internet bullying and some of the consequences for victims. What, or more importantly, who, had made my precious child think this way?

Still, I reigned myself in and realized that as the next generation, she had actually worked up the courage to ask me the question I had always wanted to ask my mother – yet had never been able to do. Respect.

So I asked…

“What makes you feel that way?”

She talked about feeling hopeless, that even if she worked so hard, had fun, did all that life could offer her…what was the point if ultimately she was going to die?

I told her immediately that she was definitely not the first one to ask that question and that this issue had plagued philosophers through the ages, including me in MY 14 year-old teenage bed.

She started to brighten.

Gratitude on the life journey

I suggest that thinking about the things she loves and is grateful for would help her find more answers to her questions. (At present she is also quite sure she doesn’t believe in God or spirit, a phase I know I went through during those years also). Still, she is not averse to me saging her room on request because she says it feels better afterwards!

We talked about how much she loves her panda body-suit pajamas, being in a warm house on a Kansas winter day and how grateful she is to have her favorite snacks in the cupboard. More brightening.

We had a lovely, heart-sharing conversation and now she understands a little about the nature of gratitude practice.

I also showed her this video which really made her think about ancestors and how far we have come as a human race, as cultures, and as women. I think this is a fantastically moving video to demonstrate to us older ‘oldies’ just how aware and grateful some of our teenagers are.

Sure it’s a rant and a revolution and might not seem to have that much to do with gratitude on first look. I can tell you though as a woman I am grateful that teenagers are learning to express themselves this way, asking questions like the one my daughter asked me and realizing that there really is a bright new world to be had the more we all work toward it.

For that I am definitely grateful. And she is too…well…until the next crisis!