week of 2/20/02
 
 
 

Teen survival tips for a father-to-be
By Jeff Minick
Yes, Your Teenager Is Crazy! by Michael Bradley.
Harbor Press, 2002. $19.95 — 300 pp.


Recently I was reading Michael Bradley’s Yes, Your Teenager Is Crazy!

That same week an acquaintance told me that he and his wife were expecting a baby girl. His announcement set me to thinking about Bradley’s book and about what advice I might give to a new father that he might not find in most parenting books.

So this one’s for you, Greg.

First, you should begin practicing now for your daughter’s arrival by setting an alarm clock to go off every two hours throughout the night. Every time the alarm rings you should get up and stumble around the room, bumping into furniture while stifling any curses (you don’t want the little one’s first words to be too creative).

This exercise has two benefits. First, if the baby wakes frequently, you will already be accustomed to lost sleep and bruised shins. If instead the baby sleeps through the night, then you will feel incredibly blessed for having avoided such suffering.

Next, you need to practice smiling and saying “Yes ma’am” a lot. For the next two years your mother, your mother-in-law, your aunts, the neighbor lady, the checkers in the grocery store, and every female over 25 will be dishing out loads of advice to you about the baby. They will tell you how to treat everything from diaper rash to colic, how to get the baby to sleep, what to feed the baby. You don’t necessarily need to take this advice, but you do need to smile.

Babies are messy, Greg, but adults tending babies can be even messier. If you are currently a TADINK (Tidiness Addicted Double Income No Kids), you might prepare for membership in the SIUTS (Shove It Under The Sofa) by throwing blankets, bottles, articles of clothing and toys around the living room. Crunching a box of crackers into the carpet underfoot has the double benefit of preparing you for both infancy and for the teen years.

I will never forget the first time my wife and I bathed our daughter. Giving an 8-pound baby a bath may seem a breeze, but by the time we had finished this ordeal our usually tidy bathroom looked as if Osama and his boys had just run through with a few hand grenades.

Once the baby is born, be sure to allow plenty of preparation time when taking her anywhere. Leaving the house with an infant can be an ordeal. I once knew a leader of a Navy Seal team who swore to me that it took him longer to get his wife and two daughters into a car for church than it did to get an entire Seal Team on a plane bound for the Philippines.

The key question to ask yourself as you leave the house is: do I have the wipers and the diapers?

Speaking of excursions, you will be pleasantly surprised to learn that a male with an infant, particularly a daughter, in a grocery store becomes a magnet for women. This attraction will allow you to engage in flirtations that might otherwise be misconstrued by your wife. More to the point, you might try convincing bachelor friends to take the baby and do your grocery shopping, allowing them the women and you an hour of peace. Believe it or not, a platoon of Hooters waitresses will not look as good to you at this stage of the game as a nap on the sofa.

As your little girl grows up, other matters will occupy your attention. By the time your daughter is 11 or 12, she will begin looking at boys in a funny way. So will you. She will continue looking at boys in this funny way until she leaves home. So will you.

You must learn to look at boys ages 12 to 20 the way critics look at pieces of modern art — what holds great beauty and significance for one person seems ugly and meaningless to another. Your daughter will see the man of her dreams; you will see a walking nightmare of tattoos and body piercings. Your daughter will see a knight in shining armor; you will see a felon in the making. Your daughter will see a hunk; you will see a hulk.

At this stage of your daughter’s development, you will need The Scowl. You won’t need to practice The Scowl beforehand. The Scowl comes naturally to all fathers. God gave you The Scowl as part of your fatherhood equipment.

You can increase the effect of The Scowl by developing a list of questions to throw at your daughter’s young men, questions like “Is that a real tattoo or did you get it from a bubble gum pack?” and “Were you born in the United States or California?” A five-page form in triplicate that includes these questions as well as space for a 500-page essay involving the young man’s plans for the evening will not only help protect your daughter, but will also assist in the battle for literacy in this county.

Before your daughter becomes a teen, you might want to consider taking a course or two in logic. You won’t win any arguments — your daughter is young and has all day to argue, and you are old and have to earn a living — but you can slow her down by making remarks such as “Isn’t that an ad hominem argument?” or “I think that your argument is a perfect example of the fallacy of the false cause.”

When your daughter reaches what someone who never had a daughter once called “sweet 16,” she will want to drive a car. The state in all its vast wisdom has decreed that your little girl, who has just dyed her hair the colors of Joseph’s coat and who can’t get dressed without throwing a hissy fit over the style of her footwear, is old enough to operate 1,500 pounds of metal and glass at 60 miles an hour. Unfortunately, the state has also decreed that you must sit beside her while she does it. Although you can get in shape for this exercise by riding bump-bump cars and roller coasters, there really is no real substitute here in terms of the thrills you may experience. One trick that worked for me was to drop my seat back and close my eyes. Usually I was asleep before we left the driveway.

You might also try reading Bradley’s Yes, Your Teenager Is Crazy!

Let’s start by pointing out that Bradley has written a remarkably fine book for a very low price. His style is warm and inviting; he pulls readers farther into his world of teens and family problems by using many examples from his work as a psychologist and by mixing common-sense solutions with recent discoveries in the field of adolescent brain development.

As may be discerned from his title, Michael Bradley also has a sense of humor, a trait that he hopes to encourage in embattled parents. Here is a brief example of Bradley’s approach:


Moodus Elevatoris Irrationnus

Fourteen-year-old Harrison, according to his father, begged Dad relentlessly for three weeks to go to the seashore. The morning they were leaving, Harrison was up at 5:00 A.M. (a miracle in itself) packing and pushing everyone to get ready. He ran upstairs to grab one last thing, and never came down. “I’m not going,” he finally screamed out his window as his family kept calling him. “I hate the shore. Why, do you always make me go there?”


What lifts Bradley’s book far above so many other books on the subject of teens and their families is his solid advice. It’s the first parenting book I’ve looked at in a long time that made me wish I had read it before having children, much less teens. Even such simple advice as “Use fewer words in shorter sentences” or “Lower your voice. The louder you are, the less they hear” would benefit many who have problems with troubled teens.

Where Bradley’s book fails, however, is where so many books of this type also fail. He never really comes to grips with a teen’s responsibilities in regard to parents and family. He seems to regard it as a given that teens will succumb to the culture around them. Bradley is easy on adults, but even easier on teens, which is probably why he goes from the discussion phase to calling the cops if the discussion turns violent. Parents who are debating with a 16-year-old boy about taking his girlfriend alone to the beach for the weekend or who encourage their 14-year-old son to spend weekends in bed with his girlfriend have probably little chance of regaining some control of their own homes. Bradley’s clients seem more affluent than many Americans; he does address the effects of this wealth near the end of the book.

Despite these misgivings, however, I highly recommend this book. Keep it in mind, Greg.

Finally, keep in mind that parents lose a lot of things. Parents lose part of their freedom. They lose their tempers. They lose sleep. Some of them lose their hair while others lose their waistlines.

Worst of all — and best of all — they lose their hearts to love.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)