The Future is Now for Me & My Teen (Unfortunately)

We have nothing to fear except fear itself—and also a whole lot of other stuff

I am not an emotional guy (cue Mom and Buried: “To a fault!”).

But parenthood forces emotions upon you, even for a stoic, repressed (I was raised Catholic, what do you want?), alpha like me. From the minute your kid is born until, well, forever, you’re riding an emotional rollercoaster; your overall mental health and general day-to-day mood are largely tied to and dependent on your children.

(But not exclusively! I may be a parent but I am also a person, and plenty of other things affect my mental health and mood, including, but not limited to, how much I’ve eaten, if lay-offs are looming at work, whether the Dolphins win or not, etc.)

Parenthood is, as my youngest likes to say when we hit a pothole or drive down a cobblestone street, “a bumpy ride.” Moms and dads feel nearly every single emotion nearly every single day, and it would probably help to have a barf bag handy. Especially when our kids get older. Because while the parenting experience has us all constantly toggling between elation and anger and pride and frustration and adoration and exasperation, the most consistent emotion I’ve been feeling lately is fear.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Detective Munch’s birthday and the trepidation that comes with parenting kids his age. He just became a teenager, and despite the constant warnings every parent receives (from other parents, from pop culture, from our own traumatized psyches), I’ve mostly shrugged them off. Parenting doesn’t just start getting hard when your kid hits 13, parenting is always hard. The hardness just changes a bit.

When your kids are little, you’re primarily concerned that they’re going to get physically hurt. But when they’re teens, you’re not just concerned they’re going to get physically hurt, you also worry more about emotional damage and long-term impact. And as they get more independent and headstrong, it becomes a lot harder to protect them.

This is where we are today.

As I said in that previous post, the problem isn’t so much that my son is a teenager; he’s only been 13 for 12 days! A switch isn’t suddenly flipped that makes him start acting like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. The problem is the increasing reality that now that he’s older, now that he’s exited “childhood,” the stakes is high. In less than a year, he’ll be in high school. In less than five, college. It’s like going from single to double jeopardy; this when scores can really change!

Suddenly, the future is now. The mistakes my son might make become less forgivable, the decisions he makes become more important, and pretty much everything he does, from schoolwork to how he spends his free time, starts to have an impact on the rest of his life; from now on, this will all go down on his permanent record, for better and worse.

Which isn’t to say he can’t (continue to) screw up. He’s still just a kid, and in this day and age, adolescence lasts longer than ever. We want him to remain a kid as long as he can – for several reasons. But now that he’s 13, an eighth grader, and we are beginning to navigate the insanely stressful process of applying to NYC high schools (yes, you have to apply to public school and the process makes applying to college feel like a cakewalk which is not as reassuring as people seem to think) after we only just got him into the right middle school, he needs to understand that playtime is over and that it’s time to grow up. Which is neither a fun fact to relay nor an easy one to hear (especially when you think there’s room for both and are in no particular hurry for your kid to be an adult during the shitshow that is this century).

No kid wants to hear how important school is, and how much harder it’s going to get, and how important it all is to his heretofore theoretical future. I didn’t want to hear it when I was his age and I don’t like saying it now that I’m a parent. But it’s my job to prepare him for the future, and to somehow get him to care about a future he can still barely envision, which is even harder. He lives in the now, like all kids (and especially kids with ADHD), but these days all I can think about is his future, and right there is the disconnect that lies at the center of all parent/teenager conflict.

Detective Munch likes being a kid, in every sense of the word. He likes playing, he likes having less responsibility (even as he wants more independence), he even likes hanging out with his parents (for now!); the last thing he wants to think about is the looming responsibility of adulthood. The last thing he wants to hear is how if he doesn’t buckle down and take things seriously and work up to his potential now, the later of adulthood will be a lot less fun.

Currently the challenge is less about my son’s behavior – he’s a good kid! - and more about his perspective—and how we, as parents, help provide proper context for it. We don’t want to scare him or add to the anxiety he already struggles with (again, he’s only in eighth grade, but the NYC high school admissions gauntlet is no joke), but we do want to impart upon him the gravity of the next few years, and help him find the inner motivation he needs to survive, and thrive.

So far, it’s not going great. Mostly because I am not good at any of this.

I’m scared for him, and the fear and stress and anxiety I feel over his future usually manifests as anger or disappointment. Those things don’t motivate him. They don’t help him understand. They just frighten him and make him feel bad about himself and make him resent me. They cause him to shut down and retreat. They damage our relationship to each other and his relationship with himself. They handicap him instead of giving him a leg up.

Add to all of this the fact that he has ADHD and hasn’t even hit puberty yet and the next few years are going to be fraught, to say the least.

I need to be better so I can help him be his best. Because his best is really great, and if we can all just get past the fear, he’ll see there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Social Media Round-Up

Pop Culture Stuff

We started watching Shrinking (AppleTV+) because we like Jason Segal (Forgetting Sarah Marshall is great!) and we needed something new and Mom and Buried gets mad at me for hate-watching The Morning Show. We’ve only seen two episodes, but it’s only 30 minutes or so and fairly light and Harrison Ford is great.

If you follow me on IG you may know that we like to partake in Spooktober, during which time we focus on watching horror movies. Well, I do, because most of the spooky stuff Mom and Buried likes to watch isn’t actually scary (unless you count The Shining, which I do, and Hocus Pocus, which is scary for far different reasons), it’s just horror-adjacent, because she can’t handle actually scary stuff. So in the lead-up, we watched No One Will Save You on Hulu, which is about aliens and guilt and is both derivative and unique and features Kaitlyn Dever, who I’ve loved since Justified (and is also great in Booksmart) and barely speaks in this film. It’s getting good reviews but I thought it was just okay. I certainly didn’t find it scary and neither did my wife; she just hated it.

But next month the real fun begins. I’m going to show her Doctor Sleep, which is pretty good unless you watch the Director’s Cut, because that’s great. There is one scene Mom and Buried will really not like but what are ya gonna do? It’s Spooktober! Strap in.