Cliques, Mean Girls & How to Teflon Your Child

The school yard may be Wonderland for some, but for others, it's a battlefield. For some children, they have to summon up all the courage they have in their little hearts, just to be able to face the music everyday. And for others, the school yard represents giggles, square ball, and idle chit-chat. Do you remember how difficult it was to make friends? Maybe for you, it wasn't difficult at all. Maybe, like me, kids were drawn to you and you had the luxury of lunch-boxing with whomever you wanted. But if you were anything like my brother, making friends was no easy task, and he was often left out because he was a little different. So the question is, how to you prepare your child for the minefield that is the school yard? How do you prepare them for those catty cliques and sassy squabbles over superficial things? Here are a few things my mama taught me:

1) Never walk with your head down!

Bumping into playground equipment is social suicide, and if you're not paying attention, you'll miss the troupe of mean girls traipsing across the yard to give you some uninvited advice on what your mother happened to dress you in that day. Clothes are superficial, hair is superficial, it's what comes out of your mouth that matters. And above all, even if you're not confident, 'fake it 'til you make it'. Yes, those were my mama's words when I was 5!

2) Don't be afraid to do your own thing!

My mama always told me that using my imagination was my secret weapon. I used to watch the X-Files as a kid, and I loved to pretend that I was an FBI agent just like Dana Skully. Running around the playground, looking for evidence of alien beings was one of my favourite games, and though I might have appeared a bit nuts to some of the other kids, I always had a smile on my face, and other kids eventually joined my pint-sized FBI agency.

3) Always tattle!

My mama and pop taught me that there is absolutely nothing wrong with telling on someone. This whole notion that being a tattle-tale is bad thing may seem to make sense if you don't want your child to have a target on his or her back. But in the long run, it's incredibly dangerous. Better to be a tattle-tale than a tortured soul. Physical scars fade over time, but emotional scars can take a lifetime to heal.

Being a kid these days is no easy task, I know, because I remember beating up my brother's bullies on a regular basis! The advice my mama gave me and my brother worked wonders for me, but for my brother, the road was much longer, and little a bumpier, but in the end, he came out on top. Life isn't a bowl of cherries, and parents can't pave the road to success for their children, it's a journey of self-discovery and mishaps.

When Parents Can't Cut the Cord

If you were born anywhere between 1980 and 1999, you are a member of what sociologists like to call Generation Y. I happen to have a full membership to this generation, but unlike many in my cohort, I don't share many of the same titles that have been bestowed upon us; Trophy Kids, the 'Precious ones', and the 'coddled ones'. These titles are appropriately bestowed, let me tell you! There are some seriously self-righteous twenty and thirty-something year old's wandering around in this world, and after watching a documentary called Hyper Parents and Coddled Kids, I was able to understand where they all came from. Not only did it shed some light on why some of my friends were as messed up as they are, but it also gave me some insight into why I wasn't.

Growing up, I had one sibling, a younger brother. Though there was a six year difference between the two of us, we were extremely close. A series of events occurred in our lives, a divorce, several moves, and the roles changed. I took on a mother hen role, and my mother went back to school to get her forensic psychology degree and took on full time work. The entire family went from living, to surviving, and times were tough. As I moved up through my adolescence, the relationship between my mother and me changed drastically, and my younger brother was consistently showered in affection and accolades. I never thought it was misplaced when he was young, and I was a willing participant. But when I left home at 17 because of a damaged relationship between me and my mother, I realized that my brother could do no wrong even if he tried, and he had developed this sense of entitlement that I never did.

Much like the documentary I mentioned above, when my brother went off to university, my mother was so ridiculously involved in the entire process, I couldn't tell who was making the decisions about my brother's education, him or Mom! And over the course of  his education, he spoke with our mother two to three times a day, only went on vacation with Mom and the family, and never said a word when she arrived in the middle of his exam period! It was crazy.

The end result of all this coddling, is my brother is an overly-sensitive, arrogant, self-entitled young adult, who is incapable of handling rejection from  anyone. I may be coming across as a resentful, or jealous older sibling, but the truth is, I'm grateful that I was never coddled, and even more grateful that I had the sense to cut the cord when I felt it was necessary!

Why Invading Your Teens Privacy is Wrong!

For some reason or another, the invasion of one's privacy seems to be a common theme in my life this week. It wasn't me who had their privacy invaded, but a couple of my girlfriends have been batting around the idea of snooping around in their partner's private things to get to the bottom of a few things. I was absolutely horrified, and it immediately launched me into flashbacks of my mother snooping around my drawers, closets, book bag and anything else she toss about. It haunts me to this day, and has caused me to closely guard everything I've ever written down. It's left a definite scar.

Look, I'm not a parent, yet. But I do understand the pitfalls of navigating your impressionable adolescent through the mine field of growing up in today's world, because I was a teenager, and not so long ago that I need to dust the cobwebs out of my mind. There is enough heartache being a teenager. I mean, in between feeling socially inadequate because a lack of the right friends, trying to catch the eye of the cutest guy or gal, and then dealing with the disappointment of being dumped for the first time, it's all so overwhelming. But it's one thing to go out into the world to have everyone judge you, to make it their business to know everything about you, only to judge you. It's very much another when you have to go home and have the only part of the world that you can actually call yours, only to watch it be raided by someone who loves you.

Despite what parents think, teens deserve privacy. They wandering through life, trying to figure out who the heck they are. Tip toeing around your kids room like you're some sort of CIA agent on a recon mission,  is just begging for conflict. I get that parents are considered about what their kids are dabbling in; Drugs, sex, booze, any anything else that will lead them astray. And there may be a handful of cases where snooping is absolutely necessary, but very, very few. You as a parent, cannot possibly control what your child does when they walk out that door. All you can do is arm them with the tools they need to take on the world. Snooping around in their stuff teaches your child that you are not someone to be trusted. Why on earth would they come to you with something serious, if they can't even trust that you won't ransack the only place that they feel safe.

My mother snooped on a regular basis, and the ironic part was, I never really gave her a reason. I never touched a drug (and still to this day!), I didn't drink until I was legal, and I wasn't having under-age sex. I did well in school, I played tons of sports, and I never missed my curfew. Yet still, my mother felt compelled to root around in my private life. All it did, was cause a rift, and when sh** hit the fan, she was the last person I went to for help.