QI’m the mother of three boys — the first one just turned 13 — and questions have been whirling in my head ever since I read a scary article about teenagers.
Do teenagers really want their lives to be different from ours? Do they watch us working long hours and dealing with work’s distractions at home, and then say to themselves, “No way am I going to do that”? Do they think that working harder for longer is just “too much”? And are they burned out by our demands to get top grades and to take part in extracurricular activities so they can get into college?
And now, for my most important question: Is it true that teenagers want more stuff than ever, but they don’t want to work for it? I know that we give our children more than our parents gave us, but are we giving them the work attitude to go with it? If not, how can we make them more aware of their responsibilities?