Comments on: The Jungle Called ‘Teenagedom’

By: Lee-Anne Ragan

Lee-Anne Ragan — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:16:05 +0000

Thanks for sharing your moving decision. Your nephew is a lucky guy. Good luck with the wild ride of parenting / ‘uncle-ing’. I’d welcome more comments from you; let me know how it’s going. Cheers to you and your new role.

By: Miami Computers

Miami Computers — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:47:09 +0000

I am new to parenting. My sister moved on to a better place a couple of months back and since my nephew has never meet his real father, he wanted to live with me. It was not hard to say, yes. He is blood and I love the kid. I’m in search of everything I can find on the internet about raising a child because I want to be the best uncle a kid can have so, thank you for the blog post and now I must move on to the next one.

By: Lee-Anne Ragan

Lee-Anne Ragan — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:27:16 +0000

Hi Colleen; great comments. Thanks for taking the time to share. I’m impressed that you survived living with 4 teens at the same time. While the challenges are great, so is the learning. Love your comment about how transferable the learning from parenting is and that ‘why’ is a four letter word. The latter makes me think of “The Resilience Factor: 7 keys to finding your inner strength and overcoming life’s hurdles, by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte”. They talk about the abc couplets; where our actions are based on beliefs that result in consequences. Great stuff. You can read a review of their book I did here if you like. Your comment about scars serving you well reminded me of Jane Hirshfield’s “For What Binds Us” ….”see how the flesh brows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before. There’s a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh is proud of its owners, wears them as honours given out after battle, small triumpsh pinned to the chest.” Here’s to proud flesh!

By: Colleen Kelly

Colleen Kelly — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:34:47 +0000

Ahhh Lee-Anne, I really enjoyed those years. We had 4 teenagers (and, yes, they were all in our house at the same time) and it truly was great fun. Incredible learning. That’s when I had a chance to learn how to coach, rather than teach; ask questions rather than give answers; learn that “why?” is really a 4-letter word. There is a recently released book entitled “Motherhood is the New MBA” – and although I haven’t read it, I absolutely subscribe to the theory that motherhood is where I learned a lot about how to work effectively with people. The scars I earned with teenagers have served me well in the work world.