According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more than 20.2 million people in America aged 15 to 19, and they are 7 percent of the population. So be careful what statements you make, or what biases you might allow yourself to believe.
Being a parent is a heroic act. Being a parent of a teenager sometimes makes us feel less than heroic. Indeed, we, as parents, often become an embarrassment. Congratulations to those of us parents who \”embarrass\” our kids in a manner that shows how much we love them.
Bettina Kurowski is the chair of the 2008 fundraising campaign of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and active in her Conservative synagogue. She\’s also a grandmother of three young grandchildren. They give her great naches, or joy, she says, but she\’s also worried — the children\’s father is not Jewish, the kids are being raised in an interfaith home and Kurowski, for all her Jewish involvement, is not sure what role she should play in passing on the Jewish heritage that is so dear to her.
For many years, at-risk behavior and drug use among yeshiva high school students has been an open secret, but only in recent years have kids and their families had anywhere to turn.
Save the few Web sites with supertight security (most of which are considered too babyish by tweens and up), worry resounds throughout kiddie cybersocial world. While parental e-mail consent may be required before activating a child\’s registration, there\’s no way for a Web site to determine whether the e-mailed permission is indeed linked to a parent.
As the doctor predicted, the breath-holding eventually subsided. By the time my second son came along, my child-rearing methods had evolved considerably.
As my son\’s bar mitzvah day inched closer, I began to see the world in a whole different light — a disco ball light, to be exact — for as my child grew, so did his friends, officially putting us both on the b\’nai mitzvah circuit.
One can learn a great deal about how not to parent by reading the stories of the dysfunctional matriarchal/patriarchal families that comprise a substantial proportion of the narrative in Genesis.
At the command of God, Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac. Bernard Cooper\’s father merely presented him with a $2 million invoice for child-rearing services. And God had nothing to do with it.
Cooper will appear on a panel, moderated by Jewish Journal Religion Editor Amy Klein, at the West Hollywood Book Fair this Sunday. He says that \”The Bill from My Father,\” his latest book, is perhaps the most conventional of his three memoirs, in that it follows a more \”chronological narrative,\” the story of his relationship with his cantankerous father.
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