Temporary parenting.

[rivka]

There's a teenager in our church who wants to go to SUUSI. Unfortunately, her parents aren't able to go. So last night Michael and I met their family at a notary public and signed forms that make us her temporary legal guardians, for one week in July.

She'll live in the teen dorm, of course, and do teen activities. The teen staff seems to be both ample and skilled. Our responsibility is to have face-to-face contact with her once a day to check in, and to be an emergency back-up if she gets in trouble, breaks the rules, or gets sick or hurt.

The SUUSI teen program is a weird middle ground between supervised summer camps and an open campus situation. The kids have rules to follow, and the teen staff provide 24-hour supervision with a full schedule of activities (Tie-dyeing! Midafternoon story-and-naptime! Capture the flag! 3am 7-11 run! Thrift store trips! River tubing! Teen worship every night at 1am!), but teens aren't required to be connected to supervised activities unless they want to be out after the 1am curfew. There are mandatory daily teen meetings and touch groups, but other than that our adopted teen will be on her own to organize her week.

She's gone to weekend UU teen conferences regionally, and she has at least three friends from conferences who will be at SUUSI. So she's got both similar experience and friends' advice to go on. We passed on our own advice: that SUUSI is a marathon, not a sprint, and that if she tries to run on a weekend con schedule she will burn out. And of course we handed on the traditional recommendation of one shower, two meals, and five hours of sleep every 24 hours, and the traditional caution not to try to reverse the numbers for meals and hours of sleep. At SUUSI we'll try to sit down and have coffee, or something, once a day to check in.

It's a bit weird. Michael had met the teen a couple of times before, casually, at coffee hour after church. I never had. Both of us thought the mother looked vaguely familiar, once we'd seen her, and agreed that we'd never met the father at all. Our Director of Religious Education privately vouched for the teen, to us, and presumably she also gave the parents some assurance that we're not axe murderers. But for the most part, they are sending their only child off with strangers.

What it seems to come down to is this: they trust their child. When we met yesterday at the notary public, the mutual love and respect and joy their family has in each other just sort of beamed out everywhere. They have faith that she's going to make good decisions for herself. But they're obviously not checked out or uninvolved. At one point the teen's father said "[Name] is going to be very respectful of the rules" in a tone of voice that precisely blended confidence-in-her and a touch of firmness, and they beamed at each other, and the whole thing was just such a perfect model for the kind of relationship I hope to have with Alex thirteen years from now.

Comments

[zencuppa.livejournal.com]

Years ago, a friend gave me some advice to give my children the opportunity to learn from, be mentored by and get to know other adults, other then (us) parents and our families.

I thought it was great advice and it sounds like that is what's (also) going on here.

I hope everything goes well!

[roozle.livejournal.com]

Second that advice.

The relationships our kids have with other adults are very important to them. Other grownups that they look up to and can relate to have been influential on them in very positive ways.

For that matter, some of the relationships I have with friends of theirs are important to me too.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

The relationships our kids have with other adults are very important to them. Other grownups that they look up to and can relate to have been influential on them in very positive ways.

It's one of the reasons why it's so important to me that my family belongs to a religious institution. There aren't many contexts in our society where kids can form relationships with adults who are not (a) in positions of authority over them, or (b) more closely bonded to/identified with the kids' parents. Churches and other religious institutions are rare examples of true intergenerational community; for kids over a certain age, I suspect that fandom works the same way.

There were a number of adults who attended my childhood church who I took as role models and confidants. My parents knew them all, but they were more my friends than my parents' friends. Those relationships were a huge gift to me. I watch Alex run around the parish hall during coffee hour, climbing into various laps and getting people to read stories to her, and I see similar bonds in her future.

[wiredferret.livejournal.com]

When I was 16, I spent a week at our big church convention. Not a camp, a governing meeting.

I had not, until now, thought about what it was like to send me to literally the other end of the country (Florida), with a few hundred dollars in traveller's checks, and no firm idea of how I was getting from Orlando to Atlanta at the end.

I did fine. But, huh. What brave parenting.

[jenett]

My parents once sent me to Pony Club championships (which, as one might expect, involved sending the horse, too) with friends because I'd qualified, but my father was not up for travelling, as he was in the midst of terminal cancer diagnosis (and might, in fact, have been in mid-chemo at that point.)

Now, granted, these were people we'd known through Pony Club and 4-H for years at that point. But still. Sending a .. I must have been almost 14 year old off that summer with a horse, even to a very well-run national competition, has risks.

It worked out fine, though!

[roozle.livejournal.com]

the mutual love and respect and joy their family has in each other just sort of beamed out everywhere. They have faith that she's going to make good decisions for herself. But they're obviously not checked out or uninvolved.

I'm going to sit here and grin.

When we let Talia go to Glasgow for the WorldCon alone when she was 16, people thought we'd gone mad. But it worked out fine. In general, kids are way more capable than we give them credit for.

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

My parents would have been confident enough to send me off like that.

I certainly hope I have the same confidence in my sons!

[okelle.livejournal.com]

I love the UUs.

[ailbhe]

My mother would've. She always trusted us beyond reason, as they say. Her results are, overall, pretty good.

I'm really looking into becoming part of a church community for broadly similar reasons; we are in fandom, up to a point, but it's an annual thing, not a monthly or weekly thing, so it's not quite enough.

watgw11b! :)

[acceberskoorb.livejournal.com]

I couldn't be more pleased with how this has worked out! I think intergenerational community is one of the most powerful things a congregation has to offer. It takes faith, dedication and trust to work, but when it does, I really believe it transforms the lives of all involved. Yay!

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Works well in bookgroup, too.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Teen worship every night at 1am!

This is more a comment on my brain than on the phrase itself, but this made me think, "Of course we have to make sacrifices to them. But I didn't realize it was institutionalized."