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I Don’t Listen to Parenting Experts Anymore
I spent years obsessing over everything I was doing “wrong.” Now I focus on leveraging my natural strengths instead.
I’ll be honest — I feel like an epic failure as a parent these days. In the course of two months, my newly 11-year-old daughter has suddenly become the “problem child” at school.
Being the parent of a problem child, I’ve learned, is an unenviable position. It’s also a lot of fucking work. I’m not used to teachers and school counselors calling and emailing me at all hours of the day. I don’t know what to say to them because I’m as bewildered as they are.
My daughter is terribly angry with us, her parents, along with most every other adult in her life. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we were born back in the 1900s and therefore don’t know anything.
Yes, we’re all quite sure that hormones are a contributing factor, but there is something else simmering beneath the surface, something I can’t quite reach.
Meanwhile, my 23-year-old stepson has been fired from yet another job. He needs a few hundred dollars just to tide him through. We see him only sporadically. He’s drifted to the alt-right and keeps getting in fights.
