Give Them Wings: Preparing for the Time Your Teen Leaves Home - Softcover

Kuykendall, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1589979427 ISBN 13: 9781589979420

Verlag: Tyndale House Publishers, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Updated and Revised
Your teen comes home with her driver’s license. College catalogs fill your mailbox. Senior pictures are taken, and graduation gowns are fitted. The family car is loaded to take your college freshman to his dorm.

During that transition time when a teen becomes a young adult, family roles must stretch and adjust to accommodate spreading wings. What can you expect in this process? Give Them Wings offers insight into how families change as parents and teens make room for the future. Emphasizing the need for independence and responsibility, Give Them Wings explores many ways that parents can equip their teen.

If your children are on the brink of adulthood, Give Them Wings can help you survive the changes and thrive on the challenges the next few years will bring. You can be prepared to help your teens journey into adulthood, as well as learn to enjoy the process of emptying the nest.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charlotte y Peter Fiell son dos autoridades en historia, teoría y crítica del diseño y han escrito más de sesenta libros sobre la materia, muchos de los cuales se han convertido en éxitos de ventas. También han impartido conferencias y cursos como profesores invitados, han comisariado exposiciones y asesorado a fabricantes, museos, salas de subastas y grandes coleccionistas privados de todo el mundo. Los Fiell han escrito numerosos libros para TASCHEN, entre los que se incluyen 1000 Chairs, Diseño del siglo XX, El diseño industrial de la A a la Z, Scandinavian Design y Diseño del siglo XXI.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Setting them free to soar
It’s both exciting and scary when a parent first hands over the car keys. Yet that’s an event that marks the beginning of transition for the entire family, one that is soon followed by extended curfews, college tours, and graduation ceremonies.

How do you, as a parent, handle this time of change and provide your young adults with the room they need to grow? Find the answers in this newly revised and updated edition of Give Them Wings, a best-selling book that’s already guided thousands of families through this phase of life.

With wisdom and insight, Give Them Wings shows you how to help your teens

• answer such questions as “Who am I?”
• explore their own beliefs
• learn the ins and outs of budgeting, doing laundry, and other responsibilities
• choose a college or career path that’s right for them
• successfully navigate their last years of high school and first years of college
• bid farewell to childhood and become adult members of the family

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Give Them Wings

Preparing for the Time Your Teen Leaves Home

By Carol Kuykendall, Krista Gilbert

Tyndale House Publishers

Copyright © 2018 Carol Kuykendall
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-58997-942-0

Contents

Foreword by Alexandra Kuykendall, xv, 
Introduction: Crying in the Kitchen, xix, 
CHAPTER 1 A Family in Flux, 1, 
CHAPTER 2 Parents' Task: To Surrender, 15, 
CHAPTER 3 Adolescents' Task: To Separate, 31, 
CHAPTER 4 High School: New Roles, New Goals, 51, 
CHAPTER 5 Home-Stretch Parenting: Nurturing Seeds, 67, 
CHAPTER 6 After High School, Then What?, 93, 
CHAPTER 7 Senioritis and a Midlife Crisis, 111, 
CHAPTER 8 Graduation Celebrations!, 133, 
CHAPTER 9 The Summer Between, 145, 
CHAPTER 10 Saying Good-bye, 163, 
CHAPTER 11 Home-Front Adjustments, 183, 
CHAPTER 12 Marriage Re-adjustments, 207, 
CHAPTER 13 Freshman Disorientation, 221, 
CHAPTER 14 First Visits Home, 241, 
CHAPTER 15 In and Out, 257, 
CHAPTER 16 The Empty Nest, 273, 
Additional Reading, 283, 
Acknowledgments, 287, 
About the Authors, 289, 
Notes, 291, 

CHAPTER 1

A FAMILY IN FLUX

I've always liked the challenge of creating our family Christmas card. I'd reminisce as I sorted through a file of pictures from the previous year, looking for just the right ones. But I hit a year when I didn't have many pictures, and my sudden sadness surprised me. It was about more than creating a Christmas card.

Our kids were leaving home, which meant we had fewer photo opportunities. I had to choose from some summer ones, or I had nothing. Kendall, our youngest, was still in high school, but Derek and Lindsay had already gone back to college and wouldn't be home again until Christmas.

There were several from a family hike in July, but they were too dark because that outing turned into a night hike when 20-year-old Derek vowed we could make it to the top of Green Mountain, even though we started at 6:00 p.m.

"No problem!" he'd insisted when I questioned whether we could get all the way up and back down before dark. "No problem" because he'd turned into a fitness guru since going off to college. And I was trying not to be Debbie Downer, casting doubt on every suggestion made by our almost-adult children. Besides, I was up for almost any all-family activity during the short time everyone was home together. So I silenced any further doubts.

Yet, as we nervously picked our way down the last part of the rocky trail in near darkness, I had to work hard at holding my tongue.

Then there were a few pictures from a memorable backpacking trip. When our kids were tweens and many things were deemed "boring," they rolled their eyes at the absurd notion of strapping sleeping bags on their backs and trekking to some remote mountain spot to sleep on the ground. But when our two older ones went off to college, they were miraculously transformed. Backpacking was in! The tougher, the better. Call it role reversal, but by then I'd become the reluctant one. My maturity and experience taught me something about the reality of camping: It always sounds like more fun than it really is. I was getting dangerously close to outgrowing camping — just when they were growing into it.

None of the pictures from that outing would work, I decided, because we all looked as if we'd been in the backwoods way too long, with wild hair and dirty clothes. I looked the worst. And as long as I chose the Christmas card pictures, I wasn't about to choose one where I looked the worst.

As I reviewed the rejects, I thought about our changing family and wondered if we were reaching the end of a tradition I'd taken for granted: creating Christmas cards with the whole family in the pictures. When do families stop doing that? The question made me feel an increasingly familiar kind of sadness.

We were a family in flux — a family of adults and "almost adults" — instead of one with parents and children. Our all-together family gatherings were fewer and farther between, often marked by mostly friendly differences of opinions that boiled down to this: We were living in an unfamiliar season of changing roles, and sometimes we didn't exactly know our way.

I dreaded the thought of entering this season. At first, I felt angry about the seeming unfairness of it all. When Derek left home first, I asked God, "Why did You give us the gift of family — a circle of close relationships where we learn to love and depend on each other — and then, one by one, take each one away?"

Now I know that God does not take family away. He merely changes its shape.

And in the changing, we have a choice: We can resist, clinging to the past and fixating on our losses, or face the new season with hopeful expectations. I bounced between both responses but wanted to land on the latter. As I look back over our family's journey, I see some things I learned along the way.

Anticipation is worse than reality. Isn't this true of most of life's anxieties? The hours I spend dreading my dentist appointment are much worse than my 45 minutes in the chair. When our children were young and desperately in need of constant love and protection, I dreaded the thought of their leaving home one day. "They won't be ready, and I won't be ready," I vowed passionately and rationally.

That's exactly what my friend Sue told me when I ran into her.

"How are you?" I asked.

"Not good," she admitted in a shaky voice. "It's Matthew, our baby. He went off to kindergarten this week, and I feel so sad. I know this sounds silly, but I feel like I'm going to blink, and suddenly our kids will be grown and gone for good." Her eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head apologetically. "See? I'm a mess!"

I smiled sympathetically because I remembered feeling the same way when a predictable, bittersweet milestone of independence, such as a child's first step, first sleepover, or first day of school, dramatically magnified the reality of their growing up and going away. I especially remember the day my own "baby" skipped happily down the driveway to be swallowed up by that huge, yellow school bus that drove her off to kindergarten with a pack of squealing children I didn't know. That bus symbolized leaving home, and as I walked back up our driveway alone, my life passed before me like a video on fast-forward. When the movie stopped, our three children were gone, leaving Lynn and me living alone in that place called the "empty nest." I didn't even know what the term meant until someone told me the analogy came from the way eagles raise their young, described in the Bible: "Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions" (Deuteronomy 32:11). When the eaglets are ready, the mother "stirs up its nest" by removing the outer lining of soft materials to reveal the sharper, prickly twigs. That encourages the eaglets to leave home, which is an act of love because what good is an eagle that never learns to fly? During the test flights, the eagles spread their wings and catch their eaglets when they fall. That's how mother eagles give eaglets their "wings."

When Lynn and I got married and had three children in five years, I couldn't imagine an empty nest for three specific reasons called Derek, Lindsay, and Kendall. They totally changed my life, my passions, and my definition of myself. They became part of my very being. As a friend said, "Becoming a parent means your heart is never your own again." Mother and writer Dale Hanson Bourke warned that "becoming a mother will leave her [a woman] with an emotional wound so raw that she will be forever vulnerable."

After becoming a parent, I discovered I couldn't go away overnight without feeling a bit incomplete. A siren in the distance always made me wonder where my children were. The rejections and hurt feelings they experienced wounded me deeper than my own hurt feelings. In an instant, I could measure their well-being by watching them walk toward the car after school, looking into their eyes, or listening to their voices. I constantly needed to look at them for that kind of checkup, because my well-being usually depended on their well-being.

By the time our kids were in high school, that raw emotional wound made me dread the thought of them leaving home. Family had always been a high priority for us, and we functioned regularly as a unit — five people together. We filled all the chairs around our dinner table. We appeared together in the annual Christmas card pictures (whether they turned out well or not). We visited grandparents together. We celebrated family birthdays and Thanksgivings together. I couldn't imagine removing one person from the picture. It would throw the whole unit off balance.

I dreaded the inevitable changes, but experience has shown me that dread and worry are the paralyzing emotions one conjures up while standing in the present and fretting about the possibilities of the future.

I've learned that those fears ignore the sufficiency of God, who promises to provide for us when we reach our point of need, not years in advance when we're fretting over the possibilities. To dread the thought of a kindergartner going off to college is to totally jump over and ignore what God will do in the in-between time.

Corrie ten Boom, who survived the horrors of living in a Nazi concentration camp in World War II, was a child when her father helped her learn this lesson about the timeliness of God meeting our needs. She told her daddy that she was afraid of dying at some unknown time in the future. He comforted her with a familiar analogy about riding to Amsterdam on the train.

"When do I give you your ticket?" he asked.

"Why, just before we get on the train."

"Exactly. And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things, too. Don't run out ahead of Him, Corrie. When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need — just in time."

When the day comes for children to leave home, we're given the strength to cope — just in time.

Transitions are tough. Still, most of us parents face a difficult but temporary period of adjustment. When we love passionately, we can hurt deeply. Good-byes are tough. Change is difficult. Losses cause pain. The exit of a child, especially a first or last child, forever alters the structure of a family and the definitions of individuals. The child's physical absence leaves a gaping hole in our lives for a time and often catches us by surprise, as if we never saw it coming. Our grief is real and a necessary part of a family's journey through transition.

Admittedly, some parents accept these leave-takings less emotionally than others. I knew I would have a hard time when I got all nostalgic as each of our kids went off to all-day-long school. I have friends who celebrated with brunch and mimosas. God made us different; we have different personalities.

According to the Enneagram, a personality typing system that helps us understand ourselves, I am a "Helper." Mothering my children has fulfilled my desire to help others and given me great joy in meeting their needs. No wonder I've resisted the loss of that role. According to another personality indicator, I am described as a "feeling" person, which means I instinctively respond to life on an emotional level and experience losses deeply. I also resist change. I find security in the familiar — a reliable restaurant, pretty much the same hairstyle, the comfortably familiar arrangement of our living room furniture. Transitions are tough for me; I grieve greatly. But the feelings are temporary. I've learned this type of grief passes.

God has a family plan. Our Creator, who divided the year into seasons and the days into mornings and nights, also divided people into families. When He created Adam and Eve and united them in Genesis 2:24, saying "a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh," He created this gift of family structure, which offers children the stability and loving security they need in the midst of an unstable and insecure world. He intended families to be a safe haven where children, like tender shoots, are nurtured until their roots grow strong and deep. He intended for those children to then be released from dependency to venture forth in marriage (if they choose marriage), yet remain in healthy, meaningful relationships honoring their fathers and mothers (Exodus 20:12; Matthew 15:4).

The purpose and time frame of this nurturing process may be lived out differently in different cultures. In biblical times, girls married at an early age. Mary was said to be about 13 when she was betrothed to Joseph. Young married couples often lived with their families. In our Western culture we raise our children to leave us, to become independent as they are able, usually soon after high school.

Yet as our country experiences more diversity, we see that first- or second-generation immigrants often have different expectations. Children may not leave home, and three generations might expect to live together under the same roof. For financial reasons, young adults may stay home or return home while attending college or working. Others may not be capable of leaving home because of physical or mental disabilities. In 2016, according to Pew Research, 15 percent of young adults ages 25 to 35 were living with their parents, versus 10 percent in 2000.

We must see the bigger picture. Sometimes we are so immersed in the child-rearing season that we fail to see the bigger picture of changing seasons. When our teens were close to leaving home, I saw a visual that helped me put the seasons in perspective. Imagine life as a whole pie, with different wedges representing different seasons. The child-rearing wedge, though intense and consuming, accounts for only one small fraction of that whole pie. When we're immersed in that wedge, we have little energy or vision to imagine life beyond that moment. But God willing, we're likely to spend more than twice as many years in relationship with our adult children in other seasons as we spend actively parenting them in the child-rearing season. That's motivation to let go of the parent-child modes and intentionally move toward a mutually satisfying, more independent adult-to-adult relationship.

Another perspective comes from calculating how old we will be when our last child leaves home, and then add the number of years we hope to live beyond that. Let's say you are 50 years old and married when your youngest leaves home. Given your life expectancy, you and your spouse may spend 30 years together in an empty nest. For Lynn and me, that's more than five times as many years as we spent together before they were born. That awareness helped us recognize the importance of our marriage, even in the midst of raising and launching children. A growing and healthy marriage requires nurturing, just as growing and healthy children do.

I'm also learning how our parenting perspectives change as our seasons change. Raising infants and toddlers is so full time that we can't wait until they get older and things get better. But as we enter the next season and experience its challenges, we realize that parenting doesn't get better as much as it gets different. The early years are more physically exhausting. The season of launching is more emotionally exhausting. Yet God, in His infinite mercy, blesses us with the ability to forget some of the hardest parts and remember mostly the good.

Now that I'm past the launching season, I can offer this perspective: For me, the very best season of parenting is the one I'm in right now — being friends with our adult children. Yet I had to navigate through many painful "letting go" experiences to move from the launching phase to this season of lifelong friendship, and I had to give my children plenty of encouragement and freedom along the way so they felt confident of their independence.

Conversations with Krista

What surprised you most about launching a child from your home?

The grief. I knew I would be sad, but the deep sense of profound loss surprised me. My daughter is the first one to leave, and her departure changes the shape of our family forever, as Carol observed. There isn't a way to prepare for that, and we can't predict how we'll react. My sister, who tends to be less emotional than me, was surprised by how deeply she was affected by her oldest's graduation. This transition can feel like a metaphorical death of what once was, and most of us need to go through a grieving process. To push those feelings down or pretend the loss doesn't hurt only stunts the healing.

I learned to engage in healthy grieving practices, such as acknowledging my feelings; allowing time to be sad; and engaging in deep breathing, prayer, journaling, and healthy activities (creative pursuits, exercise, hiking in nature, etc.). I realized this was a pivotal moment in the life of our family, and I moved through the grief by giving myself time to process it.

Is it true that anticipation is worse than reality?

Definitely. If there's anything I've learned on my journey of walking with God over many years, it's that He offers grace to meet the need. We often cannot imagine going through something because we have not yet been given the grace for that situation. What I have come to know as truth, over and over again, is that God has my back. He isn't going to leave me without hope. This is the truth I hold on to when it comes to my changing family as well. When the time came to start letting go, grace loosened my grip. When my daughter walked down that aisle in the high-school auditorium in her graduation robe, grace comforted my aching heart and allowed me to celebrate. When she left for the summer to work at a camp that same year, grace allowed me to say good-bye. While these transitions are painful, God provides for our personal and real needs. I can trust that grace will go with me, need by need.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Give Them Wings by Carol Kuykendall, Krista Gilbert. Copyright © 2018 Carol Kuykendall. Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tyndale House Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1589979427
• ISBN 13: 9781589979420
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar