At least a few evenings recently, I have enjoyed some deep and wisdom-focused conversations with my teenagers. Believe it or not and contrary to some popular-culture memes, teenage wisdom is not an oxymoron as some may believe. In fact, I have grown to appreciate the insight, clarity, and, yes, wisdom my girls bring to the conversations we have around various subjects. They have impressed me with their perspectives and their observations as well as their ability to articulate their thoughts clearly.
Perhaps it’s because they are naturally curious and tend to ask both me and my husband questions about things they encounter in their limited forays on the Internet, typically YouTube and Pinterest with a minor dabble in a few subreddits. Perhaps it’s because we also have spent some time in our unschooling adventures considering logical fallacies and what it means to think critically and for yourself. More than likely, their wisdom is a compilation of these things and more, including their naturally developing insights around people, popular opinions, unpopular opinions, and navigating the world as autistic teens with wonderfully and differently wired brains.
However it has come, it is something I love and appreciate about the two of them as I have listened to them over the course of some of our recent conversations. I’m not sure what prompted them to stroll down a bit of memory lane with regards to the public charter school they each used to attend, but as they ate their dinner, they began trading stories about their time there. Mind you, this was a school for which we all had held some high expectations. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be a place that supported either of my girls in their neurodivergent school journeys. Because of this, neither of them spoke with much nostalgia as they have had over other aspects of their childhoods.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, when many places shut down for periods of time, including the public schools here in Western North Carolina, like many other places around the country, the charter school they attended switched to remote learning that included a lot of Zoom-style classrooms. This was not a good fit for our 17-year-old; the online classroom experience was both frenetic and overwhelming. It didn’t take long before she asked me if she could be homeschooled instead. We gave the start of the next year our best shot, but when she asked me again after only two days of remote learning, I quickly agreed and withdrew her. I offered my younger teen the same option, but her remote learning experience had been much more positive and well organized and because she had had so many good experiences there early on, she opted to continue on.
Those good experiences changed drastically when remote learning transitioned back to the once-familiar in-person option. Unfortunately, so many things had to change, my neurodivergent teen had a difficult time adjusting to all the new rules and expectations, including a lot more outside time in the high late summer and early fall temperatures and the move from two teachers in her previous grade to four teachers in her new middle school grade. But the hardest part came when teasing from a couple of boys in her grade morphed into bullying and my girl’s efforts to advocate for herself went unheeded and unheard by the bullies and the staff. Eventually, she too asked to withdraw and join her sister for homeschooling. Thus began our unschooling curiosity adventures, something that has served them both well.
Still, they have not completely left behind the hurts and challenges and traumatic experiences they had before withdrawing from the school. And, as they talked through those, swapping their stories, my older wondered if maybe she hadn’t experienced as much hurt or trauma while at the charter school and if that meant she shouldn’t complain about her experience (for purposes of clarity, I will use initials to differentiate between my two teens; the 15 year old=C and the 17 year old=B). C thoughtfully addressed this question, telling B that while she may not have experienced bullying like C did, C recalled the challenges B faced with remote learning and how chaotic it had been for her. To say I was impressed with C’s ability to provide such an astute observation is an understatement.
Too often, I think we tend to compare our experiences to others and wrongly conclude that because someone else may have had a harder time or more overt struggle, we should feel grateful we didn’t have to go through what they did rather than allowing ourselves to process whatever hurts our circumstances may have caused us. My 17 year old has fallen prey to this line of thinking about her time at the charter school but also about our experience during Hurricane Helene. But, as my 15 year old pointed out quite well to her sister, it’s not about comparison because our experiences are valid, whatever they happen to look like. And, each day, I am watching the ways my 17 year old is growing and allowing herself to come to a better understanding of her own experiences.
Honestly, that’s some wisdom we can all apply to our lives to help us shift our perspectives. Obviously, we don’t need to dwell on those experiences, but we do get to acknowledge them and we can work through them, as each of my girls continues to do with their counselors. Maybe not those charter school moments, but the ways they consider the world around them. I love and appreciate the ways they have grown and changed as they have worked with their counselors as well as how they have developed in their critical thinking skills. Every day I see the ways they exercise their curiosity and understanding and insights to think for themselves. Every day I see more and more that teenage wisdom is definitely not an oxymoron.