When our oldest kids were still pretty young, Alyse was in first grade, we took in three teenage boys. It was a bit of a process – a story we’ll tell another time, but eventually we found ourselves parenting our own three little kids as well as three high school boys. Looking back, I’m not sure what we were thinking, but at the time we knew it was the right thing to do. Kelli used to call us the United Nations because one of the boys was black, one was half black half white, and one was Samoan. She loved to tell people we didn’t have family fights we had race riots! One of the boys we took in, Tracey came to us at fifteen from San Francisco. Again, we’ll tell you the whole story another time, but suffice to say Tracey didn’t have some of the home training we would liked him to have. One time he got into trouble at school. I can’t even remember what happened – other than the teacher did something very wrong in handling the situation. You see, we were living in a predominately Anglo town. Tracey was a 6’5” African-American kid that stuck out from day one. Tracey did something wrong and then took exception to a comment the teacher made and reacted badly. By the time we got involved the teacher’s words were a distant memory – all they wanted to talk about was Tracey’s behavior. That was when we began using the trigger – do the right thing then we can go to bat for you. The sermon we’ve given our kids around this trigger is the reality that people in authority make mistakes all the time. Our choice is how we react (or better respond) to that mistake. If we react poorly, as in the case of Tracey with this teacher, then the “sin” of the person in authority gets lost in the mire. If instead our kids learn to control their response – we are able to come in, address the original problem and go to bat for our kids regarding the perceived offense by the authority figure. In the case of Tracey, we did eventually address the naïve comments made by his teacher, but it came much later, after we addressed the original mistake and made amends for Tracey’s poor reaction to the teacher’s comments. Over the years it has been fun to hear our kids explain an incident and then assure us, “dad, I said yes sir, and did what they asked, but they were wrong.” Oh, how much easier it is to go to bat in those situations. We can get right to the heart of the matter with out (in some cases the smokescreen) first having to wade through the mess created by a poor reaction in the heat of the moment.

An early family picture with two of the three boys we had through high school - Tracey & Andrew

Another big trigger with our teenage kids (younger kids as well) has been, I don’t want to have to ask the right question. There have been times when our kids (I’m sure your kids never do this) would answer the literal question we asked – leaving out key information they know we are really asking or would want. For instance:

Son (S): Mom, I’m home.

Mom (M): Great. How was the movie?

S: The movie was awesome!

M: I’m glad. Did you have fun?

S: Yes I did.

M: Good.

This is a pretty normal interaction between a mom and her son. But what if the next day you get a call from the mom of one of your son’s friends and she tells you that her son got in a fight right after the movie and was arrested. After all you didn’t ask your son “did any of your friends get in a fight tonight?” Hence the trigger, I don’t want to have to ask the right question. You know what information I, as your loving parent, would want to know. If I ask “how did it go?”, then I expect a complete answer. I don’t want to find out tomorrow information that you could have told me today. I’m not an FBI agent (although many people have said Kelli would make a great interrogator) – you know what I’m asking, it’s not my job to ask the right question, it’s your job to give the right answer.

And the last one I will share is our favorite. It’s not even really a trigger as much as a phrase that we (the parents) practice saying. It carries with it a message, but we haven’t really preached the sermon as much as we’ve hopefully lived it out with our kids. There have been a few times our kids have dropped bombshells on us. Our tendency in those cases is to react, and in some instances over react, ie YOU WHAT!!!! For example, what are you going to say when your kid comes home as says, “Dad, I got into a car accident today,” “mom, I flunked my geometry class” or “dad, I’m pregnant”. We’ve chosen to practice our response now, while we are calm and thinking. The trigger, we love you and we are going to get through this. Obviously that’s not the end of it – you still have to deal with the situation. But even if your reaction is, YOU WHAT!!!! You have to deal with the situation. The consequences can be the same, the discipline severe, but what message do we send as we walk through this with them? For the mini bombshells, we recommend practicing your response as well. We use, that’s interesting, tell me more. So often our children, consciously and unconsciously, want to know do you love me. We want to make sure our kids hear from us loud and clear, there is nothing you can do to make me stop loving you. Yes there will be consequences and discipline to be meted out, but rest assured of this, we love you!

Parenting can be complicated. If you’re anything like us there are days you’re sure you’ve ruined your child. I heard someone say, I don’t have a college fund for my kids, I have a therapy fund. As we are on this journey of parenting, the trigger we want our children to hear over arching above all the good and bad is this; we love you and we are going to get through this.