Mom not charmed by Wiccan teen

Q. My 13 year-old daughter came home from boarding school last weekend and proceeded to announce at a family dinner that she is a witch and a Wiccan, which apparently is some witch religion. Then she told us she is an atheist.

My mother, who was present and is a big fan of yours, told me you would advise me not to tolerate this. So, I took away my daughter's Wiccan books and forbade associations with peers who are Wiccans. In response, she rebelled, and the more I tried to control her, the more she rebelled.

I recently have started attending church and have decided this is something the whole family should do together. Should I make my daughter go with us?

A. Your mother may be a big fan, but she did not correctly predict my advice concerning your daughter's apostasy. I advise parents to not tolerate blatant misbehavior. Wicca, which is a New Age religion that involves nature worship and belief in magic, is not misbehavior. Its practitioners are, in my estimation, deluded, but this is not something I would forbid, and if you had read my book "Teen-Proofing" before you so impulsively waded in to the maw of this situation, you would have known that.

You're tyring to control what you cannot control - namely what your daughter thinks. My advice is that you simply say something along the following lines:

"You are free to believe what you want to believe. As for me, I know from personal experience that people sometimes do not mature spiritually until they are well into their adult years. Until then, they wander. If your wandering has, at this point, caused you to become convinced that you are a witch, so be it. Just don't ever again disrupt this family with announcements of that sort, which you know as well as I do are designed simply to draw attention to yourself. Good witches never, ever attract attention to themselves, but you should know that. That tells me, by the way, that you really don't understand the responsibilities involved in being a witch. In any case, you are going to church with us. We do this as a family. You don't have to listen. You don't have to believe. You can even sit there and practice casting spells. Perhaps you can cause the minister to begin babbling incoherently."

In short, this is a time for not taking your daughter or yourself too seriously.

If my child came home and said she was going to be Wiccan she would be meeting with our priest and deacon very quickly for further discussion, in the church office. I'd have to go with what our clergy advised me to do, but I have some ideas that I think would work in our home.
1. If you are not Christian then you don't need gifts at Christmas or Pascha.
2. If you are not Christian, then you don't eat with us at the table since we pray and thank God for our food. Non-Christians can eat alone somewhere very unhospitable and uncomfortable.
3. If you are not Christian then you don't come to church with us, and since you are detracting from the family by refusing to be part of us, you can stay home and clean floors or something equally undesirable.
4. There are plenty of other enjoyable parts of being Orthodox in our home that my children would miss very much, no Orthodox camp in the summer, no working at the church bazaar, no staying up all night and having a celebration meal together at 4 am on Pascha.

You can't control what children think but you can make life very miserable for them in order to help them make better choices. Teen rebellion behavior is acceptable in all areas to some degree, except for spiritual arenas.

Dear sandyeggo,

My wife reads him. He's relatively new to the Wash Times. We lost Dr. Dobson for this drek.

I don't know under what circumstances he would send a child to bed without dinner. It happened to me once.

We were grocery shopping and my mother told us that we would have TV dinners that night, and we could each choose what we wanted. I chose a spaghetti dinner. She warned me it wouldn't taste like what she made, and I wouldn't like it. I was rather insistent. She made quite an effort to dissuade me but I wouldn't hear of it.

So, we got home, my mother cooked the TV dinners. The steam was rising off the "spaghetti sauce", and I was salivating. I took one bite and was so repulsed I wouldn't take another. My father got very mad at me and I was sent to bed without dinner.

A pleasant memory. ;-)

As for this Mr. Rosemond fellow, I think he has TV-dinner spaghetti where most folks have their brain.

sitetest

What do you think of Mr. Rosemond's approach, here?

He on one hand is recommending the mother treat the daughters interest in witchery as silly, but on the other hand seems to recommend the mother encourage the daughter to learn more about wicca so she can be a better witch.

I wonder what his recommendation would be if the daughter expressed an interest in doing drugs?I'm stunned he didn't tell the mother to get her child out of that school.

I, like Marmema would be running to my priest with child in tow and do whatever Father recommends.

Yes, I agree. Hopefully the mother will disregard the advice given to her by this person.

We have two teens and two almost teens in my home. I have several good books on raising teens. I can put up the titles if anyone is interested...both stress over and over again the fact that what teens really want is to know you care and will still set rules for them, just like kids who are adopted and test you. :-)

So for us, raising teens is the same as raising adopted kids was, when three of them were younger. They act out to get you to show them you will enforce limits, and you are still there for them. Teens are like two year olds, they want to be independent but it frightens them, so they want and hope you will show them that you are still just as strong and reliable as you were before.

There are plenty of arenas in life for kids to test themselves and grow, and show how they are growing up. Plenty of safe places where you can give them a loose lead and let them run, especially at church. The critical part of parenting teens, I think, is making wise choices about the arenas. As you are pointing out here as well, I think.

Last year I took my 15 year old daughter to a store and let her choose her own makeup. I said no to the deep red lipstick but let her have her second choice of pink stuff that I think looks terrible. She smears it on like there is no tomorrow for church and I ignore it. What is important is she loves going to church and she doesn't wear inappropriate clothing. If she must have thick pink lipstick on, I can live with it.

Last week at the parish council meeting they were asking for volunteers to cook and clean for our parish feast day. After several women raised their hands and offered to cook and serve, my daughter raised hers and offered to clean after the meal. She did it completely on her own and without asking me first. Now that's worth a lot of pink lipstick in my book.

My husband and I would interpret this child's ( in the story above) wiccan statement like this - "I am wiccan and my soul is in serious danger, do you care enough to do something about it and stop me?"

Our now nine year old adopted daughter, Irina, when she first came home to us from Russia would do the most obvious and disobedient thing, much to our amazement, as we knew she knew better. Then she would ask, "Mama, is it still my America NOW?" ( her way of asking, are you still going to keep me even though I did this?)

I don't see any difference between what Irina did and this child is doing. Both were in frightening situations and worrying about abandonment ( boarding school at 13?), and are asking to be shown that limits and parents are still a reliable and trustworthy thing in life.

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