Background

The seed of this book was planted when Natalie was thirteen. We decided it would be a great exercise to keep parallel journals in which we would each record how we experienced the conflicts and crises of her teen years. Our vague hope was that we might discover something worth sharing in a book for other mothers and teens.

We got as far as buying matching little blue journals and special pens, but the shopping is always the easy part. The trouble was that neither of us was a very dedicated diarist and later, when mother-daughter conflicts and crises began to pile up, we didn’t much want to write about them. It was all we could do just to stagger through.

Fast forward three years to the biggest bump we’d hit to date on Natalie’s road to adulthood, an event that involved her disappearance overnight, a boy Doris and (step dad) Ken had never met, a party, alcohol, and more. (The full story is in Chapter 7, “The Other Sex.”) A few days after the episode, Mom and Natalie were trying to reconnect over hot fudge sundaes at a favorite hang-out when one of Natalie’s classmates walked in. “Hey, Natalie!” he said. “How’s your summer going?” Natalie and Mom exchanged long, loaded glances. The Incident had occurred four days into summer break and ended with Natalie being grounded in one form or another for the summer—basically one step up from being grounded for life. “Great!” Natalie responded brightly. “How’s yours?” After the boy reported on his trouble-free vacation and left, Doris and Natalie started to laugh. “Over,” Natalie groaned. “My summer is over!” But she was laughing.

As Greg writes in the preface to Promise You Won’t Freak Out, “the frustration and comedy that characterize Natalie’s teen years are hardly unique to our family. It’s just that we see the comedy in the frustration, and that always gets us through.” After the family meltdown, it was Natalie who said, “Maybe it’s time to write that book we talked about.” Her rationale was that if we could get through our biggest bump, perhaps we could encourage other teens and parents as they worked through theirs.
 

Mother-daughter book groups

Promise You Won’t Freak Out contains material that is relevant to mother-daughter book clubs and to reading groups of women alone. Mother-daughter groups may find the book helpful in starting discussions of touchy topics that otherwise would be difficult to initiate. Women’s groups may find the book a fertile catalyst for broader consideration of parenting philosophy, strategies, and experiences.

In groups where the girls are below high school age (under 14), one or more mothers may want to “preview” the book to decide whether the parents find the material appropriate for their own young adolescents. By early in high school, little of the material is likely to be surprising to the teens, though the same may not be true of the mothers.

For mother-daughter groups, any of the “Conversation Starters” listed at the end of each of the book’s 13 chapters (see samples at right) may provide a useful starting point.

For women’s groups, Promise You Won’t Freak Out offers additional topics that may provoke lively discussion. We offer a few questions below to get you started. If you find additional topics you believe other groups might enjoy discussing, please send them to us at bookgroups, and we'll include them in future lists.


Women's book groups--general topics

1. In the book's introduction, Doris writes, “Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is power.” Do we agree? Is it important to know what our teens are doing? How can knowledge be empowering? How might it be debilitating? Is there a limit to what we want to know about what our teens are up to?

2. Doris makes “deals” with Natalie in which she gives up something she values to gain something she values more. How do we feel about making “deals” with our teens? What are the dangers of “deals”? What are the benefits? Who has made a deal with their teenage son/daughter, and how did it turn out?

3. One of the deals Doris makes is that Natalie will never get in trouble for what she’s done as long as she tells the truth about it. What do we think of this strategy? Will it encourage our teens to do whatever they want and then confess, confident that they won’t be held responsible? How might we induce our teens to be as candid as Natalie without giving up the option of punishing them for what we learn?

4. From many of Natalie’s stories, it’s clear that all sorts of risks could be eliminated if we didn’t allow our children to participate in “sleep-overs.” Does this seem like a good parenting strategy? What are its advantages? Disadvantages? How would our own teens be likely to react? How could Doris have managed sleepovers better so that the girls weren’t streaking, drinking, or sneaking off to parties nearly a hundred miles away?

5. Have our teens ever had friends we felt were a “bad influence” on them? How did we react? Did our reaction lead to a change in the teenagers’ relationships? Was the change good or bad? Knowing what we know today about the friends involved, would we have adopted the same strategies?

6. Did any of us as teens have friends our parents thought were “bad influences,” or were any of us viewed as “bad” by other parents? How accurate were these parental assessments?

7. When we were teenagers, did we share our secrets with our mothers? Did they tell us any of their own? How did this candor (or lack of it) affect the risks we took as teens? Do we wish things had been different with our mothers on this score? Are there secrets we’d like to share with or learn about from our mothers today?

8. Do we have secrets we would never want our adolescents to know? Would there be any benefits to sharing our secrets? Has anyone shared a “skeleton in the closet” with her teen, and how did the sharing turn out?
 

Women's book groups--specific topics

1. Have any of us caught our kids stealing? What did we do? Did it stop them from stealing again? Did any of us steal as teenagers?

2. Have any of our teens told us they were one place and to gone another (at least, as far as we know)? What did we do when we found out? Have we ever checked their bedrooms to see if they’re in bed and alone when we think they are?

3. Have any of us read our teens’ diaries or broken into their computers? How did we use the information? Did we let our teens know what we had done? How might they feel if they knew? How do we feel about our snooping?

4. Do we feel guilty about the amount of time our children spend (fill in the blank with any electronic diversion)? Do we try to manage their time? What strategies have been successful? What strategies have been flops?

5. What are the challenges we have created for our kids (e.g., divorce, dating, disability, job changes)? How have they coped? Is there anything we’d do differently today if we found ourselves in the same situation?

6. As mothers, what kinds of signals are we sending to our teenagers about the importance of weight and other appearance issues? What kind of example do we set? Is there a healthier model than the one we’re currently setting?