Teenage, In This Age, Challenges Our Community

“I’m a teenager, Dad,” my daughter said with a lilting voice and melt-a-heart smile on the morning of her 13th birthday.

I was grateful for the merry words and show of teeth.

Becoming a teenager compels many perfectly normal girls and boys to experiment with a variety of other verbal tones and facial expressions.

Grunts, screams, scowls and disdainful glances come to mind, along with animated crying, personalized yelling, loud stamping and slamming and, my favorite, the hysterical laugh.

Though still trying to be an optimist, I’m worried.

This symphony of teen-age attention-getting devices could begin to wear on a person and turn a loving father into a psychotic with an ice pick.

Was this the reason summer camp and vacations without the kids were invented? I was relieved when my daughter suggested Wolffy’s as a place for her party.

This ‘50s-style joint with a loud jukebox, clattering plates and menu that invites you to “walk a cow across the grill and run it through the garden” (or otherwise order a hamburger deluxe) offered the perfect venue to experience the full range of 13-year-old exuberance.

My daughter’s exuberant 13-year-old friends were invited to share the experience.

For an hour or more we all squealed, whispered and stuffed ourselves with burgers, fries and milkshakes before heading for a movie.

The activity worked up quite an appetite in the girls.

Just after Wolffy’s, and just before entering the movie theater, they stopped to order enormous tubs of popcorn, big rolls of candy and more Coke to make sure no one expired of hunger.

In some ways, the whole birthday was something of a throwback to the ‘50s.

For one day, Elvis still reigned supreme.

The girls didn’t worry about being thin but about whose sundae would arrive first.

They all sat together without boyfriends to watch a love story.

The next day my daughter floated a stretch of the Spokane River as a rite of passage.

She navigated a few rapids, looked at the sky and the birds, taking a moment to consider her place in the natural order of things.

Along the way, some punk kids threw rocks at the innertubes. When we arrived back at the truck, someone had stolen our new beach towels.

This was a lesson, too. There is always a next day after a perfect birthday.

And in the next days since 1982 when my daughter was born, the number of arrests in Washington state for crimes committed by teenagers has more than doubled.

By the time she turns 18, my daughter will, God willing, have lived through the largest increase in teenage homicides seen during any period in our nation’s history.

She will have watched a record number of girls have babies without husbands.

She will have seen more lethal drugs, more AIDS, more violence among her peers than any generation before her.

In her book, “Reviving Ophelia,” psychologist Mary Pipher describes the struggle American girls must undertake to maintain a sense of themselves as adolescents today.

“Adolescence is harder now,” Pipher says, “because of cultural changes in the last decade. The protected space and time we once called childhood has grown shorter.

“There is an African saying: ‘It takes a village to raise a child,”’ she said. “Sadly, most girls today no longer have a village.”

She will need your assistance for that.

She will need mentors and coaches and teachers in her school, her church, her neighborhood.

She will need the police, the doctor, the student driving instructor.

She will need music that speaks of women’s power and heart and intellect.

She will need poems from writers who have thought hard and deeply about life.

She will need long walks on safe streets, full nights of sleep without boys, a friend or two who will be there no matter what.

She is the reason to vote, to clean up the neighborhood, to fight poverty, and ignorance, and fear.

And for now, she still needs her mom and dad, dumb, stupid and mean as we are, to help her navigate in a village where she, and all of us, must find a way to work together, prosper and thrive.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears each Sunday on the Perspective page.