Mom and Dad vs Hip Young People

We moved from the formerly king-of-Franklin TN suburbia development Fieldstone Farms to Leipers Fork in 2003. Fieldstone Farms, now unseated by the newest mega-development in Middle Tennessee, Westhaven- where all the cool young suburbanites live, is a young families dream. The neighborhood is LOADED with young children, and on any day one need only step 20 paces out the front door to interact with parents and their young merrily riding big colorful plastic cars, tricycles, and a myriad of other human-powered vehicles.

Our kids loved the neighborhood, and had more friends there and in the local elementary school than could be easily counted. When we moved to the “country” of Leipers Fork, and a new school, it was a hard transition for them. A new church last year has made it even more challenging. Our oldest, K, has had a hard time finding her place in our new church, and finding a number of good friends at school.

We have challenged her to get involved at church, push herself to meet new people and form new relationships, but the encouragement has been met with mostly unintelligible grunts and sounds, and I don’t seem to have been assigned a Teenager to English translation dictionary yet.

A couple years of encouragement and prodding has not resulted in much. Yesterday though, a new group of young 20-somethings that have been assigned to work with the middle school crowd at church broke through.

After church K mentioned that the new middle school youth director had mercilessly begged her to come to the youth camp this coming weekend- “it’ll be a blast! You will meet tons of new friends!”

Those words were echoed by one of the staff assistants, another 20-something, cute and artsy looking with a lip ring sticking out of her otherwise innocent looking face- “C’mon K- you’ll love it! We will have so much fun and you will meet a bunch of new friends.”

2 hours later, after lunch, we returned to church, entirely at the prompting of K, to sign her up for camp and hopefully a group of new relationships that will challenge, encourage and grow her.

So- years worth of the same encouragement- almost the exact same words- gets Michelle and I nowhere, but 5 minutes of the medicine administered by hip-looking young folks turns her 180 degrees. Interesting. I wonder how a lip ring would look on me… or Michelle perhaps.






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