Quitting your job to stay home with your tweens and teens

Financial challenges
If, as the song says, life is a highway, then in the early 1990s newspaper columnist Paula Brook had already been red-lining down the road for a decade, manically steering a course through ever-mounting obstacles -- a workaholic husband, teen daughters, a demanding position and an increasingly expensive lifestyle -- when she ran headlong into a brick wall: her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Out of her shattered reality came an inspiring book -- Work Less, Live More: A Woman's Guide (Doubleday Canada, 1997) -- documenting her decision to give up the “freakish timetable and constant damage control” of her fast-track lifestyle and recommit to her first love: her family.

The loss of her executive-level salary had an immediate effect on the family's pocketbook: they moved out of pricey Vancouver to a less-expensive suburban neighbourhood and found partners to help finance the family cottage.

With the debt load reduced to manageable levels, Paula could afford to earn less as a stay-at-home freelance writer. “I was lucky to have work that I could do from home,” she notes, “but other people get the same result in different ways -- by working shifts or part time. They just find ways to reorder their lives to make all the puzzle pieces fit.”

Although Paula fretted about leaving her young daughters with a nanny, she notes that “it was so much easier to structure their lives when they were little.” By the middle school years she worried constantly that they were not thriving. “The issues and problems they were facing became more complex. They were running into problems at school. They were dropping out of this activity and that activity. I was looking down the road, and I didn't like what I was seeing. They needed time to just be in their own space, to think and dream. I believe when you leave preteen kids alone, you're asking for trouble. They get to a point where they're just too smart and yet not smart enough to be left alone.”

A work in progress
That blunt assessment has recently been confirmed by neuroscientists looking into how the teen brain functions -- or doesn't, as the case may be. While it has long been understood that most brain development takes place in a child's early years, when billions of synaptic circuits are forming, researchers are now discovering that the adolescent brain is also a work in progress.

It turns out that the prefrontal cortex, seat of the so-called “executive functions” -- such as planning, organization, impulse control and reasoning -- is the last part of the brain to mature. So when, as recently happened in the Allan household, a teen makes a bad decision involving the family car, and in response to the inevitable parental question, “What were you thinking?” replies, “I wasn't” -- well, she's probably telling the truth.

“Adolescent brains don't cement up as fast as we thought they did,” observes Gordon Neufeld, a child psychologist in Vancouver. “For a long time we thought that the brain's hardwiring was finished by the time kids hit their teens, but we now recognize it has a high degree of plasticity, which means that young adults are still highly adaptive creatures that can learn from example and experience.”

Neufeld, author with Gabor Maté of Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers (Vintage Canada, 2005), maintains not only that parents are best suited to deliver such critical guidance but also that teens really need their parents to step up to the task.

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