Ready Player Two! A New Streamer Joins the Fray!

I’m writing this sitting at my laptop, watching my newly minted teenage son conduct a takeover of my Twitch channel and play Star Wars: Battlefront II online. This is a rite of passage that I hadn’t planned, but that seems to suit him perfectly. I’m not sure I recognize this kid. He’s not stuttering, he’s totally confident talking to a camera, and completely unconcerned that there are actual people watching him take on other players around the world.

Sometimes, this boy is so much like me that it hurts. He didn’t want to see a movie this year, just play multiplayer RTS games with me in the morning, go to lunch, then game online and on Twitch for the first time in the afternoon. I probably would have done the same thing at his age if given the choice.

He’s a challenging glimpse into what I was really like at that age. Reality doesn’t always line up with my perceptions. I’m proud of the kid though. A lot of times I’m too close, all I see and hear are the irritating things that I want to correct, and it’s difficult to imagine the butterfly that’s going to emerge from this cocoon. Stepping back like this though, trying to see him through others’ eyes, I think I see it a little clearer. There’s a long way to go, sure, but I think through God’s grace, that he’s headed in the right direction.

Monday Vlogging: Temporary Single Parent - Vlog 2018-40

Having one half of the parenting team gone for a long weekend really makes a fellow appreciate her efforts more.



One particular observation that kept occurring to me over the weekend is that I don't know how single parent hobbyist streamers make it work. I'm getting off easy, because my wife had the meal plan, lesson plans, and most of the laundry already squared away, so I didn't have to do a major shopping run, plan kids' schoolwork, or spend too much time worrying about the kids having clean clothes.

If I did have to worry about those things, I doubt I would have had time to prep video and blog content for the next week, much less actually sit down and play some games at some late night point.

Book Review: Teenage Boys: Surviving and Enjoying These Extraordinary Years

It’s time to face the reality that I’m soon going to have a teenage boy in my house. And then a teenage girl. Then another teenage boy. And another. Then finally another teenage girl, although by that time the first teen boy and girl will both be in their twenties and hopefully out of the house either in some career, college, or branch of the military. That’s getting rather far ahead of myself, but the fact remains that I’d better get used to having teenage boys around. And while I have personal experience with being a teenage boy, I could definitely use some additional perspective.

Enter Teenage Boys: Surviving and Enjoying These Extraordinary Years, the first of what will probably be a number of books I’ll end up reading over the next few years on how to raise up teen boys and teen girls. Originally written in the late early ‘00s (hence the cover of some seriously Xtreme! Teen Boys), this version has been expended with a couple of additional chapters of response material collected by the author Bill Beausay after the publication of the original book.

Overall, it’s a useful book for helping to understand the teenage mind. Again, having been a teen boy, you’d think I’d have a pretty good instinctive understanding of this, but sometimes, that’s just the problem. A lot of what teenagers do is based on instinct, not heavily considered rational processes. It’s one of the big reasons why looking back at their teen years, most people (guys, at least) have a few incidents they can recall that they now preface with “Now I don’t know what I was thinking at the time…” Because we probably weren’t.

The strategies for de-escalation, suggestions for how to establish firm ground rules, and answers to some of the most common parental concerns are especially useful.

The book is also a little bit of a time capsule, having been written just a couple of years before smartphones and social media took over everyone’s lives. Those strategies for firm ground rules, common concerns and de-escalation suddenly seem even more difficult now than they would have been ten years ago, but are more necessary than ever.

The book is written by a Christian, from an Evangelical Christian perspective. As such, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, although it certainly meets me where I live. Still, much of the advice is valuable regardless of what place religion of any sort has in the reader’s home.

Overall, highly recommended for anyone who is, or will soon be parenting a teenage boy.