Parenting Teens
Ask About the Attachment, Not the Gift
Drawn from The Wrong Alliances (Book 5), from the Seeds of Wisdom for Teens™ series The Divided Hallways: A Journey Through Hosea.
Have you ever said yes to something genuinely good and discovered, a few months later, what it was attached to?
A scholarship with a commitment buried in it. A friendship that came with a price nobody mentioned. An app that was free because you were the product. None of these were lies, exactly. They were gifts with a second half nobody read.
every announcement had a second half
In The Wrong Alliances, Kingdom Heights celebrates three prestigious partnerships promising scholarships, technology, and national recognition, each announced with fireworks. Every one of them is real. Every one of them comes with terms the school does not stop to read. The principal calls the new partners friends and “above suspicion.”
Naomi’s grandmother, who has watched a great deal of history from the wrong end, gives her granddaughter a different instinct: ask about the attachment, not the gift.
The book is clear that this is not a lesson in cynicism. Its note to leaders warns against letting caution curdle into suspicion of every good thing. The goal is discernment. A teenager who can enjoy a gift and still ask what it attaches her to is not jaded. She is free.
moorings and bindings
The grandmother’s test is four words long, and it may be the most portable tool in the whole series: a mooring holds you and lets you go; a binding holds you and won’t. So — can you still get free?
Run any attachment through it. A team. A friend group. A dating relationship. A game. A coach. A church program, for that matter. Good attachments steady us and leave the door unlocked. The book puts the same idea in friendship terms: “The good friend leaves you freer than they found you.”
In the school garden, Farmer Eli adds a slower lesson. A vine becomes the shape of whatever it climbs. You do not reclaim a reaching thing by scolding it; you put something good close enough for it to grab first.
five questions worth teaching
By the end of the book, the students have gathered five tests for any alliance. They are worth writing down for a teenager weighing an offer:
- Can I still get free?
- What will I have to become to keep this?
- What am I hanging it from? — is the foundation underneath sound?
- Which way does it grow me?
- Who does it attach me to?
Notice that none of them asks whether the thing is impressive. The book’s student Graciela cuts through every prize with a better question: not do you want it, but do you want to be the person that getting it this way is turning you into?
a boundary is a membrane
When teenagers discover that something they belong to has a cost, they often see only two options: stay and be reshaped by it, or leave in a blaze. Mrs. Bennett gives them a third. A boundary, she says, is not a wall; it is a membrane, letting in the good and keeping out the toxic while you stay. It “protects the relationship by keeping you distinct within it.”
That is a sophisticated idea for a sixteen-year-old, and an important one. Some attachments a teen cannot simply walk away from — a family member, a required class, a team mid-season. Learning to stay without dissolving is a life skill.
And where an attachment involves control — someone who isolates your teen from friends, monitors their phone, threatens, or makes leaving feel dangerous — that is no longer a discernment exercise. It is a safety issue, and it calls for adult help.
when they have already grabbed the wrong thing
Every parent eventually watches a child wrap themselves around something we can see is dead wood. The book’s mercy is real here: “a vine grown the wrong direction can be redirected while the root is still good.” Some vines, the book admits, have to reach the mud and find it empty before they will turn.
The book’s counsel for loving someone in that place is quiet and costly: be small, love them from outside the fortress, and want nothing from them but them. It may not free them right away. It keeps the door open, and it keeps you free.
conversation starters
- “Is there anything you are part of right now that would be hard to leave if you needed to?”
- “Who in your life leaves you freer than they found you? Who doesn’t?”
- “When something amazing gets offered to you, how do you usually decide?”
- “What is something you have agreed to — an app, a group, a commitment — that you have never actually read the terms of?”
- “If you could keep one thing you are clinging to and let go of one, what would they be?”
one thing to try this week
From the book’s Grow Deeper guide: “Read the actual terms of one thing you have already agreed to — an app, a group, a commitment — and find its second half. Then decide, on purpose, whether you still agree.”
Do it alongside your teenager, with one of your own. It is easier to learn discernment from someone practicing it than from someone explaining it.
And if what you are seeing has moved past ordinary growing pains — a sadness that will not lift, talk of not wanting to be here, a fear that has stopped being temporary — that deserves real help today, not someday. Bring in a counselor, a pastor, a doctor, or another trusted adult, and know that in the United States you or your teen can call or text 988 at any hour. This article is education, not diagnosis, and it is no substitute for someone who can sit with your family in person.
Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC, is the author of Seeds of Wisdom for Teens™. The Divided Hallways: A Journey Through Hosea follows one school through fourteen novels, one for each chapter of Hosea; The Wrong Alliances is Book 5. Every book closes with a Grow Deeper guide for families, and the first chapter of The Wrong Alliances is free to read.