Parenting Teens
Have You Asked the Person?
Drawn from Bought Back (Book 3), from the Seeds of Wisdom for Teens™ series The Divided Hallways: A Journey Through Hosea.
Have you ever heard a story about someone’s child and felt the story finish itself in your head before you knew a single fact?
Most of us have. A half-sentence at pickup, a screenshot passed between phones, a name said in a certain tone — and the mind supplies the rest. It is fast. It feels like insight. It is very rarely about the person at all.
eleven pixels
In Bought Back, a blurry photograph goes around Kingdom Heights. It shows, in the Grow Deeper guide’s words, “a girl, a man, a parking lot.” That is all it shows. By the afternoon, the girl’s lunch table is empty and her own name has become a story the whole school would sooner defend than take down.
The student journalist at the center of the series, Naomi, describes a rumor as “a screen, and everyone projects their own worst movie onto it.” The boy who took the picture posted it with no caption and felt innocent because, as he says, “I didn’t even say anything.”
That last line is worth reading twice with a teenager. Most harm in a school hallway is not done by the person who says the cruel thing. It is done by the people who hand the crowd something and walk away, and by the much larger number who simply drift.
the empty street
One of the students in the book has a rule: it is “safer to wait and see — from a distance.” Naomi’s grandmother, who has lived through far worse than a school rumor, answers with a sentence that lands hard: “a stone you can survive; it is the empty street that kills you.”
Our kids are rarely the ones throwing stones. They are far more likely to be on the empty street, keeping a careful distance because the social cost of sitting down feels enormous. The book does not mock that fear. It names what it costs the person left alone, and then it shows what happens when a few people pay the price anyway.
One student’s father explains why he sits with a man the town has judged: “You don’t sit with a man because you’re sure he’s innocent. You sit with him because he’s alone, and being alone is its own guilty verdict, and I won’t be one more person handing it down.”
a door and a pit
Bought Back is also about what happens inside the person being talked about. Mrs. Bennett gives the students a distinction that many adults never learned: “Guilt says I did something bad — it’s a door. Shame says I am bad — it’s a pit.”
The book’s test for telling them apart is direction. Guilt moves a person toward people, to repair. Shame moves a person to hide. If your teen has done something wrong, guilt is useful; it has somewhere to go. If your teen has been made the subject of a story, true or false, what usually grows is shame, and shame’s one prediction, the book says, is always abandonment: if they really knew you, they’d leave.
Which means the most powerful thing a parent can do for a teenager in that pit is not to argue with the shame. It is to be someone who knows the whole story and does not leave.
the price proves the value
The novel takes its shape from Hosea 3, where the prophet goes and pays a price — the text counts it out in silver and barley — to bring home a woman the whole town has written off. In the Workshop at Kingdom Heights, the carpenter Mr. Rivers puts it in shop terms: “Buying back always costs more than replacing. The price proves the value.”
That is worth saying to a teenager in plain words. When someone stays with you while it is costing them something, the cost is not an accident. It is the message.
conversation starters
- “When a story about someone goes around, what usually happens at your school? Who decides what everyone believes?”
- “Have you ever been on the other side of a rumor? What helped, if anything did?”
- “What makes it hard to sit down next to someone everyone is avoiding?”
- “Has anyone ever crossed a room for you? Who?”
- “Do you feel more like hiding or more like fixing it, when you mess up? Does that change depending on who knows?”
one question to hand them
The book’s seed for the first chapter is a single question, and it is the one that separates a reporter from a rumor: Have I asked the person? Before forwarding, before leaning away, before deciding. It is short enough to remember in a hallway.
And one boundary to state just as plainly. If a rumor involves a threat, harassment that will not stop, or an image of a minor, it has moved past what a kind conversation can fix. Bring in the school, and where the law is involved, the law. Asking the person is for the ordinary cruelty of a hallway, not for keeping a dangerous secret.
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; Bought Back is Book 3. Every book closes with a Grow Deeper guide for families, and the first chapter of Bought Back is free to read.