Parenting Teens
When the Yes Is Graded
Drawn from Counterfeit Belonging (Book 2) and The New Counselor (Book 1), from the Seeds of Wisdom for Teens™ series The Divided Hallways: A Journey Through Hosea.
Have you ever watched someone post a photo and then check it, and check it again, the way you might check a wound to see whether it is still bleeding?
Most of us have. Some of us have been the one checking. It is a small, ordinary motion, and underneath it sits one of the oldest questions a person carries: am I in?
Adolescence is the season when that question gets loud. It is not a character flaw that a fifteen-year-old cares intensely where she sits at lunch. It is the work of the age. The question for the adults who love her is not whether she will go looking for belonging. She will. The question is where she will shop for it, and what it will cost her at the register.
a census of unmet attachment
In Counterfeit Belonging, Kingdom Heights Academy gets a corporate sponsor, an ambassador program, a jacket, and a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet selects a small group of students and quietly tells six hundred sixteen others that they were not chosen. The jackets are real. The gifts are real. And the school counselor, Mrs. Bennett, looks at the whole arrangement and calls it “a census of unmet attachment.”
One of the students, Marcus Bell, puts it more plainly than any adult in the building: “The yes was real. And they grade the yes.”
That is the whole difference between fitting in and belonging, and it fits in a single sentence. A graded yes has to be kept up. It is renewable on review. It can be repossessed, like the jacket. A belonging yes is not a grade at all. It was given before anyone checked the numbers.
two columns
The book lays it out in two columns. Fitting in, in one. Belonging, in the other. Most teenagers are remarkably skilled at the first column, because the first column rewards skill: reading the room, matching the aesthetic, saying the right thing at the right volume. One girl in the story, Kiara, has become so practiced at it that she cannot tell what she thinks until she has performed it, and meets herself, as the book puts it, “eleven seconds at a time.”
The second column cannot be won by skill. Mrs. Bennett’s answer to how a person finds herself is not to look inward harder but to be safely seen by what she calls “an audience of about three.” Not a following. Three people in front of whom you could have a bad week.
the question under the other questions
The first book in the series, The New Counselor, begins the same thread. Mrs. Bennett arrives at the most polished school in the state and finds, in the Grow Deeper guide’s words, “the most successful exhausted children I have ever met,” all carrying one question underneath everything else: if I stopped performing, would I still belong to anyone?
It is worth asking how a teenager in our own house would answer that, and worth admitting that homes can grade too. In the book, the principal’s house is full of provision and short on presence; each of his children is displayed as an achievement, with a gold-framed label. None of those labels is cruel. Some of them are flattering. And every one of them leaves something out.
Very few parents set out to grade their children. Most of us simply praise what is easiest to see — the score, the role, the trophy — and our kids, being excellent readers of rooms, notice what gets the warmest response. The repair is not to stop celebrating. It is to make sure the celebration is never the price of the seat.
the hunger is not the enemy
When a teenager is chasing a graded yes, the instinct is to correct the chasing. The book offers a gentler reading. Its closing word to readers is this: “The hunger is not the enemy. It is the homing signal.”
A kid who is working very hard to be chosen is telling the truth about something. She wants to be claimed. The point is not to shame the want. The point is to make sure there is somewhere she is claimed without having to apply.
In the story, the students eventually write down the terms of a different kind of table: nothing earned, nothing repossessable, mistakes cost parts and not membership, set for who else is coming. A family could do worse than to write those down too.
conversation starters
- “Is there anywhere at school where it feels like people are keeping score? What is that like to be around?”
- “Have you ever been left off a list — a team, a chat, an invite? What did you do with it afterward?”
- “Who are two or three people you could have a really bad week in front of?”
- “What is something you loved doing before anybody was watching?”
- “If our family wrote down the rules for our table, what would you want on it? What would you want off it?”
Ask one, not five. Ask it in the car, where nobody has to make eye contact. And be ready to hear an answer that does not flatter the household; that answer is the most useful thing you will get all week.
one thing to try this week
The book’s seed for the week after the two-columns chapter is this: “Give one person a column-two experience: receive their bad week with no advice, no metrics, and no performance. Just stay.”
Try it with your teenager. Not a pep talk. Not a plan. Just stay in the room for the bad week and let them watch the seat not move.
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; Counterfeit Belonging is Book 2. Every book closes with a Grow Deeper guide for families, and the first chapter of Counterfeit Belonging is free to read.