I am raising a child who is not my own. We saw each other one day on a common street corner, where the accidental-child lives and where my blood-children descend from the big yellow bus. That was more than a year ago, and now our familial lives are intertwined. Its co- parenting at it’s most experimental – the boy, his mother and the household at the Abbey. We are all guinea pigs.

Our Wolfpup is sixteen years old, intelligent, funny, and at ease with people of all ages. He loves history, German shock rock, and all things electronic He’s lived in three countries and visited a dozen more; is a sponge for anything involving historical war craft, and speaks three languages– and he’s failing high school.

Diagnosis: intelligent kid exhibits failure-to-thrive at local mediocre high school. Side effects include general belligerence, multiple notifications from high school counselors and parental hair loss.

It’s a classic case, I know.

Still, his mother and I are at the end of our resources. It’s sink or swim time, and when it comes to American public high school, the kid is sinking like a stone.

We’ve researched our options and laid out a couple of choice for the Wolfpup.

1) Go back to traditional high school and actually do one’s homework. (not likely)
2) Do the absolute minimum and take the GED.
3) Pass the entrance exam for “Running Start” program and begin community college in lieu of high
school in the Fall.
4) Opt out of high school and pursue self-schooling as described by The Teenage Liberation Handbook.

The manchild doesn’t want to take the GED. He’d rather be seen as excelling, so the bare-minimum approach doesn’t appeal to him. He keeps talking about Running Start, but has avoided taking the entrance exam for two weeks – even though he had an appointment set up to do so. We know he’s not going back to regular high school –the dynamic of him being in school and us constantly nagging, berating, or plain old yelling at him was ruining all of our relational ties. It simply can’t go on. Self-schooling seems to be on our horizon

His mother is very supportive of the opt-out option. She’s got a pretty unusual education-and-career history, and she’s highly successful in her field as an ethno-choreographer, in spite of not having a PhD in her field. I, in my normal schizophrenic fashion, vacillate between three realities:
a) the simple acceptance that the traditional high school thing isn’t working and something’s got to
give.
b) wide eyed wonder at the glorious possibilities of self-schooling.
c) basic unadulterated terror that we are ruining the child.

The idea behind self-schooling, or “unschooling” as Llewellyn calls it, is that kids study what they want how they want. Apparently there are plenty of now-adult guinea pigs out there who have taken the self-schooling route and done just fine in life. Some are in careers which they love, and don’t require higher education. Others have done the college-graduate school-career combo, without a high school diploma. When I read the Liberation Handbook, it all makes perfect sense. But when I look at this child, who I love, I become frightened. I see food stamps in his future. “Beauty School Drop Out” starts playing in my head.

According to Llewellyn, the key ingredient to recovery from a toxic school situation is to allow your child a detox period where they do nothing but sleep, watch TV, and loaf. At this the Wolfpup excels. If sleeping and gaming were part of his high school curriculum he would be valedictorian. Yesterday for instance, the manchild woke up at 5am; went down to the park to blow up underwater firecrackers (which I guess we could classifiy as studying chemistry); came home at 6am and slept until dinner. Then he stayed up all night doing who-knows-what on the computer. (I can only hope that his household’s lousy wireless connection is at least limiting his consumption of online no-no’s.) It’s all I can do to rouse him at 2pm for a little human interaction and perhaps a meal involving some kind of produce. The boy is becoming a vampire. Once he’s up his happy – downright giddy even — a pleasant interactive teen with a good appetite and a friendly demeanor. The Wolfpup is a natural at following his own circadian rhythms and at the fine art of doing nothing.

I however, suck at this. It takes all my self-restraint to step back and allow this to happen. Frankly, I’m exhausted. I just keep re-reading Llewellyn’s success stories and hoping for the best.

I tell you what though, if I had to go back, I’d do it all over again.

Here’s to the horror and the glory of living with teens!