’Raising a teen in these times seems almost impossible, but Laura Ingalls gives me a model of what true joy and contentment can look like,’ says Kate Orton.
I didn’t grow up in a Christian home and like many adolescents my teens years were a time of rebellion. I lost my virginity a few months before I turned 16 and I distinctively remember thinking that it was proving a point that the age of consent was arbitrary and I could decide based on my own feelings. How little I knew back then!
When I became a christian at age forty two with a ten year old daughter, I felt clueless. How was I going to explain to her that sex before marriage was wrong when my personal experience was a different story? It felt like I would be a complete hypocrite if I did.
How was I going to explain to her that sex before marriage was wrong when my personal experience was a different story?
My daughter is now thirteen. When I was at school by that age many of the pupils were drinking, taking drugs, and becoming sexually involved with others. It’s hard for me to comprehend that the teenage years could be any other way. I laughed with my friends about the few Christians we knew who planned to wait until they were married.
However, there is one example that springs to mind whenever I feel anxious about how to raise my daughter, and that’s Laura Ingalls Wilder from the Little House on the Prairie series.
I read the whole series to my daughter when she was younger, and it’s the book Those Happy Golden Years that always springs to mind. Laura is fifteen in this book, but she’s a very different fifteen year old to how I was.
Laura’s capable of doing adult things like teaching school and helping out around the house, but she’s also childlike and innocent. When she gets dressed up in a new dress, and fancy bonnet her sister remarks that she looks like a young lady. Laura is startled as she doesn’t feel like and isn’t sure she likes the idea.
When I was fifteen, I thought of myself as an adult, constantly striving for more and more freedom
When I was fifteen, I thought of myself as an adult, constantly striving for more and more freedom, but Laura isn’t in a hurry to grow up. She enjoys the simple pleasures in life like a snowball fight with the children she teaches, and singing with her best friend at church.
When Laura teaches school she lives away from home on the weekdays, and goes back to her family on the weekends. On returning home she is so grateful she thinks, ‘if I could only live like this always I’d never want anything more.’
It makes me reflect on how much joy there was in a simpler way of life. Good food, family, less material possessions, busyness and stress. Reading about Laura’s life makes me ache with nostalgia and sadness as that world is falling away.
Our current world is getting darker and darker as adolescents are accessing pornography at younger and younger ages, and being told things like polyamory are liberating.
Raising a teen in these times seems almost impossible, but Laura Ingalls gives me a model of what true joy and contentment can look like. She still takes joy in buying a pretty dress and bonnet, but her excitement is gained from riding fast in a horse and carriage, rather than sex and drugs.
I still feel like a bit of hypocrite when talking about sex and marriage, but through God’s grace, and the Little House On The Prairie series, I’m starting to escape my own past history.
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