Parents Choosing Influence

Audio By Carbonatix

Dawn and Doug (those are not their real names) were two regular American folks. Middle class from the Midwest, nothing too spectacular or showy. They’d been married to each other for years, and together they had three kids and a house payment. The thing was, though, whenever I went over to that house of Dawn and Doug’s, it seemed the place was packed with teenagers. Students were everywhere; the headcount was far above three. Residents and guests roamed the halls, checked the cupboard contents, relaxed on the couch, killed time in front of the TV, dug into the refrigerator. It was like some kind of voluntary after-school foster care program.

Beyond the abundance of people, what amazed me about this was how anxiety-free Dawn and Doug were, despite having so many teenagers at their door and under their roof. Unlike the kind of perspective I’d seen in some dads, Doug was glad when his kids invited their friends over. He was kind, hospitable, and generous to them—found ways to manage the increased ice cream budget and the added competition for the remote.

And unlike the kind of outlook I’d observed in other moms, it seemed more important to Dawn that students felt welcome in her home than that students were impressed with her housekeeping skills. Whether the chores were done or not, whether the furniture was dusty or spit-shined, Dawn’s policy remained the same: an open door for her three teenagers’ friends. Once, running low on groceries, she joked with a student who had wandered into her kitchen: “You’re not gonna find anything in there today!”

If there’s one interesting twist to this story, it’s that neither Dawn nor Doug started out with such carefree attitudes toward guests. They both had to change first—without the changes they made, life for their kids and their kids’ friends would have looked very, sadly different. There was a time in Dawn’s life when she’d been fanatical about the appearance of her home. As a young wife and mom, she went so far as buying new houseplants every time her friends visited—the woman couldn’t keep a plant alive for anything, but she wanted guests to think she had a green thumb. As for Doug, I think it’s safe to say the guy’s an introvert at heart. He’s friendly and outgoing, sure, but if it were all about him, home life would err on the side of fewer guests, of quiet and solitude.

If. That’s the point here, really, because what happened in Doug and what happened in Dawn is that somewhere along the line they made the decision that things couldn’t be all about them. It had to be about the teenagers, theirs and others’. Some of the students who walked their halls had never seen a home that was happy. Some didn’t feel important to the adults in their lives. Some were craving attention. Others were just plain bored.

Dawn and Doug wanted to live for a purpose bigger than themselves, so keeping up an image and being introverted became secondary to influence. Their house took on a mission: showing love, building relationships, being available. It was an extrovert’s dream at times, and traffic levels through the rooms made things less tidy than they could’ve been, but it was just what it should’ve been. A whole crop of teenagers had someplace to go where people loved them enough to sacrifice. In a word, home.