In this podcast, we cover:

01:00    Introduction: How To Direct Our Teens To Step Into Adulthood With Responsibility: What Is Our Role?

02:06    My parents were very strict.

05:02    Fast-forward to raising my own children

10:11    The Academy of Practical Homeopathy® is attracting young people as a college alternative

11:44    A new role: parents of adult children

14:28    Knowledge of homeopathy provides relevance for parents even after the children become adults

16:23    Closing advice

Additional resources:

Joette Calabrese on YouTube (Monday Night Lives)

Joette’s Learning Center

PracticalHomeopathy.com

Gateway to Practical Homeopathy®: A Guided Study Group Curriculum

Joette’s Study Group, Find Your New Study Group Friends

Joette’s Mighty Members

FindAPracticalHomeopath.com

Kate:

This is the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast, episode number 158, with Joette Calabrese.

Joette:

Hi, I’m Joette Calabrese, and I welcome you to our health care movement — yours, mine and the countless men and women across the globe who have retaken control of their families’ health with Practical Homeopathy®.

So, for the next few minutes, let’s link our arms as I demystify homeopathy — what was once considered an esoteric paradigm — into an understandable, reproducible, safe and effective health care solution available to all.

This is the medicine you’ve been searching for — my unique brand of homeopathy, PRACTICAL Homeopathy®.

Introduction: How To Direct Our Teens To Step Into Adulthood With Responsibility: What Is Our Role?

Kate: (01:00 )

Welcome to another episode of the Practical Homeopathy® Podcast with Joette. I’m Kate, and I’m here today with Joette.

Joette:

Hi, Kate.

Kate:

Hi. Today, we’re going to talk about parenting. And you’re going to share your thoughts on a topic that’s close to many parents’ hearts, and that is guiding our children into responsible adulthood and understanding our role in that journey.

Joette, you’re going to share your personal experiences today, including the advice that you give your own children — or I should say “gave,” as they graduated high school — and how your relationship with your father shaped the way you guided your teen children.

Joette, let’s begin with you sharing about your father’s influence in your life, and why do you advocate for, let’s call them, I guess, “guardrails.”

I like that image of when you go bowling, and they put down those guardrails for the people that are just brand new bowlers, and it guides that bowling ball to the pins. I like that image, and it helps you to hit the mark … or hit the pins.

So, talk about that for a bit.

My parents were very strict

Joette: (02:06 )

Well, let me start by saying that when I was growing up, my parents were anything but laissez-faire parents. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that because if it works for a family, then that’s just fine.

My parents were very strict. They were not helicopter parents at all. We were outside playing all day long. Sometimes, I didn’t see them for many hours. There were a lot of kids on the street.

But once I got to puberty — high school — my parents became very strict. I was the only one that had to be in hours before their friends. My father was adamant about curfews, and my mother was adamant about what I wore. I felt hemmed in.

And ˆI can call them guardrails, but then, I was resentful. I’ll be honest, I really hated it. I hated that my parents were so strict. My parents were certainly American, but they were first-generation Sicilian American, and so a lot of the older ways they brought into their parenting.

I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone was Irish American, and it was their grandparents and great-grandparents who would come over, and so we were closer to the original European thinking, especially southern European thinking, and I resented it. In fact, I hated it.

But I have to say, I did (in the back of my mind) — as much as I felt hemmed in — I knew that the reason that I was hemmed in was because they cared so much. I knew that I was very loved. I always felt very loved by both of them.

And my brother and I talk about it, even to this day, that we never felt anything but love and care towards us, even though they were strict. Now, I look back, and I can see that they were putting in the extra effort — which was not easy for them because they were fighting against society at that time, too — to keep us in line.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that it worked — constantly worked. There were plenty of times where I was able to sneak around here and get away with this or that, but I always knew that I would be in trouble.

So, it hemmed me into a certain degree if I did anything that was really outside of those guardrails.

Now, my parents encouraged me also. And they encouraged me to go to college, and, of course, my brother, too. My parents assumed that I would become a piano teacher because we had been playing piano; my brother and I had been playing piano all our lives. My father was a professional musician, and that’s the way he saw it. They both saw that I would work at a school, perhaps for a while, or I’d take private students. That just wasn’t for me. I wasn’t even thinking about that far in advance.

So, their advice was to go to college in music and perhaps even only go two years and become a piano or a theory teacher.

Fast-forward to raising my own children

Joette: (05:02 )

And so that brings me to where my husband and I went with our children.

Now, we homeschooled our children up until high school. Then one of them went to a private high school, and the other two went to a Catholic high school, and we actually discouraged them from going to college.

Now, had they said anything about going into STEM, any of the sciences, then we would’ve said, “Well, of course, you go to college for that.”

But without really knowing what they wanted to do, we felt as though it was a waste of time and a waste of money. And so, our oldest son needed to go to college in order to get into his profession today. That made sense. But the other two weren’t exactly sure what they were going to be doing, and my husband and I discouraged them and encouraged them instead to consider other possibilities, such as a trade school or starting a business or joining our business.

My husband had a construction business, and he was also in the boating business … and get them involved in something like, as well. But the pressure was on. There was so much pressure in society, they felt as though they wouldn’t be up to par if they didn’t go to college.

So, what my husband and I decided to do was to tell them we just weren’t going to pay for college. So, if they wanted to go to college, then it had better be something that they really want to do, and they had to pay for it themselves.

So, this, then, put in place a couple of situations. One is that, then, they were pretty much not going to go to a very expensive college, nor were they going to go away. We raised our kids outside of Buffalo, and there are a number of — two universities and many colleges. It’s a college town. And so, they could choose something that was local. Well, that kind of kept them local, which we very much wanted to do.

And now some people might say, “Well, don’t you want your children to expand and grow out and go out into the world?”

Yes, I did want that, and I didn’t want them under our wing. I liked that they did go to college — they paid for it themselves — and they left the home. They did not stay home during those college years. They actually lived together and with, I think, another roommate at one point to keep their costs down.

But I did want them to explore the world. And that’s exactly why I didn’t want them to go to college, because I think it’s a one-track way of thinking in universities and colleges. Now, there are exceptions, but there are only barely a handful of those. And so, I felt as though if we wanted our children to be independent thinkers, they had to stay out of the arena that would be most like