Troubled Teens Resources

The gap between reality and the distorted world that the media sells our kids is growing ever wider. Instead of parents serenely enjoying their kid’s high school days in the neighborhoods that they grew up in, parents feel compelled to get them out of the public school system and into private institutions and boarding schools. Parents with teens already participating in the drug culture are reviewing troubled teen boarding schools instead of reviewing possible colleges choices..

The plague of political correctness has made speaking the truth even more difficult and the state’s interference in family life is increasingly becoming more and more invasive.

Parents need all the reinforcements that they can get and it is a valuable service that Bill Gate renders when he talks to high school teens with straight forward candor. It’s worth printing out and hanging on the fridge door.

ParentingTricks.com offers the following from a recent speech Bill Gates gave at a high school. He is to be commended for calling a spade a spade.

“Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.”

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now.. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.