Tim Wright has written on this blog before, and often about a crucial subject:  Rites of Passage and Coming of Age programs.   Now Tim has penned his own Coming of Age novel, an absorbing and powerful rite of passage adventure involving young Toby Baxter.  This children’s/young adult novel is actually a great read for us adults, too.  I gulped it down in two sittings.

Today’s blog post features Tim’s new article on these stories and his novel.  I hope you’ll enjoy the blog and get the book for your kids, grandkids, and students–and for your own summer enjoyment.  — Michael Gurian

 

Why Your Child Loves—and Needs—Coming of Age Stories

 

Hey, Parents:

Imagine standing on a mountain top overlooking the valley below. Next to you stands your son or daughter. The view represents the life ahead of her. His whole life is before him.

As you stand there together, what are your hopes and dreams for his life? What kind of life do you want her to live? What values, beliefs, passions do you hope to instill in her to help her live to her potential? What kind of man do you want him to grow up to be? What kind of woman do you want her to grow up to be?

In your mind you picture him turning his bright, smiling face to you only to hear him say, “School sucks! Why do I have to study math anyway? I’ll never use it.”

In your mind you picture her turning her radiant, inquisitive face to you as she says, “Why am I so ugly? The other girls make fun of my braces all the time.”

As you come crashing back down to earth you realize again how sacred and how challenging it is to raise a child into an adult in the 21^st Century:

Pimples. Bullying. Social media. Screen time. Sports. Homework. Menstruation. Sibling rivalries. Romance. Breakups. Success. Failure. Wet dreams. Facial hair.

How any child makes it into adulthood is a miracle! (How any parent survives their child moving into adulthood is a miracle!)

On top of the challenges our children face as they move through the teen years, they also begin to wrestle with the big questions of life:

Why am I here?

What’s my purpose in life?

Am I worth loving?

They may not use those words. Their questions may come out more practically:

What am I good at? Math? Science? Acting? Singing?

How can I make more friends?

Why do I have such a hard time making friends?

What’s happening to my body?

Thankfully, as all wise parents know, you aren’t on your own. For those willing to look, there are a variety of parent-helping, kid-shaping assets most parents can tap into:

Grandparents.

Teachers.

Coaches.

Religious leaders and communities.

Podcasts (like The Wonder of Parenting Podcast: A Brain-Science Approach to Parenting)

And… books!

Specifically, Coming-of-Age stories.

Think Harry Potter. Percy Jackson. The Chronicles of Narnia. The Hobbit.

These books, and books like them, take our middle-school-aged children (and our younger and older kids) on an adventure into adulthood. Characters, about the same age as our children, find themselves, like our children, trying to figure out how to navigate the pre-teen and early teen years.

Through the power of these stories our kids begin to learn important lessons about the adventure of life.

Author Jen Petro-Joy says it this way:

Middle schoolers aren’t just toddlers with a few more inches on them. They’re not mini adults, either. Kids in middle school are unique beings, caught in that utterly amazing and uncomfortable space between carefree childhood and responsibility-laden adulthood. They’re starting to question their beliefs and their place in the world. They’re developing and refining their personalities and pushing back against their parents. They’re figuring out where they stand in their peer groups.

And often, even with people all around them, they feel utterly alone. That’s why books are so important. In books, readers can find people just like them. They can see how others navigated struggles and solved problems. They can brainstorm what might work for them and what might be a bad idea altogether. They can see that growing up may be hard—that it may seem almost intolerable at times—but that they can get through it. It might be messy and the process might not be wrapped up in a pretty bow with a perfectly crafted ending—but growing up without falling apart is possible.

That they can do it, too.

In a world shaped far too much by agitation-and-anxiety-inducing social media, hooking our children on engaging, compelling books will serve them well for the rest of their lives.

These Coming-of-Age stories grow out of the ancient tradition of Rites-of-Passage. For most of our history, rites-of-passage focused on training boys to be men. Boys don’t have the built in biological monthly reminder that girls have signaling to our daughters that they are becoming women. Cultures and tribes recognized that boys need men to call them into—and shape them for—manhood. A rite of passage, then, is a strategic period of time in which a boy is mentored by men, through tasks, performance, and ceremonies, in order to instill in and empower the boy with a vision for good, noble, manhood.

For the last 100 years or more we have come to the obvious recognition that our girls also need strategic rites-of-passage as well, to help them navigate their way into womanhood.

Unfortunately for our children and our society, intentional rites-of-passage have become a lost art. Certainly sports or theater or the chess club or youth groups can play a role in training our children for adulthood. But that strategic, focused, time-honored process of pouring healthy masculine energy into our boys and healthy feminine energy into our girls is lacking in the lives of most our kids today.

Coming-of-Age books, while not replacing rites-of-passage, are rites-of-passage stories. They take our kids into the heart of what it means to be a pre-teen or an early teen and begin to sear into their imaginations values, passions and dreams that help them navigate adulthood.

The best part of these Coming-of-Age books is that they are meant to be read together: child and parents.

Since 2006 I have been working with Dr. Michael Gurian. For over 35 years Michael, using brain-science research and best practices, has been inspiring and equipping parents and educators with tools to help them raise boys and girls into wise, honorable men and women.

Together, we have created several rites-of-passage for boys, girls, and their parents, both secular and faith-based.

Being a fan of these great Coming-of-Age books, I decided to try my hand at it, writing a story for our sons and daughters using Michael’s research into the power of rites-of-passage and his outline for raising our children into noble, good adults: HERO.

Toby Baxter is a just-turned thirteen-year-old boy who loves Marvel Super Heroes. On the night of his birthday, he is called into a strange world by a River Elf. The River Elves believe Toby is the Hero who will save them from the trolls. Like most thirteen-year-olds, Toby doesn’t see how he can possibly be a hero. He has no real gifts. He doesn’t have a lot of courage. He lives in fear of the school bully. And, as he discovers in RiverHome, when he does meet a crisis, his anger gets in the way.

Surrounded by strong male and female mentors in RiverHome, Toby begins to discover what it means to be a HERO: Honorable. Enterprising. Responsible. Original.

My hope, as your child reads The Adventures of Toby Baxter: The River Elf, The Giant, and the Closet, is that it will inspire the HERO in your daughter or son. I also hope, as you read along with your child, that the story will provide opportunities to instill in your child the values, beliefs, passions, and morals you believe will shape him or her into a wise, compassionate, strong, honorable adult.

To order the book in either print or ebook, go to www.TimWrightBooks.com. If you’d like, you can sign up for my email and receive the free Toby Baxter Prequel!