High School as a Rite of Passage

I have been talking to several fairly intelligent individuals about homeschooling in the last couple of weeks. I had to convince baby daddy man that homeschooling isn't totally stressing me out already. I honestly think he is afraid that the curriculum is too difficult for my delicate little brain. Silly rabbit, we aren't even doing real math yet! Ask me again when we get to algebra!
I also spoke to a middle aged father of 4 high school students about the trials of having children in high school. He told me a story about his daughter getting invited to a "rainbow party". A rainbow party is a festive gala in which girls are given different color tubes of lipstick to adorn their beautiful faces. When the festivities are over the boys get together and have a friendly competition to see how many different colors of lipstick they have on their dicks. Ok take a minute to digest this.

Ok now digest this: the girl invited to this party was 12 years old. 

12

I had never even kissed a boy when I was 12. I thought holding hands was terrifying. 

These kinds "events" are becoming the new normal. The man I was speaking with stated that "all he could do was to try to maintain an open dialogue with his children to try and make sure they are telling him the things they are getting into."  Basically he is stating that he is powerless control the situations that his teenage kids get into to. 

I have been told numerous times that at some point when raising children you just have to give up control and let them make their own choices. Even if these choices include things like rainbow parties?

How many times have you heard things like "well I survived high school but just barely," or "I hated high school but I turned out ok." I wonder why we think it is ok to put our kids through something most of us barely survived. I truly think I spent most of my early 20s trying to recover from high school. I never even got bullied, or struggled with grades. High school is HARD regardless of who you are and it seems that the pressure, drugs, and irresponsible sex is beginning younger and younger with every generation. High school is seen as a rite of passage and this makes the trials faced somehow ok.  However we are appalled when we hear about other rites of passages such as; female circumcision, breast ironing, (look it up, it is some awful shit) boys ingesting semen of the tribes elders (Mati Tribe), and the Hamar woman beating ceremony (which precedes the Hamar man cow jumping.)

Most of these rites of passages occur over less than a 24 hour period, high school is a solid 4 years of psychological ravaging and emotional depletion. It doesn't need to be this way, why are we content to lose our children to their peers the second they enter kindergarten and pray that they don't get chewed up and spit by the end of high school (or if they do, that they recover from it?) 

I for one, am not going to close my eyes and hope for the best. And maybe nothing I do will prevent my kids from suffering torture in their teen years but I can tell you I won't go down without a fight. Bring it puberty.