What Barbara Cooke wanted was really quite simple: advice and information on raising a teenager.
She went to magazines and found no answers.
She went to experts who had no advice.
She tried associations, parenting books and friends. None had the kind of proactive, positive advice she was searching for.
“They said, `You know what, we don’t have any’ ” information, she said. ” `It would be great, but. . . .’
“I still didn’t do anything about it.”
That changed during one week in 1996. A serious illness gave her time to reasses her life and what she was doing. Her thoughts returned to her search for parental advice.
Then Cooke, a journalist who lives in Deerfield, covered a parenting seminar that cemented her interest.
“I wasn’t feeling great, but when I started listening I thought, Someone has to write about this.
“The parents who were there were all asking the same questions, and it wasn’t the big things. They were things like, `How do I get my kid to be home at curfew’ or `They always keep borrowing my clothes.’ You know, just things like that.
“And I said, `You know what, I can answer that.’ And there were things I couldn’t answer. And I said, `I’m a journalist, there are (answers) out there, and I can get them.’
“I finally just said, `All right, I’m doing it.’ And I did it.”
The ParentTeen Connection was conceived that Saturday.
Volume 1, Issue 1 of the ParentTeen Connection came off the presses in May 1996. It was 12 pages long, cost $15 for a year’s subscription and mixed scholarly and parental advice. Most important, it filled the void Cooke had found in her research.
“I just wanted to write,” she said. “That’s all I wanted to do. All I was thinking about was to get this information out there.”
Three years and 15 issues have passed, and Cooke is still getting the information out there. People have given the ParentTeen Connection as gifts; parents have ordered it for teachers.
The Illinois State Crime Commission awarded Cooke its General Excellence award in June. The newsletter just won the gold medal in the 1998 National Health Information Awards.
The letters of thanks come to Cooke on e-mail, stationary and the answering machine. One woman said her friend refused to read the newsletter because she had already raised children into their early 20s. The woman finally talked her friend into reading an issue.
“She said that not only did she read it, but her three kids read it,” Cooke said. “They started talking about it and said, `How did she know? How did this lady know what we’re thinking about? It’s like she knows something that a lot of people don’t know.’
“It was pretty cool. It’s those types of things that keep me going when I’m sitting there thinking, Oh, I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”
The cover of one 1997 issue featured a breakdown of what teens are: “Teens love talking veryveryveryvery fast,” “Life for a teen is lots of laughs/lots of tears.” Her son approached her after he saw it.
“He said, `That’s what a teenager is all about,’ ” Cooke said. “I cried. He doesn’t say very many things like that.”
Her search for guidance in parenting a teenager began shortly after her son Ben entered those years. A friend from Ben’s tennis team, Mike, asked to stay with the Cookes after his family separated. Cooke agreed and became Mike’s legal guardian that summer.
“In his house, he had very different rules growing up. He was allowed to smoke cigarettes, he was allowed to drink as long as he wasn’t driving, he had no curfew. It made me realize we raise our kids very differently from some people.”
Later that summer, though, she found a cigarette in Ben’s room. She had worked alongside a chainsmoker during her pregnancy with him: “I was very, very sick throughout my pregnancy.” Ben’s cigarette was a jolt.
“To me it was like finding a heroin needle,” she said. “I hate cigarettes. He had grown up listening to me talking about how much I hated cigarettes, how sick I had been.
“I have never seen him to this day with a cigarette. But every once in a while, I would find a cigarette, he would reek of cigarettes.
“I started to realize how totally clueless I was. And if I was so clueless about that issue, what else didn’t I know about?”
So she went to find out, checking every resource she could find. Family friends say Cooke is a researcher at heart: “If there’s something that comes up, right to the library, right to the bookstore,” Bob Cornis said.
What she found amazed her. Parenting books and magazines did an excellent job on children’s issues — as long as the subjects were children. Their coverage dropped off at 13-year-olds.
There were exceptions. Religious magazines wrote about the good some teenagers had done and the positive influences in their lives. “They were great to read; they were wonderful to read.”
News magazines and experts often focused on the opposite aspects of teenagers: the drug users, the bulimics, the gangsters and the pregnant.
“I started looking around for information and there was nothing. There was so little. The parenting magazines, when they would write something about teenagers, it was always negative: drugs and gangs and violence.
“Every single association listed either dealt with disabilities or substance abuse.
“Teenagers are not disabilities. They’re not diseases. They are people. They are works in progress.
“It was very frustrating to me.”
Her newsletter has changed very little in its three-year existence. Cooke still sees six issues through production each year. Subscriptions have inched up to $18 a year, and issues now run about 24 pages.
Its motto, which has run just below the masthead since the first issue, is “Don’t be Clueless.”
The newsletter doesn’t shy away from the negative aspects of teenagers: the drugs and violence and early pregnancies and drug use. But it offers advice to parents to steer their children away from those dangers, and it strives to tear down the tired stereotypes.
“We also cover just the everyday part of growing up, of raising teenagers — dating, talking to your teenagers,” Cooke said. “There’s so much we talk about. You know, `When is my kid old enough to go to Great America alone?’ ” (The answer to that appeared in the March/April 1997 issue: “It depends upon the maturity level of your teen.”)
“You’re either hearing about the kids who are causing trouble or the kids who are number one in their class, you know, are solving world peace. And you think, My kid’s not like that.
“Well, 99.9 percent of teenagers aren’t.”
A shadow at the base of her brain is what spurred Cooke to inaugurate the newsletter. It turned out to be nothing, but the experience forced her to complete what she had been considering.
An excruciating headache that refused to subside toppled her in January 1996.
“It was the worst pain I think I’ve ever been in,” she said. “And I have a pretty high pain tolerance. I was living with it.”
The headache struck on Monday; her mother drove her to Lutheran General Hospital’s emergency room on Friday. She was diagnosed with viral meningitis and sent home to recover.
The neurologist called back four days later. Doctors reviewing her MRI had noticed something far more chilling: what looked too much like an aneurysm at the base of her brain.
Cooke went into surgery for a cerebral angiogram. Doctors threaded a wire through her heart and up to her brain. Cooke’s life could have taken three paths at that moment: she could have a stroke, she could die or she could be fine.
She was fine.
“It was a very, very frightening thing,” she said. “It made me really reassess why I was here.
“It’s like, I’m OK, it could have been terrible, it wasn’t. God gave me a second chance, (the newsletter) is what I’m going to do with it. I was just given this opportunity to do this and if I keep waiting for someone to ask me to do it, it’ll never happen.”
She has high expectations for the newsletter’s future. She hopes to eventually transform it into a magazine and — as one step toward that — has agreed to produce a quarterly section for Chicago Parent magazine. The newsletter could also make the jump to the Internet.
“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “Every single issue I look back at and there’s information I can use every single day. It’s timeless stuff. And I think, I can’t believe I did this myself.”
The newsletter boasts subscribers in 23 states and Canada, Cooke said, and is approaching a circulation of 1,000.
And, while teenagers often read it and sometimes even laugh in agreement, the newsletter is written for their parents.
“Basically, the parents of teenagers are kind of like the walking wounded,” she said. “It’s a difficult position to be in. You always say, `My child will never do it.’ Then when your child does it, who do you call? You don’t call everyone you know and say, `Guess what my child did!’
“You feel like you’re a failure, if your child is caught drinking, if your child is caught doing drugs, if your daughter gets pregnant, you’re so mortified. It’s like the walking wounded.
“You just have to realize that everybody else is in your same situation. There are millions of people out there just like you.”
Finally, Cooke said, there is a resource for people who want to know what they can expect from their teenagers. Finally there is a source of advice to guide the walking wounded.
“I’m not a doctor,” Cooke said. “I can’t help people that way. But with my writing — I try to help people that way.”
