This is what teenagers do. They rebel. They offend. They push boundaries. They challenge convention and they question the beliefs of their parents. And as they expand their world, they are attracted to art and artists and symbols and people who help them do this.

It was not surprising then, that as the child of two liberal Mississippians in the 1980s, that the writer Wright Thompson possessed a bit of a rebel yell. It’s not surprising that he’d put up a Confederate flag in his room at boarding school. He was certainly not the first teenager to be drawn to symbols and ideas that he could not fully comprehend (or understand what those symbols would mean to other people). In fact, it’s almost a cliche. But Wright’s stunt, given the wrong circumstances, could have ended up taking him down a very dark path.

Fortunately, he caught a lucky break. A music teacher noticed it and took him aside. “He laid into me,” Wright recalls in his book ​The Barn​ (​we have copies available at the Painted Porch​), “but, mercifully, sensing I clearly had no idea what I’d done, explained step-by-step the history of racial violence in the South generally and in my home state specifically. I felt the floor drop out from beneath me, frantic and full of sorrow, and when I got to my room I immediately removed the flag. In some ways. I’ve never shaken the feeling.”

Our kids are going to do and believe some dumb things. They are going to hurt people. They are going to hurt us and they are going to hurt themselves. This is what they do. Our job? As adults? As parents? It’s to help pull them back from the edge. Not in a rage, not with force, but with kindness and patience and understanding. Our job is to give them the context they do not have. Our job is to help them see what they do not see (which is so often how what they are doing affects people other than them). We do this because that’s how growth happens. That’s how wisdom is passed down. Not through shame or punishment, but through honest conversations, through love, through showing them a better way.

Wright was lucky someone did that for him. Our kids should be just as lucky to have someone do it for them—someone like us.

P.S. ​You can grab copies of Wright Thompson’s The Barn​—which we really couldn’t recommend more highly—over at the Painted Porch. You should also ​check out our Daily Stoic podcast episode with Wright​—​watch here​, or listen over at ​Spotify​ and ​Apple​—who discussed untangling myth from history in America and reckoning with the South’s secrets as a native Southerner.