How To Raise A Teen, From The Father Of A Runaway

MEDFORD, MA — The last thing you may expect of a father who had just spent three days searching for his runaway teenage daughter is advice on parenting. But Sal Clemente is learning how to communicate better, and that's just what he did in a raw message on Facebook and during a chat with Patch shortly after his girl returned.

Sal's 17-year-old daughter, Lola, spent three days and two nights away from home, time spent by herself in the freezing woods of Worcester, about 40 miles away from their Gorham Street home in Medford. She was inspired, he said, by books and films such as "Into the Wild."

"Lola could not get the passionate ideas in these stories out of her head, and she felt compelled to act," he wrote at 4 a.m. last Sunday, an hour he had only seen because of recent sleepless nights. Two days earlier, Lola returned to his porch, seemingly out of thin air.

When he heard someone out front, he thought it was the cops coming to tell him Lola was dead, he told Patch over the phone.

"I've never felt that kind of transformative relief of just pure - it's certainly not joy, although that's mixed, but you're also pissed and all those other things - but just the relief of knowing they are OK and they have another shot," he said. "I couldn't let her go for about five minutes, I could feel her regret about the whole thing. She told me, just her and I, 'Dad, I never knew time could move so slowly.'"

Lola had purchased camping equipment, took a train and went dark. She returned after plugging her phone back in and seeing an overflow of support on social media — from the police to her parents and everyone in between.

"She spent two nights — she was cold," he said. "She was miserable. But she's also — I don't want to call her stubborn, but she had an idea of what she was going to gain from it."

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So what did Sal gain from it? Instead of using his Facebook post to blow off steam at his daughter or even gush about her return, he offered some newfound advice for people who need it most: parents with teens.

"For parents of teenage girls and boys - there are no easy answers," he wrote. "These kids are under tremendous pressure, they have more input coming into their systems than the teenage brain is capable of absorbing and processing. They are sometimes incapable of knowing a good decision from a poor one, they feel they are invincible. They cannot always control the choice to act on their impulsive thoughts. Their job is to push, to grow, to find their place, to fight authority, to press hard on boundaries.

"We have one job. Get them to adulthood in one piece."

He also had some words for the teens driving their parents crazy.

"Also, even if they've sometimes been tough on you, even if you feel they ask a lot (maybe too much) of you, your parents love for you is limitless. They are dedicating their entire lives to yours. You are a beautiful human being with value and their love for you has no bounds."

Sal pulled no punches over the phone.

"I'll be honest with you, she's our third kid," he said. "We've been parents for 27 years, we're tired of it. It's like any job and you kind of get to the point of like 'Well, its just another day.'"

Patch asked what he learned about his relationship with Lola and how to, as he put it, do his job better.

"The biggest thing is communication," he said. "It's about us hearing her even when she doesn't speak ... I think we missed some of the nonverbal stuff that we should have seen that we didn't.

"I'm in my early 50s, and I remember that anxiety of youth ... and now the way the world is, it's much worse for them in terms of the ideas that spread around — it's almost like a virus. You kind of have two choices: You either try to isolate the kid from it all — no iPad, TV, keep them off the phone or whatever — or you try to help them assimilate it. And both ways are tricky. We chose the latter."

Clemente said his family hopes to move forward without missing the lessons to be learned.

"Five years from now nobody who meets her is going to know any of this — because that's not who she is going to be five years from now," he said. "So that's kind of the goal: keep our eyes focused on what's ahead of us and not get too bogged down in our mistakes."

Was there a time when he expected the worst, especially when his family learned she had bought some camping equipment and would likely head to the woods as an arctic blast descended upon the region?

"Probably anybody in this situation would go through all the possibilities of what might happen, and part of what was frightening was some of the circumstances lined up to put her in real danger — camping equipment, no experience camping, zero degrees," he said. "And I've read enough stories, and we've seen enough movies to know it doesn't always end the way you want it to. We didn't care where she was or who she was with — our feeling was as long as she was alive and safe we could mend any problems."

It wasn't just his relationship with his daughter Sal felt was mended.

"I really have felt a new appreciation for people that I didn't necessarily have," he said. "Let's just say post-election, I've been kind of unsure about a lot of things since then. But just feeling everyone connected to her. Darcie (Lola's mother) found out her post had been shared about 10,000 times. I tried to reply to as many as I could — there were only two instances of somebody trolling.

"Everybody just gave a [crap.] And I think that speaks well of people."

But for all the lessons learned, a father got another chance with his daughter. That's all he spent nearly 72 hours asking for.

"When I saw her at the door - my entire body was filled with indescribable relief and joy - it was a feeling that will never leave me," Sal wrote. "Over these three days we experienced a universe of feelings, from utter terror to the sweetest relief."

Photos courtesy of the Clemente family