(no subject)

Last night, Marina's 13-year-old son Jacob had a friend over. Since I was using both my computers (one for music, one for the game I was playing), they flitted about the house for a while until John told them they could use his desktop.

Jacob's primary source of entertainment after computer games is YouTube, and at one point he was showing his friend something or another than involved a lot of swearing within the video. Every time another swear word popped up, they glanced over at me to see if I was going to react or make them turn it off or whatever. (No, apparently, they do NOT know me very well, since I use pretty much all of those words on a daily basis. But boy, do I feel old, knowing that I was the Adult In The Room.)

Marina objected to the content, though, and came upstairs to tell Jacob to turn it off, and turn it off Right Now(tm). In between arguing with Jacob over whether Right Now involved waiting until the video was finished (I just love 13-year-old logic), Marina shot me a couple glances that said she had expected me to put a stop to it before she even got there, and why wasn't I backing her up right then too?

So, here's a tip to all you parents and might-be-parents-someday out there:

I am not your child's parent. That's your job.

MY job, if I care about your kids in the slightest (and I do), is to be what you can't. Your kid needs a lot of things from the people in his or her life, and many of them are mutually exclusive. And, at a certain point, you kid is going to rebel against you, and there's not a damned thing you can do to stop it. Frankly, you shouldn't want to stop it, because people who don't rebel to some degree never learn to think for themselves, and turn out to be amazingly boring when they're adults.

Unless you've gone completely the wrong way and decided you be your kid's friend instead of their parent (in which case I'll play the hard-nosed disciplinarian for you), my job is to make sure that your kid learns that their actions have consequences that have nothing to do with getting caught by you, while making sure that the consequences they suffer are only temporary. That means that when your 16-year-old asks me to buy alcohol for her, not only am I going to buy her a drink, I'm going to do my best to get her drunk. I'll make sure she doesn't operate an automobile, swim alone, or get so drunk that we have to take a trip to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. But I *want* her to be drunk enough to have a hangover the next morning, because I will be there bright and early with some nice noisy job that I'll have made her agree to in "payment" for buying her the drinks in the first place. You'd better believe that I will have chosen the "payment" carefully, to capitalize on her hangover headache. Why? Because it's better that she learn self-control now, when she's not risking her job or her college grades. And I will continue to get her drunk enough to feel it the next morning until she finally learns to stop herself BEFORE she goes far enough to hurt the next day. Then I will congratulate her on her maturity, and I'll wait a few months or so before I teach her about alternating alcohol with water to avoid the dehydration that causes the hangover in the first place. She doesn't get to learn that until she's got the self-control part down, though.

I take this down to toddler-level, too. If your 3-year-old wants to touch the hot stove, I am not going to spend a lot of time shooing him away and telling him "no, no, hot!". I'm going to let him touch the stove, so that he learns WHY he shouldn't touch the stove. Safety still comes first, of course-- I'll let the stove cool down to where it's only uncomfortably warm, not to where it will cause 3rd degree burns. Pain that lasts for hours is not any more effective of a lesson to a small child than pain that lasts 5 minutes. If you don't want your kid to have even the 5 minutes of pain to learn a valuable lesson, don't ask me to babysit.

Moreover, once your kid hits the teenage years, I expect that you've already drilled into them what your morals and ethics are. So if your teenaged+ kid comes to me and asks whether she should have sex, or should experiment with drugs, or some other ethics question, I'm going to answer her bluntly and honestly, and that answer is going to include the phrase "Ultimately, you're the only person who can make decisions for yourself." I'll buy her condoms and show her how to use them. I'll have frank talks about sex and the varied reasons that people have it, and if her hormones are screaming "Do it!" but her choices for partners leave her cold, I'll probably buy her a vibrator, too. Get over it, and be glad that she got proper instruction about safety, because she'd probably have had sex anyway with or without my blessing, and I'd rather she did it with proper protection thankyouverymuch.

I offer this information now, so that I can say "I told you so" later. Also, this way you get a chance to tell your kids how crazy Amanda is, so they put less stock into what I tell them when they're older. Don't say I didn't warn you, though.

Also, I have a favor to ask: if I ever have children, do the same thing for my kids. I want them to grow up to be interesting and well-rounded adults as much as I want it for your kids, but I'll be busy being their parent.

[Note: gender pronouns are chosen largely based on the fact that most of the teenagers I interact with are girls, and most of the toddlers are boys. This should not be taken to mean anything, as I will happily let your toddler daughter burn her hand and show your teenaged son how to use a condom.]

(no subject)

Last night, Marina's 13-year-old son Jacob had a friend over. Since I was using both my computers (one for music, one for the game I was playing), they flitted about the house for a while until John told them they could use his desktop.

Jacob's primary source of entertainment after computer games is YouTube, and at one point he was showing his friend something or another than involved a lot of swearing within the video. Every time another swear word popped up, they glanced over at me to see if I was going to react or make them turn it off or whatever. (No, apparently, they do NOT know me very well, since I use pretty much all of those words on a daily basis. But boy, do I feel old, knowing that I was the Adult In The Room.)

Marina objected to the content, though, and came upstairs to tell Jacob to turn it off, and turn it off Right Now(tm). In between arguing with Jacob over whether Right Now involved waiting until the video was finished (I just love 13-year-old logic), Marina shot me a couple glances that said she had expected me to put a stop to it before she even got there, and why wasn't I backing her up right then too?

So, here's a tip to all you parents and might-be-parents-someday out there:

I am not your child's parent. That's your job.

MY job, if I care about your kids in the slightest (and I do), is to be what you can't. Your kid needs a lot of things from the people in his or her life, and many of them are mutually exclusive. And, at a certain point, you kid is going to rebel against you, and there's not a damned thing you can do to stop it. Frankly, you shouldn't want to stop it, because people who don't rebel to some degree never learn to think for themselves, and turn out to be amazingly boring when they're adults.

Unless you've gone completely the wrong way and decided you be your kid's friend instead of their parent (in which case I'll play the hard-nosed disciplinarian for you), my job is to make sure that your kid learns that their actions have consequences that have nothing to do with getting caught by you, while making sure that the consequences they suffer are only temporary. That means that when your 16-year-old asks me to buy alcohol for her, not only am I going to buy her a drink, I'm going to do my best to get her drunk. I'll make sure she doesn't operate an automobile, swim alone, or get so drunk that we have to take a trip to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. But I *want* her to be drunk enough to have a hangover the next morning, because I will be there bright and early with some nice noisy job that I'll have made her agree to in "payment" for buying her the drinks in the first place. You'd better believe that I will have chosen the "payment" carefully, to capitalize on her hangover headache. Why? Because it's better that she learn self-control now, when she's not risking her job or her college grades. And I will continue to get her drunk enough to feel it the next morning until she finally learns to stop herself BEFORE she goes far enough to hurt the next day. Then I will congratulate her on her maturity, and I'll wait a few months or so before I teach her about alternating alcohol with water to avoid the dehydration that causes the hangover in the first place. She doesn't get to learn that until she's got the self-control part down, though.

I take this down to toddler-level, too. If your 3-year-old wants to touch the hot stove, I am not going to spend a lot of time shooing him away and telling him "no, no, hot!". I'm going to let him touch the stove, so that he learns WHY he shouldn't touch the stove. Safety still comes first, of course-- I'll let the stove cool down to where it's only uncomfortably warm, not to where it will cause 3rd degree burns. Pain that lasts for hours is not any more effective of a lesson to a small child than pain that lasts 5 minutes. If you don't want your kid to have even the 5 minutes of pain to learn a valuable lesson, don't ask me to babysit.

Moreover, once your kid hits the teenage years, I expect that you've already drilled into them what your morals and ethics are. So if your teenaged+ kid comes to me and asks whether she should have sex, or should experiment with drugs, or some other ethics question, I'm going to answer her bluntly and honestly, and that answer is going to include the phrase "Ultimately, you're the only person who can make decisions for yourself." I'll buy her condoms and show her how to use them. I'll have frank talks about sex and the varied reasons that people have it, and if her hormones are screaming "Do it!" but her choices for partners leave her cold, I'll probably buy her a vibrator, too. Get over it, and be glad that she got proper instruction about safety, because she'd probably have had sex anyway with or without my blessing, and I'd rather she did it with proper protection thankyouverymuch.

I offer this information now, so that I can say "I told you so" later. Also, this way you get a chance to tell your kids how crazy Amanda is, so they put less stock into what I tell them when they're older. Don't say I didn't warn you, though.

Also, I have a favor to ask: if I ever have children, do the same thing for my kids. I want them to grow up to be interesting and well-rounded adults as much as I want it for your kids, but I'll be busy being their parent.

[Note: gender pronouns are chosen largely based on the fact that most of the teenagers I interact with are girls, and most of the toddlers are boys. This should not be taken to mean anything, as I will happily let your toddler daughter burn her hand and show your teenaged son how to use a condom.]