Yeah, what? Even when I was 16 I didn’t think I deserved a car for being 16. Of course, I am a lowly female.
(I do remember thinking little of boys who had nice cars. I figured they were probably spoiled brats. The guy who drove his parents’ ugly old castoff, when he could get it, was more my style.)
Why no car? Does every 10-year-old get a bike? Even if the 10-year-old gets all “Needs Improvements” at school? Of course.
Look, the kid knows he’s not poor. It’s not a question of money (they fucking SAIL, people!); it’s a question of meeting an arbitrary standard so that he “earns” it. (You could argue giving a kid a car for one hour of homework a night teaches a worse lesson about “entitlement” than just giving it to him for dad’s convenience.) I believe the kid is getting a car, anyway. Once all his friends have cars, and Quicksilver Junior is mooching rides off friends, and borrowing his dad’s car constantly, and threatening to buy an '82 Caprice for $400, the kid’s getting a dependable car.
The question is: does dad attach strings and then cave, or buy it and then restrict its use? I advocate the latter.
Giive him a car “for work”. He’s doing that right. If he wants to take it to school, he has to get his work in. I wouldn’t demand C’s or B’s, I’d say, “No missing assignments. If you get everything in and still have D’s, well maybe you’re a D student. But if you’re not doing your work, use that time on the BUS to do it.”
What’s arbitrary about when you earn enough money to buy it, you can buy it?
It’s how the world works.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness1]
That’s poor pedagogy. The object of the class should not be to apply sufficient quantities of ink to paper. The object of the class should be to learn. If an assignment’s completion is unnecessary either to complete the object or to demonstrate completion of the object, requiring its completion is the sign of a bad teacher. If a teacher wants to mimic Cartman and shout RESPECT MAH AUTHORITEH, they should do it on their own time.
[/QUOTE]
Teaching is supposed to prepare you for the real world. When your boss says “Smithers, I want this report, formatted this way, and I want on that date” and insists you do it, even though you’ve pointed out the problems, you have to do it (or quit). Learning how to jump through hoops is necessary for every! single! job out there.
Not for the middle class. I got a used car as a birthright. I got college as a birthright. I got a 25% down payment on my house as a birthright. Not everyone gets these things, but some parents take a great deal of pride in providing nice things for their kids, if the parents can afford it.
But that’s all irrelevant, really. The danger is that the kid buys a $500 piece of shit Pinto that explodes and burns him alive when he’s rear-ended. Most parents want their kids in a safe, dependable car; a better car than the kid can afford. (You could argue: have the kid kick in $500 and dad $5000, but why? So the kid can say, “You can’t take my keys, I paid for part of it.”? Buy the car and make clear: it’s “yours” only for MY CONVENIENCE, not yours; it’s really MY car, and you can use it when I say.
This actually made me laugh out loud. The rest of your post was fine, this was ridiculous.
Gotta agree here. I didn’t get my first car until I was 23, and I paid for it myself. It was a used econobox, and I took good care if it and drove that thing for seven years, way past the ends of its useful life. My mom was poor, and could barely afford her own car, let alone buying one for me when I was in high school and college.
My stepchildren both got cars when they were 16, courtesy of their mom and stepdad. My stepdaughter treated her (new) car like crap, got in multiple wrecks, never took care of it, and thought it was no big deal, after all, mommy and stepdaddy were paying, not her.
No one “deserves” a car just because he turns 16. :smack:
Yeah, the consensus seems to be that this is an asinine notion. I don’t know if being a Michigander makes me more likely to connect with autos, but I can’t imagine not having gotten a car at 16.
Part of learning how to buy a car includes learning that you take it to a mechanic for a look over first (a lesson I wish I had taken to heart and not ignored with my last purchase, at age 39!). THAT I agree a parent needs to step in and insist on, because it involves physical safety. I think Dad is perfectly within his parental rights to insist that any car purchased passes inspection.
Yes, yes, I know–I said as much in my first post. No kid has any shortage of opportunities to learn what soulsmothering arbitrary Kafkaesque bureaucracy is like, though. There is no kid out there in public schools unfamiliar with that. That doesn’t mean good pedagogy incorporates arbitrary and useless assignments.
To be clear, I’m focusing here not on whether the kid ought to give two raised fingers to The System. I’m focusing on whether teachers ought to give meaningful assignments; and if the homework’s completion is not necessary either for developing or for demonstrating mastery of the content, it’s bad form to require its completion.
I got a car when I was 16, but I was under no delusion that it was my birthright. My father told my sister and me explicitly that the car was for working hard in school and for not ever giving him a hard time. My older sister, the rebel who regularly skipped classes and underachieved, had to buy her own car. So did my brother, who was always breaking shit.
I would have totally understood if my father had made us pay save up for our own car. I am grateful for his generosity, but I know I wasn’t entitled to it.
Maybe it’s different in different areas. The closest my parents came dto talking with me about getting me a car when I was 16 was shaking their head sadly at my older cousin who got a cherry-red sportscar on his sixteenth birthday and telling elementary-school-aged me that that wouldn’t be happening in our family. For my sixteenth birthday, I got a perfectly functional bicycle, complete with helmet and U-lock. It was great. My friends who had cars generally had them through their part-time jobs (the money from which I used to buy a Greyhound ticket to go to California, Land of the eco-Hippies, but that’s another story), and were generally clunkers.
No; it’s not. To be in **Quicksilver’s ** position is exhausting.
But I want to make clear: my advice to all middle-class parents is NOT “back off; the kids’ll be fine.” It’s ONLY for people in Quicksilver’s position:
He’s done everything. Groundings, withholding privileges, lectures, harangues, conferences, phone calls, emails, checking grades on-line; all that shit.
The kid won’t play school! But he’s not a “fuck-up”; he works, he participates in class, he plays JV (which deserves recognition–it’s daily hard work and no one but a few parents and non-tenured teachers who want to impress the principal go to the games), he contributes around the house, he’s happy and well-adjusted. But he won’t play school!
This situation is not very common. Most kids adopt the values of their parents and peers. Middle class kids at suburban high schools CARE about their grades. Most kids who are otherwise very honest do not look their parents in the eyes and lie, “All my geometry homework was handed in this week”. Often, it’s more trouble to NOT finish an assignment than to just spend 5 minutes doing the last 2 Chemistry equations.
Yes, there are stoners, and burn outs, and emo kids, and pregnant girls, and dumb kids, and lazy good-for-nothings, and spoiled brats; and they have their academic issues. But that’s not Quicksilver’s situation. At all.
What the hell is the guy supposed to do? Tell his son to try harder?
I agree with every parent who says, “My House, My Rules.” But that’s not working, and there are other concerns worth protecting; such as his own sanity and his relationship with his son.
From what the OP has shared with us, this kid does not appear to have a learning disability. Or be of low intelligence. Nor frustrated over or ashamed about his poor performance.
I’m guessing he just doesn’t feel like school is that big of a deal.
Which is his decision to make. But the OP shouldn’t have to bend over backwards to shower this kid with all the ideal trappings of upper middle-classdom, all for the sake of a positive relationship between the two of them. They’ve had 15 years of a positive relationship. If a car is enough to destroy that, then it wasn’t that strong to begin with.
Telling the kid “Hey, you want me to give you a car? Well, I want you to turn in your homework” is not tantamount to giving up on him or depriving him of his birthright. It’s simply reminding the kid that just showing up isn’t sufficient for getting what you want in life. Middle-class kids need this lesson just like everyone else does.
I was pregnant at 17 and graduated with a 3.8 GPA. :dubious:
Oh yeah. You’re “middle class,” alright.
There are no Pintos anymore.
your parents paid for a car, your university education, and 25% of your house. You weren’t “middle class,” you had pretty well-off parents who spoiled you. So knock it off with telling other people how to spend their fucking money and raise their goddamn kids.
That’s not so much “middle class” as “well-off.” The house down payment is the really puzzling one. You want my parents to have given me nearly $50K at age 27?? Dude, if I can’t afford the house, I shouldn’t be buying it.
Don’t try to connect this to being a Michigander, because this Michigander thinks your mindset re:16 year olds and cars is asinine and completely bizarre.
Birthright?? Jesus Christ. :rolleyes:
Fine. Then don’t buy kids cars. I didn’t realize there were so many undeserving 16-year-olds out there. I really liked getting a car, and look forward to buying my son one someday.
I am middle class.
The point was a safe, dependable vehicle. And there are still Pintos, but they’re uncommon.
Used car, state school, and, yeah, a nice down payment. I was totally middle class: the 4th of 6 kids to public school math teachers. My parents are smart, frugal, savvy investors, and generous with their kids. And middle class.
I can’t wait to share this thread with them, those RICH schoolteachers with the six spoiled kids.