wring: how did it go? What was said? What excuses were used? We wanna hear the dirt!!
[fires up the Wayback Machine and {{{{{{{{ teenage Zette that nobody gave a flying fuck about }}}}}}}} ]
Wring, I’m glad I was able to help save a human life. 
Yesterday when The Cat came home from school, I tactfully drew her attention to the newspaper article–and she went totally ballistic on me. She was furious! I finally realized (too late–duh) that she was probably very threatened by this “dead teenager” story, even though she doesn’t know the girl (different town). All I had wanted to say to her was, “Did you know that you can get very sick, and even die, from playing the shot-drinking contest game like in Raiders of the Lost Ark?” and to make sure that she knew about alcohol poisoning. Well, she did, except that she assumed “shot” meant “whiskey”. Fighting a little ignorance, I pointed out that vodka and grain alcohol are more dangerous than whiskey because of the higher alcohol content. “Well, duh!” she yelled defensively.
Anyway, once she calmed down, her opinion of the girl, stated flatly, was that she must have been “stupid” to have gotten involved in something like that. She wanted to know how old she was again, and I said, “15” and she said, dismissively, from the lofty heights of 16, “Oh, well, she was just a baby.” And she added, “Maybe she hadn’t had Health Class yet.” I said, “Huh?” She said, in a superior manner, “Well, that’s where you learn about this stuff. Or maybe she just wasn’t paying attention.” I said, “Or maybe she didn’t care, maybe there was too much peer pressure not to join in, and once you start drinking shots, it’s hard to stop…” And she interrupted me with an impatient, “Yes, yes, I know, ‘after two shots you’re drunk’.”
So when the Little Kids came home from school later on, I gathered them around me (Bonzo age 13, La Principessa age 10, and her little friend, also 10) and asked THEM if they knew what a shot was. Bonzo and the friend knew; all 3 of them also assumed that “shot” meant “whiskey”. When I pointed out that actually grain alcohol and vodka were more dangerous, they all clicked on the word “vodka” and chorused that one shot of vodka equals one beer, and that if you’re going to get drunk, it’s better to drink beer than vodka.
So they sure didn’t learn any of this from me or the Better Half. All we’ve taught them is a general “we don’t drink ourselves, and getting drunk and making a fool out of yourself is stupid” but I’ve never told them about alcohol poisoning. But they knew all about it.
So I guess maybe Officer DARE isn’t such a twerp after all. Huh.
I had a talk with my almost 10 year old about ‘huffing’.
There has been a rash of coverage on the news here about eskimo kids in Newfoundland who put gasoline in garbage bags then inhale it, and stagger around giggling. THEY SHOWED IT ON TV!! great way to give dumb kids ideas!
ANyway, we talked about what it does to the brain, and how it makes you feel dizzy and funny because your brain isnt getting any air… how it can kill you, or leave you mentally handicapped.
I hated every second of that talk, but its kids his age that do this stuff - too young to get liquor, but old enough to get gas/glue/hairspray/etc.
I dont worry about him smoking dope - because of his asmtha. One drag off a doobie and he would need oxygene, so I doubt he will ever try that. But we talked about it too, and alchohol, and ‘bad touching’…
This parent stuff is hard.
Hmm, well I dont know how well the asthma defense would hold up…Believe me, “if I smoked a joint, I would die! You know how I have asthma mom!” 
It worked for a pretty long time on my parents.
Back to the main topic though. Parents always think they know where their kids are. All you really need to do is go over to someone elses house and sneak out from there. It’s a lot easier that way. Plus you can’t get in trouble from it because it isin’t your house!
As a teen, I see other teens all around me who lie and have keggers every weekend, and I always wonder how they do it. I guess there’s always at least one house where the parents are either out of town, oblivious, or they don’t care about having kids in their house getting drunk. It’s different for me because my parents don’t drink or leave alcohol around.
Then again, I have good communication and trust with my parents. They know I hang around with good people, and I’m comfortable telling them where I’m going. And even if plans change, I can easily say, “Yeah Mom, there was a change of plans, so we went to ____ instead.”
I’ve only snuck out of the house once, and it was for my own safety. My father had been taken to the hospital by ambulance that night, and my mother had gone with him. I was devastated, and I knew if I stayed home I would probably end up seriously injuring myself, so I contacted this guy I had met the day before and his friend (I know, stupid stupid welfy, but I had known this guy from the past and knew he wasn’t some bad guy, and his friend happened to be an ex boyfriend) and they took me to a restaurant. I just walked out the door (my 16-year old brother was in bed); it was 2am. After I loosened up a bit, we left the place and went to the guy’s house until 5am or so. Nothing happened, I was just glad to have human contact at such an awful time (btw, this is the guy I’m currently with; it’s been about 5 months now). When I got home I crawled in through my window in case Mom was home. 20 minutes later she did make it home, never suspecting a thing, and she still doesn’t know. I think I’ll tell her someday, but not until after I graduate. She’d probably get a laugh out it, but I want to play it safe.
I would never say my mom doesn’t care; she was just distraught and I took advantage of the situation, and I’m thinking that’s what other kids do sometimes.
Yes, that is creepy that such young kids would hang out with older people. Heck, even hanging out with a 19-year old seems weird to me until I remember that I’m 18. It’s hard to get used to.
I had (and still do) very loving and caring parents but between the ages of 15-18 I was drinking, having safe sex, experimenting with soft drugs and doing quite well in school thank you very much
My parents would ask and try to check up where I was but it was easy to cover it up / lie / dodge the enquiries. I could have been mugging little old ladies for all they knew and if I was caught they would have got the bad parents tag.
I know there are a lot of parents that do not care what their kids are up too and actually help to degrees with their kids delinquencies but there are also lots of parents who just don’t and can’t be there all the time. Luckily my friends and I were all sensible enough to have lots of fun but not screw up our lives in any way that I can tell.
Speaking from a teenagers perspecitive there is little a parent can do to stop their teenager from doing stupid shit short of locking them in their room. Of course once you lock your teenager up you’ll be inflecting deep emotional scars that will takes years of therapy to heal. So just let your teenager do what their going to do, hopefully they’ll learn. If they don’t get it out of their system now they’ll just have to get it out later in life. Its better for them to do all the stupid shit now while their parents are still there to bail them out of trouble. Just sit back and let shit be, and hope your teenager is smart enough not to kill himself.
No. Wait–not just “no.” Make that “HELL no!”
I have children, and while they’re not teens yet (one is 3, the other is 1), I will not just sit back and let them “do what they’re going to do.” If I sit back and let them do whatever the hell they want, I’m the one that’s going to get popped for it, and I’m the one that’s going to end up with kids on Springer/in jail/dead.
My kids are not going to get smart unless I and my husband, as their parents, teach them the difference between right and wrong. Of course, we can pack their little heads with all the knowledge we’ve accumulated over the years, and they’re still going to do stupid shit, but knowledge is power, and the more they know, the less inclined (hopefully) they’ll be to do the really stupid shit. That’s the way it was with me, anyway.
Something that my mom said to me once when I was a teenager still rings in my head. She said “there is nothing that you can do now that I myself haven’t already done…twice. So don’t you even think for a minute that I don’t know anything.” The tone of her voice, and the way she was looking me straight in the eye when she said it let me know that she wasn’t bluffing, or talking out of her ass just to try & keep me in line. I believed her, and as a result, I stayed away from the really stupid shit, because I knew I’d get busted for the rest of my life if I got caught.
Goat, you don’t get to be an adult without being a teenager first. So believe me when I say I understand what you’re trying to say. But as an adult who has lived through the weirdness that is the teen years, and is now raising children of her own, understand that I would be seriously remiss in my responsibilities if I just “sit back & let shit be.” Kids, no matter how old they are, need to have some boundaries. As a parent, I can exercise my judgement as to where those boundaries will be, and whether or not they can be redrawn from time to time. But they will exist, and it will be up to me, NOT my child, to set those boundaries.
I think its better Goat to actually try to get your teenagers to respect you. Then they will listen to you. You just cant force them.
Of course your right Persephone the best thing that a parent can do for a kid is to educate them. There is an important differance between knowledge and wisdom. As a parent you can impart all your accumulated knowledge to your teenager, unfortunatly you can’t give them any of your wisdom. Thats something that they will have to learn for themselves. Hopefully the knowledge that you have given them will help that not get killed in this process of growing up. Wisdom only comes from making many mistakes. No matter how much it pains you sometimes your just going to have to let your teenager take his hard knocks, and hope he learns from it.
May I stress communication again?
I had a long policy of not lying to my parents. We discussed party plans, looking at the pros and cons, together. My curfews were discussed fairly based on safety as determined by an informed discussion. This was great.
Until things became a matter of comfort. I was fine with coming home, calling, etc to be safe, I refused to keep a curfew because “my mom couldn’t sleep unless I was home and she needed to get up early”. Or they wanted me at home by 12 rather than 10 the next day because they didn’t want me to drive home tired, ignoring the sleep I would get while I was out. When the reasoning began to be “We would rather control you” and not “This is not safe because of x, y, z.” I was gone. Safety was no longer a concern of mine. I would lie to do what I wanted. My life to live, however incorectly.
I much, much prefer frank discussion. My parents are smart people. My mom’s sharp. I like having good advisors help me make decisions. I detest people trying to force me to conform to their comforts.
Talk with kids, they can like making informed decisions.
For all that I drank too much at times in my twenties, my high-school years were my most outrageous. I’d hardly count my parents as uncaring or stupid, however. I think that at the time (late 70s/early 80s) it was still possible for parents who were in high school in the late 50s themselves to underestimate the likelihood that kids out running around at night were up to something illegal, stupid, or both.
That was one factor in my favor. Another was that I’d established a track record of truthfulness in my accounts of where I was and what I was doing. I started off just after getting my driver’s license by playing Dungeons and Dragons at a local hobby store on Friday nights. We’d usually play until the store closed at 9:00, though they’d occasionally let us hang around until a little later. Gradually, the gang of us began to extend the evening a bit with some aimless driving around, then to a little hanging out at some convenient place with no adults around, then to a little drinking, and so forth.
Having established that I was with other kids that my parents more or less knew, at a reputable business establishment, and that we occasionally kept playing past the stated closing time of the store, it was pretty easy to maintain the fiction, even when we began ditching the D&D scene altogether in favor of other activities. Add in that my parents seemed a little worried about my social fortunes and were happy that I was getting out a little with other kids, and they saw no reason to look closer at what I was doing. This made it easier, when I found other options, to convince them that they were equally innocuous.
Another factor was that during this time, my dad was working about four hours away, staying there during the week and coming home on the weekends. By the time he got home on Friday nights, I’d have already left the house, having convinced my mom to let me do whatever I’d cooked up for the evening; they never got to double-team me.
For example, a music venue with no liquor license opened up about this time in my hometown. Shows typically started around 11:30, the rationale being that the other places in town that served alcohol had to close at 1 am on weeknights and midnight on Saturdays. My mom knew that I loved music and relished the chance to see live bands. I explained (truthfully, so far as it went) that the place didn’t serve alcohol, and satisfied her as to why their shows started so late. I omitted to mention that it was an open secret that a storage room off the downstairs lobby held a fridge with generic beer, for which a dollar donation per can was expected, entirely on the honor system. I also didn’t point out that people were perfectly free to bring their own refreshments, and that not all of them scrupled to refuse same to minors, nor that many of the minors were bringing their own alcohol.
(I realize that this description will stretch the credulity of people younger than myself, but this was pre-MADD, pre-Reagan-era-drug-war, pre-zero-tolerance-for-underage-drinking, etc. While the drinking age in Arkansas was always 21, in many states at this time it was 18 or 19. Drinking by minors was illegal, but was not looked on as a horrible social evil the way it is now.)
Even after the shows ended at 2 or 3 am, we didn’t always go straight home; we’d go for something to eat, or just in search of some place to hang out. I found out, during this time, that I preferred hard liquor to beer (much as I came to love beer later). I kept trying to convince myself I enjoyed pot, and I gobbled a lot of Primatene tablets as a legal form of speed. I’ve turned on the lights at a public park tennis court in the middle of a residential neighborhood at 1:30 in the morning so a friend and I could play Frisbee for an hour or so, hoping that the running around would help him metabolize the alcohol in his system faster so I could take him home. I’ve driven around half the night in an effort to force the local radio station, solely by the force of the collective will of those in the car with me, to play “Just What I Needed” from the first Cars album. For the better part of a year, I rarely made it home before 3 am on Friday and Saturday nights. But I always had a plausible story for my parents, and most importantly, I never gave them any reason to doubt what I told them.
Partly, it was just blind dumb luck that I never got caught (my friends did a couple of times, but not when I was with them). But it was partly having a sense of how far to push things. I drove at times when I’d definitely had to much to drink to drive safely, but when I was driving I never went beyond a certain point, and typically was the soberest of the group I was in. I never bought or sold drugs; if someone I was with wanted to share, that was fine with me, but I didn’t have enough money or sufficient motivation to seek them out. I think this bears out SuaSponte’s point about trying to build up your kid’s ability to tell the “bad” stuff from the “stupid bad” stuff. There’s a fine line between them, and I’m still grateful that I managed to walk it as well as I did, and that my slips didn’t have serious consequences for myself or anyone else.
As a parent myself now, and having lived twice as long as I had then, I know that you don’t get to know in advance whether some dumb thing you do is going to end tragically for you or someone else, and that it’s typically not worth the risk. I also have filed away all the evasions and equivocations I used with my parents so that I will be better equipped to recognize them if and when my kids try them. But I honestly don’t think my parents were to blame for my getting away with what I did; they certainly came down hard on my sister a few years later when, living in a much smaller town where everyone knew everything, they caught her every time she put a foot wrong. If anything, I’d say they deserve the credit for giving me the tools to at least be smart about being stupid.
Of course. I have no intention of sheltering my children from everything. They will fail at things, and they will fail me. They are human, and so am I. I don’t even doubt the fact that I will probably give them bad advice, because there are things out there today that I never had to deal with.
But I can’t just let them get knocked around constantly, or allow them to consistently place themselves in dangerous situations. My parents never just gave me flat “no, because I said so.” They always followed it up with “here’s why I said no, and here’s what the consequences will be if you do not respect what I have said.” In doing so, they taught me how not to get in to trouble.
Now, as has been stated throughout this thread, kids do stupid stuff. Regardless of what we as parents say, kids have this deep-seated need to find out just whether or not their parents are actually right. I know this, and I know it firsthand (I suspect you do too, Goat). I hope you understand that I can’t just throw up my hands and say “well, kids are gonna do what kids are gonna do.” I still have to try to teach them what I know, and if I think something truly bad will happen, it is my job to actively prevent them from going in to that situation, by whatever legal means I have at my disposal.
“Speaking from a teenagers perspecitive there is little a parent can do to stop their teenager from doing stupid shit short of locking them in their room. Of course once you lock your teenager up you’ll be inflecting deep emotional scars that will takes years of therapy to heal. So just let your teenager do what their going to do, hopefully they’ll learn. If they don’t get it out of their system now they’ll just have to get it out later in life. Its better for them to do all the stupid shit now while their parents are still there to bail them out of trouble. Just sit back and let shit be, and hope your teenager is smart enough not to kill himself.”
This is garbage but consider its source.
When I was fifteen I became an alcoholic like my parents. Two weeks short of my sixteenth b-day I moved out of my mother’s house (my parents are still married but my father worked four hours to the North. He came home on weekends), because I had a full time job and how could I possibly take direction from an abusive woman who drank nearly an entire 1.75 liter bottle of scotch every night? For the next 20 years I lived in an alcoholic maelstrom. The genetic propensity for alcoholism in my case can’t be underestimated but the environmental element shouldn’t be either. I don’t spend much time wondering about it but it has crossed my mind–what would my life been like if I had had reasonable parents who gave us the boundaries that we needed, as Persephone sagely suggests?
I got sober by spending five months in jail for my third OUI. It was a dehumanizing hell that I badly needed. I would gladly do it again for my sobriety. I am glad I didn’t kill anyone behind the wheel or otherwise.
If I had children they would lead ordered, structured lives fully cognizant of the fact they could easily endure what I did, but they sure as hell wouldn’t get a nice head start while they lived under my roof. Next spring I will finish my undergraduate degree. I am 37 years old.
My brother and sister aren’t so lucky. My sister called me last week and told me that she is “clean”. She is now a junky. In the same conversation she tells me that she is a junky but that she is clean. How long do you think that will last? My brother began drinking again after 9-1/2 years of smug sobriety. He calls me when he is drunk and tells me what a shitty deal he has gotten. He hurls invective when I tell him that his life is now his own responsibility. I wish that I could help them. He has a 4 year old son that he can see on supervised visits.
The point is that you can easily “do shit” in your teens that you might never rectify. But don’t worry. This isn’t you, Goat. We were all bulletproof sui generis when we were teens, too.
My heart goes out to the children of the self absorbed asshole parents who are “too busy” (or whatever lame ass excuse they murmur when the kid comes home in a body bag) to properly love what they have wrought.
“Speaking from a teenagers perspecitive there is little a parent can do to stop their teenager from doing stupid shit short of locking them in their room. Of course once you lock your teenager up you’ll be inflecting deep emotional scars that will takes years of therapy to heal. So just let your teenager do what their going to do, hopefully they’ll learn. If they don’t get it out of their system now they’ll just have to get it out later in life. Its better for them to do all the stupid shit now while their parents are still there to bail them out of trouble. Just sit back and let shit be, and hope your teenager is smart enough not to kill himself.”
This is garbage but consider its source.
When I was fifteen I became an alcoholic like my parents. Two weeks short of my sixteenth b-day I moved out of my mother’s house (my parents are still married but my father worked four hours to the North. He came home on weekends), because I had a full time job and how could I possibly take direction from an abusive woman who drank nearly an entire 1.75 liter bottle of scotch every night? For the next 20 years I lived in an alcoholic maelstrom. The genetic propensity for alcoholism in my case can’t be underestimated but the environmental element shouldn’t be either. I don’t spend much time wondering about it but it has crossed my mind–what would my life been like if I had had reasonable parents who gave us the boundaries that we needed, as Persephone sagely suggests?
I got sober by spending five months in jail for my third OUI. It was a dehumanizing hell that I badly needed. I would gladly do it again for my sobriety. I am glad I didn’t kill anyone behind the wheel or otherwise.
If I had children they would lead ordered, structured lives fully cognizant of the fact they could easily endure what I did, but they sure as hell wouldn’t get a nice head start while they lived under my roof. Next spring I will finish my undergraduate degree. I am 37 years old.
My brother and sister aren’t so lucky. My sister called me last week and told me that she is “clean”. She is now a junky. In the same conversation she tells me that she is a junky but that she is clean. How long do you think that will last? My brother began drinking again after 9-1/2 years of smug sobriety. He calls me when he is drunk and tells me what a shitty deal he has gotten. He hurls invective when I tell him that his life is now his own responsibility. I wish that I could help them. He has a 4 year old son that he can see on supervised visits.
The point is that you can easily “do shit” in your teens that you might never rectify. But don’t worry. This isn’t you, Goat. We were all bulletproof sui generis when we were teens, too.
My heart goes out to the children of the self absorbed asshole parents who are “too busy” (or whatever lame ass excuse they murmur when the kid comes home in a body bag) to properly love what they have wrought.
Some background, too: I’ve worked with ex-offenders for 20+ years, ran a correction center for 14 of 'em, and his father has worked in a substance abuse treatment ward for 20+ years, alcoholism runs in both sides of the family (my mom died of Acute alcoholism, my ex has been a recovering alc for 20+ years) etc. So, we’ve had ‘talks’ for his entire life, about what the laws mean etc. This of course, has not meant that he still didn’t make foolish choices based on wrong information. Now, the fact that his dad and I have been divorced since he was a toddler means that he’s never before had the “mom and dad” united in front of him grilling him over charcoal scene.
So, I pick him up from school, he thinks I’ll be taking him directly to work. “why are we going this way?” oh, I just have to stop at my office. “what’s my dad’s truck doing here?” hmmmmmm.
So we all sit down and I say “we thought we should talk, and that you should start the conversation off with what have you been up to lately, assuming, of course, that since we’re both here, that we do have some knowledge.”
He admitted setting it up (quite a way before hand) knowing his dad was going to be out of state, playing both of us “no dad, don’t send me a postcard, I’d rather wait until you’re back” and so on.
He was at a friend’s house on Friday night, his dad’s for the party on Saturday, then an older brother of a friend on Sunday (I’ve called the parent of the Friday night gig, to let them know that I always talk to the parent before Ben spends the night). He denied knowing that anyone had beer, denied anyone having sex. Do I believe those denials? nope.
So, at first he’s unrepenent “you never let me have any personal life, so I wanted for once to have fun”. we go over what risks he made for his dad (teens w/o supervision, damages, lawsuits etc.). He worrys about ‘I’m supposed to be at work’ (don’t worry, I called and told them you’d be late).
We get to the “you’ve been so mean to me lately” (the worst I did: three days a week, I take him to school for swim practice at 6 am, we live 20 miles away, I take him to and from work some evenings as late as 10 pm, while I just kinda hang out at my office, waiting for him to be done, pick him up from swim practice in the evening, or bowling practice 4 days a week, etc. this one weekend went : Friday night, hang around town til 10 pm picking him up from work, get up at 5 am to take him to work on Saturday, find out after we get there that he got the dates wrong and he doesn’t work, take him back home, take him out again at noon for his second job, get called right away again, no, he no longer works there, take him back home, take him to town on Sunday so he can ‘socialize’ with friends, take him to school on Monday, pick him up from Bowling practice, take him home, take him to school Tuesday 6 am for swim practice, pick him up 10 minutes late from swim practice, his first words to me were “you’re late”. I replied ‘fuck you, too’ - I was a bit peeved).
BY the end, he’s tearful, wanting assurances that mom still loves him, we table the specifics about punishments til we’ve all had a chance to calm down. my thoughts include specific loss of phone priveleges for the specific lies he told me (‘your dad is picking you up from school, right?’ ‘and he’s taking you to work Sat and Sun?’ ’ and taking you to school on Monday?’ got ‘yes’ answers to each) bad bit of timing on his part to get into trouble just before Christmas break (of course we’re going out of town for some of it, probably will be digging snow when we get back)
So, the good news is I won’t need to buy a snow blower, 'cause he’ll be available for all snow removal tasks. The better news: “he wasn’t twins”.
Having been a “bad, baaaddd teen” I thought I’d reply.
It’s always possible for someone with medium intelligence and a lot of will to selfdestruct to get out of the house and into a messed up situation, I did it most weekends myself!
I sort of grew out of it, and I didn’t die, but my best friend did. What could his parents have done? Not much in my oppinion, short of actually locking us away, and what kind of a life is that anyways?
So in my oppinion, when you’re past 15 or 16, there’s not really that much that anyone can do if you have a strong enough will to win and a weak enough will to live.
— G. Hrafn
I disagree. Even if the parents can’t prevent the kids from ducking around the rules, they can make sure that the kids know what their parents expect of them. Knowing that my parents expected me to be home after curfew, to not drink, and to not be somewhere unsupervised made me more careful when I was evading them. I still did what I was going to do, but I did less than I would have done if I hadn’t had to make sure that I at least appeared to be conforming to those standards.
I also disagree with TheGoat’s suggestion that there’s nothing to be done other than letting kids make their own mistakes. Let them see that actions have consequences, sure. They won’t learn if they know that someone will always bail them out, no harm, no foul. But it’s insane to suggest that a parent should shut their eyes on the “kids will be kids” principle.
While it is true that structure, communication, and education are importatn and certainly help the odds that your kid won’t kill them selves doing something stupid, the important thing to be learned from the OP is that when you hear of something terrible happening to some teenager you can’t really reassure yourself by saying “That couldn’t be my kid, I have assured that by being a good parent, dotting all my Is, Crossing all my Ts, doing just what I should have when I should have”. It simply isn’t possible to defend your child perfectly, and to insulate yourself from the possiblilty of tragedy. On the other hand, it also does no good to sit and contemplate the fact that Your Reason For Being is just one momentary brain fart away from getting themselves killed, so you might as act as if all those things you are doing are sure to be effective–they are certainly more effective than doing nothing.
I agree that we teens need boundaries. I agree that we need parents who are concerned enough with our safety to try to make sure we don’t do anything TOO stupid. I agree that children need to be taught when they’re young what will and won’t get them killed.
I’m lucky. Mom does all of this. Sometimes I hate it, but when I calm down, I understand why she does it.
However, I don’t think there’s a teen on this flying mudball who hasn’t told lies about where they are, who they’re with, and when they’ll be home. I don’t do it often myself (I don’t like the taste of alcohol, I don’t make many wild friends, I don’t hang out with 20- and 21-year-olds, and I don’t like being out of control of myself, so I avoid drugs), but I do it on occasion. And even then, I try to know what the situation is, and what’s likely to happen. If I don’t feel comfortable, I don’t set the 'rents up, and I don’t go.
I’m not saying that parents should let their kids run rampant. But my stepfather-troll-type-thing has made my house a veritable fortress, my eight-year-old cousin lives with us and I’m normally the babysitter, and sometimes, I just need to get out. Luckily, mom understands up to a point, and I can get out legitamitly. When I can’t…I go anyway.
I’ll be eighteen in five months. I’m moving out of the house and going into the military (Air Force, no less) a week after graduation. Up to this point, I haven’t maimed myself.
Some kids can take it, others can’t. Teach your kids when they’re little, and try to earn and keep their respect. And when it doesn’t work, kick some butt.
-Tezza