Beth Stephenson
The Edmond Sun
EDMOND
October 03, 2008 11:21 pm
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There are cold, hard facts that everybody has to learn at some point in their life, but if parents are tough, they’ll let their children feel the pinch to keep them from being bitten later on.
We held off getting cell phones until we were down to three kids at home, mostly because we didn’t get much reception in the mountainous area where we used to live. Until last week, we were up to four phones for a four member household. The older kids insisted that their younger brothers were spoiled, since we made the older ones walk 10 miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways, with nothing but baked potatoes in their pockets to keep their hands warm and feed them at lunch. (Wait, maybe that last part was from “Little Women.”)
It’s true that our younger children have luxuries that we couldn’t afford when the older ones were growing up, and I deeply appreciate our older children monitoring our parenting so that we don’t spoil their siblings. I’m sure they have nothing but the purest motives and it does help to know that every time we splurge in some way we didn’t used to splurge, we’ll have to explain it several times to the deprived older children.
When our oldest son was old enough to drive to school, we had a 10-year-old Geo Storm. The high schoolers had an early morning religion class that prevented them catching the bus, so they drove themselves to and from school each day. It was a sporty car (by my standards) that often got 40 mpg, was simple to repair and inexpensive to buy in the first place. It was perfect for a teen driver and we carried the minimum required insurance on it. But our son was careless one day and turned in front of an SUV that rolled right over the hood. Nobody was hurt, but the car looked like a kid wearing braces who lost a fist fight.
We required our son to pay for half the repair. The car was always a little wall-eyed after that, with junk-yard parts that didn’t quite match, but that bill was like sending him to a year of driving school, and he’s driven like a little old lady ever since. I might be exaggerating, but you get the idea.
The whole world is a happier place for our current 16-year-old now that he has his license, but he’s already had one of the those hard lessons. Happily, it came with little expense to us and the natural consequences are a pretty thorough punishment. It seems he left his wallet and cell phone on the roof of the car while he loaded his bike after a ride in the park. He was all the way home before he missed them and since he didn’t have his wallet, I had to drive all the way back to look for them. Nothing. When we called the cell phone, it went right to the message, so it was either dead or someone was talking on it. (To London? Hong Kong? Outer Mongolia?)
He worried and fretted and searched the car a dozen times. He said he dreamed that he found them that night and was relieved until he woke and found he was once again demoted to the realm of licenselessness.
To our relief and his profound delight, a man called the next morning saying he’d found the wallet and the remains of the phone. He gave directions to his home and the driver’s license, wallet and the five dollars it contained were soon reunited. But the phone is beyond hope. It would cost more than the contents of our son’s bank account to replace, so that’s that.
He can carry my pink phone when he goes somewhere that he needs a phone, or he can carry his brother’s old phone that has a damaged screen. Either way, he has lost his cool-ness asset. In my old and prosperous age, I am more inclined to have pity on the poor kid as the only one in the entire high school that can’t fill his spare minutes texting, talking and instant messaging, but my gut tells me that it’s better this way. The older kids would cry foul if we replaced the phone and aside from the convenience to us as parents in being able to contact him when we need to, I don’t like the cell phone culture anyway. My experience tells me that the cost of the phone and the lost convenience is well worth the extra caution my son will exercise with his property and ours. He’ll never have an accident because he was on the phone either, and that goes a long way with me.
These lessons are a bargain compared with the cost of learning them through a balloon mortgage or a too-expensive car purchase, or even choosing a marriage partner lightly. I’m brave enough to allow my kids to feel the pinch from their mistakes in the hope it will save them from a major bite in adulthood.
BETH STEPHENSON is an Edmond resident.
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