I’ve been bothered as of late. It seems that the next generations coming through the pipeline don’t seem to understand the concept of accountability. I can safely say my generation learned the lesson well. It was often pounded into our thick skulls by our parents when we were late from a date or were somewhere we weren’t supposed to be and they found out, using their sixth-parental sense.
I certainly understood the laws of cause and effect. One time I learned it the hard way, mouthing off to my mother about one thing or another. The timing was my error. She was doing the dishes when I decided to have my moment. Without breaking stride at the sink, she sprayed a stream of Palmolive dish soap into my mouth with alarming accuracy.
I choked back as the lye did its thing in my throat. Rather than retreat, I regained what little voice I had and shot back at her with a vile line. It was then that she tore into me and after me in one felled swoop.
I ran as fast as I could through the zig-zags of the halls, trying to find the safety of my room. My mom was in hot pursuit and as I hit the bed she hit me, over and over again as I pleaded for her to stop.
I was 17 years old. I knew I had overstepped the boundaries on several levels that day, including the one that led me to mouth off in the first place, thinking I was some kind of equal at this age and should automatically be respected as such my mom.
What I learned was accountability. I was living in my mom’s house for free. Even though we were scraping by on welfare I was still being fed, housed, given gas money and my mom even did my laundry. I was literally biting the hand that fed me, all because I thought I was so grown up and that I didn’t have to do what my mother had asked.
Of course, I can’t remember what event set all these gears into motion. It was obviously something really serious at the time, for while my mom was great at threatening, her follow through was hit and miss, largely because she used a lot of tough love, served up by an unpredictable, yet mostly tender hand.
I learned a very good lesson in cause and effect that day. My mom could have easily tossed me out on my ear that day and with good reason. I was so full of myself, a newly-minted almost adult who was still very much a child inside.
I don’t see the up and coming generations understanding anything about accountability or cause and effect. It just seems to go in one ear and out the other, and most of us are too afraid of not being “unliked” on Facebook by our children to draw a line in the sand and stick with it.
Not that I am perfect at this line-in-the-sand thing. Still, my son has been given a rope to hang himself with as far as his car. Every quarter he doesn’t hit 3.0 on his report card, he owes me $250 back on the money I loaned him to buy the car and to date, he is only allowed to drive to and back from school. Otherwise, the car remains parked in the drive.
I understand that all this parenting stuff is imperfect at best. Teens love to test the edges of what we say we will do and we are often too busy or too loathe to do the dirty work. We promise punishments, but deliver them randomly or weakly, all because we don’t want to deal with all the outfall, or worse, the drama.
The invention of texting seems to have added a new level of whining. Kids no longer take their medicine. Instead, they have to text everyone they know about the injustice of it all, and then post it to Facebook and post photos of their sad little selves on Instagram. They think everything is an injustice to them, even when they’ve been told that there would be consequences for their actions.
And then their “friends” all chime in, agreeing that the parents are being unreasonable, that they should understand why they rules were broken and how they were unjust in the first place.
Kids think they are being abused because they lose their phone, their Internet, the TV or their car. They cry incessantly to anyone who will listen to them about how unfairly they have been treated and how their lives are being ruined by those mean adults who only think of themselves.
In short, they want to have their cake and eat it, too. Not only are we letting them, but we’re making more cake just in case they get hungry again. We lather on the “well next times…” and “you won’t like the consequences if you do that agains…” like there’s no tomorrow.
We are being meek and mild just when we owe it to our kids to be tough and strong. The world is a consequence-making machine. It doesn’t give a sh** about our kids’ ideas of entitlement and privilege. It doesn’t give a damn about those who are sure that their selfie-selfish life is so important that they are somehow above the rules and even the law.
Oh, I can hear them now. All those poor souls who complain all over social media about how their lives suck, how they are forced to check in with mom and dad just because they get to live for free at home. They want to stay out and party all night, sleep around, have fun without a single consequence or responsibility, and have all the privileges of being an adult without any of the responsibility.
To paraphrase the Trumpmeister, “they’re losers.” Thankfully, life will eventually kick them in the proverbial balls, again, because life doesn’t care about their pathetic little lives. Life just goes on, giving lessons wherever and whenever it wants.
It is one of a parent’s greatest joys, seeing life hand down another lesson to once deaf ears with a swift kick in the nuts. I, for one, look forward to each and every lesson being administered. Perhaps then these kids will understand how lucky they are and how good their lives are, even with all those silly rules that seem so arbitrary and unfair to them in their immaturity and self-absorbency.
In the Emerald City, counting the days, the blessings and the lessons to come,
– Robb