Oh my gosh!

If anyone tells you that life gets easier as you get Older and your Children get older – they are lying to you!

Heaven, I now know, is when your children are babies and totally have no options but the ones you choose for them. They are at your mercy then. Life is so sweet then although you don’t know it at the time. You choose everything – their diet, the clothing, what they watch on tv, bedtime and every other single decision. No worries such as ‘oh my god, I can’t buy my clothes at Walmart – ugh!’, Mom, I need to have a cell phone (when they are in grade 7!), and no social life activities that exceed anything that I and all of my 5 siblings experienced combined.

But my oh my, how that reverses when they get older because then YOU are at THEIR mercy.
You will suffer the consequences of their bad choices, mistakes and mind changing, as well as constantly remind them to take care of their responsibilities.

They ask you to co-sign credit applications to assist them, to help them insure cars because the system makes it so extremely difficult to do themselves (its a racket), to help them find places to live, to move them, support them etc and you do it. You do it because you care, because you are their parent and don’t want to see them fail. You want to give them every single opportunity to succeed as there are enough obstacles and challenges in life already and you want it to be easier for them.
But you know what happens??

Just a sec. Think back to when you were late teens or early twenties. Did you receive all this help from your parents? I know some who have but I was never among those lucky young adults nor do I know many who were. We went off into the great big world and we did it on our own. The hard way. Maybe that is why we have such appreciation for the things we have achieved.

– Back to the ‘you know what happens?’.

It seems to me that they don’t appreciate things that people assist them in obtaining. They don’t realize it is a privilege (and responsibility) to drive a vehicle. They don’t understand the risk or commitment or even what it legally means when someone co-signs something on their behalf.
Perhaps it is that they don’t realize how much harder all of these things would be if they had to accomplish it all on their own and couldn’t depend on others to make it happen for them.

So I have decided it’s time for a little tough love.

Although I am not tough enough to withdraw my help (at least not yet), I am going to start to place conditions on the help that I give. I’ll do this for you ….but you must do this in return.

The commitments I will ask for in return are not for me, but for them. I insist they make some decisions and better choices and to be at least 50% responsible for the risks, commitments and responsibilities that I have taken on in order to help them.

To drive cars, live in homes and appear to be an adult (and expect to be treated like one), these children/young adults must also take on the responsibilities of adulthood, including the consequences and costs of making bad choices.

I never worry about some disease or bad habit killing me. The four children I have will be enough to put me in the ground early due to stress, worry and constantly putting out fires.