Recently, friends of ours gave their teenage son some souvenir money to enjoy on a class field trip. It wasn’t a huge amount of cash – about $30 or so – and within range of the suggested guidelines from the school. By all accounts, the kid had a great time which he reported to his mother upon arriving home. When she asked how he spent his money, he happily shared his purchases with her — $28.50 worth of candy – to which she responded as any red-blooded American mom would:
ARE YOU CRAZY???!!!
In all fairness, I was not a witness to this exchange. It was shared with me after the fact – but it is an experience with which I am all too familiar so I’ll take a guess as to how the scene played out from there.
It took a moment for the child’s brain to click over from being completely secure in his decision to realizing that a colossal mistake had been made. He was initially confused as to what the big deal was and therefore did not react at the recommended level or speed of remorse, causing his mother’s head to begin spinning on its axis – slowly at first but accelerating exponentially until it was in danger of taking flight from her body as she posed additional rhetorical questions to her son:
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!?
HOW CAN SOMEONE SPEND ALL THAT MONEY ON CANDY?!
WERE THERE NO OTHER CHOICES!?
DO YOU REALIZE THIS WAS A BAD DECISION?!
Answers to these questions begun to form in the child’s mind (and hopefully stayed there for his own safety):
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!? Well, if you must know, I was thinking that I really wanted all this candy.
HOW CAN SOMEONE SPEND ALL THAT MONEY ON CANDY?! It was actually very easy. The nice people behind the counter took my money and gave me the candy.
WERE THERE NO OTHER CHOICES!? Yes. There were. I didn’t want them. I wanted the candy.
DO YOU REALIZE THIS WAS A BAD DECISION?! Uh, I do now.
And of course…
ARE YOU CRAZY? No. I am perfectly sane. You, Mom, on the other hand have all kinds of crazy going on right now and I really hope that Dad gets home soon.
And so it goes. It happens to the best of us. Our children exhibit a lapse in judgment and we can’t figure out whose fault it really is. When my friends gave their son this money, they never said, “Don’t spend this all on candy.” So, in the midst of going loco, Mom was wondering in the back of her head if the bad choice was partially her fault because she didn’t provide adequate direction. But truthfully, do you realize how long it would take if parents reminded their kids what NOT to do every time they went out the door? In addition to instructing her son not to spend the money on candy, she would have also had to tell him not to buy crappy plastic stuff, or play video games, or give it to a friend, or lose it, or….. and none of us want to be that kind of parent. As a result, we all have subsequent fallout “conversations” that go somewhat like this:
Son: Uh Mom, I got a little behind in my school work and I have four projects, a math sheet, and a test to study for …. tomorrow.
Mom: ARE YOU CRAZY???!!
Son: I used the money you gave me to buy dinner at the jazz competition to purchase 10 raffle tickets to win a ukulele.
Mom: ARE YOU CRAZY??!!
Son: I know we are having a special family dinner in 20 minutes but I was hungry so I just ate two bowls of cereal.
Mom: ARE YOU CRAZY??!!
In each of these cases (which may or may not have happened in MY home), I never thought to suggest out loud that my child should not 1) completely space out on long term school projects 2) play the lotto to win an instrument he already owns 3) not go to the Lucky Charms trough right before my mother’s birthday dinner. And for this omission, we all paid.
But, it has — and will always be — a required toll on the road to adulthood.
At the end of the day, we have no idea what our children will face as they run the daily gauntlet of decisions. The best we can do is cover the biggies – the bad choices where they could hurt themselves or others – and chalk the rest up to experience. They NEED to make these little mistakes – and we NEED to freak out when they do so they get the gist that something went sideways. You can bet our friend’s son isn’t going to overspend on candy ever again – and my guys made the errors above ONCE.
One of my favorite fortune cookies says: The only thing worse than learning from your mistakes is NOT learning from them.
Let’s embrace the craziness. Theirs and Ours. And recognize how much we both need it to make our children into the fully functioning grownups they long to be.
