IF THE SIGN FITS…
If you think you’re going to just hand your eighteen year old the keys to their life and it’s all gonna somehow magically work out… that all the hours of schooling and “citizenship training” have prepared them to take responsibility for their life… you might want to think again.
When our kids were quite young, like three or four years old, we tried to imagine how many years of practice they’d need with making their own decisions to have any chance of taking the wheel to their lives and not ending up wrapped around a tree.
We settled upon ten years… probably because we prefer round numbers. Ten years of of trial and error. Three thousand six hundred and fifty consecutive days of supervised potential mayhem.
So… when each of our little bundles of joy turned eight we strategically started to do what doesn’t come naturally to parents… get out of their way. We let them make their own choices, only intervening when they careened towards serious trouble.
Birthday party or soccer game? Let me tell you, running around in the heat has no chance against ice cream and pizza in the mind of an eight year old.
I explained the logical fallout of choosing the party over their team. They made the call and… endured the repercussions. When the coach benched them in subsequent games, the lesson was learned… mostly.
The strategy has been in play for eight years now, and… it’s kinda working. Please don’t get me wrong, Wyatt our resident expert on every subject, is still just as unwittingly clueless as your average run of the mill sixteen year old. (Although I have to confess having someone in the tribe who literally knows everything takes a lot of pressure off Malia and I.)
One difference that we see between him and the other sixteen year old know it alls we meet, is he has eight years of practice with making his own decisions AND taking responsibility for them. It’s a big difference.