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Get off my lawn!

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A Wet Helmet:
Ah ha! We have a frame of reference issue.

For the record, when I use the term 'democracy' that is exactly what I mean.  One voice = one vote and majority rules.   I believe --and will hold on to the belief-- that that is untenable in a household.

Let's step back a little, let some of the vitriol settle, and let me see if I can weave a couple of anecdotes into something that makes sense when I'm done.

I used to have two guys who worked for me.  They were from the same place, were the same age, had the same interests, and were friends outside of work.   Dealing with them should have been pretty much a rubber stamp process right?   Nope.  Not by a long shot. 

One of them was 100% praise motivated.  If you so much as looked at him funny he took it as a criticism and he would literally mope for weeks.  His work performance would suffer for it.    If you wanted him to do something you had to tell him, "Look, you're the best guy I've got for this ok?  That's why I've chosen you..."   It was a non-stop ego stroke with him.   If there was something you wanted him to improve a little bit in it was "Oh man! You kicked so much as at this last week, and you're the best in the whole organization at that, and why couldn't everyone do something else as well as you?  You know what though?  Tom told me that Bob can do something else entirely just a little bit better than you.  I told Tom 'fuck no' and that you're the best at it.  He says...."

See what I mean?  An extreme example of praise motivation was required or this guy was absolutely fucking useless.

His buddy on the other had, was exactly the opposite.  If I didn't find something to literally scream at him about at least once a week, he thought that I was ignoring him and he'd go out of his way to fuck something up royally so that he would be the center of my attention.  With him, praise didn't do a thing.  Screaming did.   My conversations with him would usually involve a closed office door, me in his face with spit flying out of my mouth threating violence on him.   He'd be out of the office like one of those Evil Knieval wind up toys.  Motivated and moving fast for a couple of days, but then he'd kind of wind down, realize that I wasn't on his ass, and fall over.  Or, in a more literal sense, do something really stupid so that he'd get in trouble.  So I would have to look for little things to yell at him about before he felt like I didn't care about him anymore and he screwed something up really badly.

Two guys who required radically different communication styles to get the same result.

So having the understanding of myself that communication requires more than just "I say it, everyone gets it" I will often seek to clarify, especially if it becomes apparent (quickly!) that I'm being misunderstood. And that's what I call it too... clarification.  My point hasn't changed, though my method of explaining it might.  That's somewhat different than back pedaling in my book.   I didn't 'spit it out' in a manner that people got what I was saying the first time, I'm going to try to convey my point through a different approach.  I have a dry sense of humor, I'm sarcastic, and I'm snotty.  It's hard enough to pull off in person and not piss people off,  it's ridiculous to think that I can do it on a web forum.   But it's who I am.  It's how I talk, and if I think I'm upsetting someone unintentionally, I'm going to try to clarify that. 

Rarely --and I mean rarely-- do I deliberately try to incite someone. 

Part two:

I'm going to tell y'all something that I'm relatively certain won't be believed at this point.  Perhaps after I'm a little better known it will be.

I'm a cool-as-hell parent.

Seriously.


Here's how it breaks down, just so we know who I'm talking about:  I have a 13 year old daughter, a son who is about to turn 7, and a four year old daughter.

When my 13 year old asks me if she can go out, I ask her "What time will you be home?"   I don't say "Be home at whatever o'clock."   I try to give her the option to come up with something reasonable and then I hold her to it.   If it was say, a school night, and she wanted to go out and told me she'd be home at three a.m., my response would be "try again" until she got down to something reasonable.  I do my best to let her determination of reason preempt mine if I can't find anything inherently dangerous about it.   Because I do think that kids need to make their own choices and their own mistakes.  Within reason.  As soon as life, limb, or eyesight might get compromised, I reserve the right to put my foot down.

Here's where it gets funny with this one:  I go to great lengths with her to explain my reasons for doing something whenever it impacts her.   If I have to tell her "No", I always want to explain why. My folks were "because I said so" types and I hated it.  I don't want to do that with my kids. She, however, doesn't care.  All she hears is that "No" and doesn't want to hear a thing that I have to say.   My other two --who are much younger and could change-- on the other hand, will listen raptly to the reasons behind my  parental veto and usually are ok with it once they understand it.

The oldest though... she'll abuse any privilege that you give her.  Phone, internet, going out, going shopping... it doesn't matter.  It's never enough with her.  She wants what she wants when she wants it, and anything that stands in the way of that is awful.   

She was recently restricted from the phone and the computer.  I don't really like to punish but there were a slew of incidents leading up to it.  One of the things was I caught her on the phone with her friend at 12:30 on a school night.   I came upstairs and herd her talking.  I looked at the phone base station and it showed that there was  a call on.  She heard me coming and she hung up.   

Me: "Are you on the phone?"

Her: "No"

Me: "Were you on the phone?"

Her: "Yes"  (Well hooray for her for not lying.  That was a bad habit that took a looooooooong time to break)

Me: "Your mother told you not to use the phone and it's 12:30 at night. On a school night."

Her: "Oh, you know, I forgot Mom said no phone and I didn't realize it was so late"

Me: "Oh, you didn't know you were doing something you shouldn't have been doing then?"

Her: "No"

Me: "Then why did you hang up when you heard me coming?"

Busted.  She knew. 

Anyway, the point is for a variety of reasons she lost her phone and internet privileges.  She did really really well not sneaking around (another problem we've had with her) so I gave them back with a congratulations for doing so well, I really appreciate the maturity you've shown, etc.  When I took them away I made a point of saying that I'm not trying to keep her from the phone, and I'm not trying to monitor what she's doing.  What she needs to do is realize when it's appropriate to use the phone, and when it's not.  She needs to have the maturity to say to herself "It's getting late, I should be in bed, I'll call tomorrow".   THAT is all that I want her to demonstrate to me.  That she is capable of doing things with a modicum of responsibility.   She's not though... yet.     She still has to have it *all* right fucking now.

I give her the phone and the internet back on Friday.  On Saturday morning she was sitting at her computer and I asked her to do something to help her mother that would take all of about five minutes.   She says "Ok".   Fifteen minutes later she's still at the computer.  I remind her again that she needs to help her mom with something and that mom is basically waiting on her.   "Ok, I'm getting up now" she says.  Ten minutes later she's still sitting there.   What choice do I have at that point but to say "Get up now and help your mother." ?   

I don't like doing it.  I don't want to do it, but she does things the hard way.  Instead of placing the needs of others above her own wants for all of five minutes (which is a sign of maturity) she had to turn me into asshole dad telling her do it now.   She got right back on the computer and was almost late for music lessons because she didn't want to get up and get ready to go.   

She almost missed the bus this morning because she was on the phone.    Her missing the bus is not something that only impacts her.  Her school is is ten miles away.  Either her mother or myself then has to take her, and she's got a little brother and sister that need to be ready to go at certain times too.  If she's not on the bus, the entire morning schedule is blown.

So I'll let her make her own mistakes, and I'll let her make her own choices, right up to the point where they become dangerous or have a detrimental impact on others.   If that makes me a shitty parent, then I'm a shitty parent.  But I believe that some parental structure and guidance is critical to understanding that there are consequences for the choices you make, and sometimes you don't get exactly what you want in life. Sometimes, consequences are good, sometimes they are bad.  Otherwise, that realization comes as a judge is banging a gavel, or the paramedic is running an IV.

Valrus:

--- Quote --- Otherwise, that realization comes as a judge is banging a gavel
--- End quote ---

Yeah I think we can agree that that judge is probable making a Bad Decision and there will be Consequences.

what?

Barmymoo:
Wet Helmet, you do sound like a good parent, and I never meant to say that you weren't. All I was originally meaning to say was that it's a difference in attitudes between myself and my mum's partner that I think is related to age.

On the other hand, the examples you are citing are different to the one I gave, in that the things you don't let your children do are dangerous or stupid in some way. In my example, it was more about me having an opinion that was disregarded on the grounds that I'm a teenager and he's an adult. My mum didn't say anything much until after the argument, although we all knew already that she isn't a football fan or a fan of television while we eat.

This thread seems to have started dissolving into a bit of an argument, I'm afraid that might have been my fault. But it's interesting!

Also, thanks for the wikipedia link whoever that was :-)

0bsessions:
Bluntly speaking, your anecdote only speaks to me in a manner of you just had two really damn high maintenance employees who both needed to sack up and learn to motivate themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if this has something to do with why they "used" to be your employees.

In terms of your daughter, that's something I admittedly have very limited understanding on. The only obvious frame of reference is first child syndrome combined with the five year difference between her and her next sibling. All three in my family are within close age proximity of each other (My older sister is actually closer to my youngest brother in age than your two oldest are), so my parents learned second child and third child lessons quick enough to be able to still apply them relatively seemlessly before any of us got too old for them to be properly applied and not protested too hard. Beyond that, it's hard for me to determine since, as I mentioned earlier, my sister has some severe mental illness. This pretty much upended all birth order trends and psychology as the roles are very hard to peg as a result.

Honestly, it would seem that a good portion of all this has been a perfect storm of semantics, misunderstandings and poor wording/stubborness on both of our parts and I apologize for my end of it.

Barmymoo:
On the plus side, my word count has crossed 200.

What sort of things do you mean by second and third kid lessons? I'm three years older than my brother and I think we were brought up in a similar way, although I was expected to be a good example (I wasn't really) and he goes to a fee-paying school whereas I went to a state school. I'm not sure if that was a good decision or not (for him, I mean. I loved my school). So I can't really think of many lessons they learnt from me. On the other hand, I was a small child at the time and they'd probably have a better perspective. But I've talked about this sort of thing with my mum and I don't remember her saying anything in particular to suggest she did anything different with him.

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