Giving Kids a Leg Up from Your Own Experiences

One of the "near universals" you gain when you become a parent...if you like your kids, anyway...is the desire to give your kid the things you didn't have growing up. If you grew up wishing that your parents had given you more books, you shower your kids with Barnes and Noble gift cards at the first sign that they're interested in flipping pages. If you grew up with parents you felt were oh so restrictive then you try to give your kids more freedoms.

We want to give our kids the benefits of our experiences. We feel we knew what sucked from our childhood and don't want our kids to have to endure the things we did, or make the same stupid decisions we made.

But there's a problem with that thinking.

I thought about this after arguing with someone about the latest fads in education making the rounds in the public schools in the area. I lamented that the politicians dictating and mandating rules for schools to follow had little to no experience dealing with kids (or parents) in the classroom. The mandates are impossible to follow.

I was thinking about this recently when I was pondering what I'd do if I won the lottery (who hasn't dreamed about that?). I thought that one thing I would do is sponsor a deserving student in paying for college. I'd have slight stipulations, small conditions that if they broke the rules they would be on their own in paying for the courses, but if they stayed within the rules they'd get a free education. It would be a marvelous opportunity in a time when four years of college cost as much as my house.

Then I thought about the kids that have everything given to them. Kids that had a free Mercedes or Corvette, and if they wrecked it, Daddy would pay for another. The kids that have cell phones and treat them as if they're disposable...drop it in the toilet? Mommy will pay for another one tomorrow. Hell, if they don't like their phone for some reason, some have intentionally destroyed it so they'd get a new one.

These are kids that treat other people as property because, hey, if they're not of any use to you, why bother talking to them?

These are kids that have all the benefits I lacked growing up (and then some). And because they didn't know what it was like to have to experience some of the suckitude of the world they didn't realize just how good they have it.

I didn't have a bad childhood by any measure. Humans are hardwired to find the shortcomings in their lives and make that the "thing" that would make them happy; my family wasn't poor, but we didn't own a boat. I'd really love a boat. We never ended up homeless, but I wanted a treehouse. Things like that.

So if I made sure my kids eventually had a boat and treehouse, I'm pretty sure my kids would be impressed for all of an hour before wishing we had a bigger boat and a treehouse with outlets.

I extended this thinking to the kids that I had in mind for giving the opportunity for a college education. If I won the lottery. That part is important.

Unless they were kids that truly came from families struggling to meet the middle-class level of life, and truly wanted to have that college education and knew, truly knew that they were on the brink of not getting it, they'd never realize the opportunity they had.

Moreover, part of who I am today came from making stupid mistakes and lacking some of the things I wanted. So by depriving kids of some deprivation, I might not be doing them a favor. They'll end up lacking life lessons from their failures because I handed a success to them, rather than letting them fail and having them pick themselves back up.

I can tell my daughter about the things I ended up regretting in life. I can tell her and warn her and she'll still be the "typical teen". She blinks and stares without comprehension. She ignores what I'm saying, focusing instead on excuses for why XYZ happened rather than listening to the point.

She doesn't even bother reading the blog as far as I can tell. And this is full of lessons and ideas I've pondered and observed. If she wanted to know more about me, I'm pretty open on this website about my ideas. Not everything, of course. Some things are best left to discretion. But there's still a pretty honest baring of who I am here in this blog. She could not care less.

So maybe it's best if you have the means to simply spend that inheritance on yourself. The kids will simply squander it, and if you truly care for your kids you'll dole out the benefit of your wisdom in moderation. Let them make mistakes rather than give them the means to bypass what you recalled as a pain. Give them enough that they can stay out of jail, but not so much that they treat computers and game consoles and cell phones as if they were as disposable as paper towels.

Your Daughter the Teen Mother

This is a topic that is just something I end up thinking about periodically, probably because I have a 17-year-old daughter with a boyfriend. It's a subject of great debate yet is often kind of couched in a silence at the dinner table; an uncomfortable pebble in your shoe rubbing on your foot. It's simply avoided.

Fortunately my Asperger's and her mother's sometimes lacking skills of tact means this normally doesn't apply to our family as a problem.

If I'm reading this right, the US had a 84 out of 1,000 teens pregnant on average. This report shows that almost half of school-age teens have had sex at least once. Newer information just further convinces me that this isn't a topic that should be ignored.

I've worked around kids enough...with a young one and a teenager in the house, especially...to know that you can't take for granted that they know what they should or shouldn't do. You'd assume that they could figure something out. Then we get questions about things like how to make spaghetti ("The instructions are right on the box!"). For some reason apparently the biological drive to mate, despite fumbling and possibly getting slivers, is strong enough that teenagers manage to figure it out while simpler things like boiling water without disintegrating the pasta...with instructions in hand...escape them.

Lesson: don't take it for granted that they know their parents views, understand those views, and understand the consequences.

My daughter has had exposure to the hardships incurred by unwed pregnancies. She has an aunt that has two children without a father in the picture; she lives with her parents and so the children's grandparents use a considerable amount of their resources to raise the grandchildren. She herself...well, isn't my biological daughter. My wife became pregnant her last years of high school and married the biological father; the marriage crumbled and reached a breaking point nearly ten years later, after which she divorced and met me, so she's my step daughter and she was raised under economic difficulty and had to move around as jobs and money permitted while her mom worked during the day and went to college on weekends and at night to try making a better life for them. She basically grew up seeing what can happen (although I guess her mom was a bad role model for showing the bad side of being a teen mom, since her mom worked her tail off to get through school while raising a daughter with little help from the father and managed to graduate with a degree...she now has a master's degree).

She sees the hardship that her grandparents go through emotionally with having their daughter and grandchildren with them as well as experiencing her own childhood with parents barely scraping by because of balancing family, bills, and education.

But again, we couldn't take that for granted.

My wife wanted to make sure that our daughter was able to tell her...if not both of us (okay, I'm not a teddy bear to relate to when there's emotions involved. I'm cognizant that she'll first go to her mother if something like this happens to have some support before revealing it to me...) that she was sexually active so she could get birth control. Or come to us with questions.

We differ a little here.

She knows I disapprove of her having any relations with someone else before she is married. I know, it's such a conservative view! Weird! But the fact is that I disapprove of it before marriage, I have made it clear to her that she has full support to do whatever she wants to do once she is 18 and out of the house.

See, my philosophy extends from the notion that if you want to play adult, you need to be in a position to live like an adult. Having sex is a big risk; condoms break, they slip, and anything that can get one motile sperm into the uterus can get her pregnant. At that point you are then responsible for bringing a potential life into the world that didn't ask to be here. Taking risks like that means you think you're prepared to go into the world as an independent adult.

She was told that if she got pregnant, she'd be given a reasonable time to move out to her own apartment. She's not disowned or banned or anything like that...she just needs to get her life in order and understand that there are consequences; sex isn't a little hobby thing to do when you're bored or to fit in. We agreed we'd help her out with things when we could, but only as long as she's making a reasonable effort to keep her own head above water...steady job, education if she needs it, pays own bills, learns the joys of keeping her car running, things of that nature.

But we can't swoop in and save her every time. She wasn't living with us rent free if she decided she was living here; she uses electricity, she uses groceries (unless she buys her own), she uses space...she was going to pay a reasonable rent. My parents never told me much as I grew up about finances; I wanted to remedy that with her. We told her that we're paying a little under two grand a month to keep a roof over our heads. We make no secret from her what it costs with our bills and taxes.

But none of this made much of a real-world impact until she was strongarmed into getting a McJob. It was heartwarming to see her read her first paystub and realize how much money was taken out for silly things.

My primary concern, reinforced from the surgery, was that we want her to live on her own if we were to die. We have provisions in our will for her and her brother so that she'd be taken care of while my parents were still alive, and she's nearly old enough that should something happen she can care for her brother reasonably well in about five to seven years, I suppose (we're hoping to change the will should it become necessary later on), until he's old enough to live on his own. But my worry is that if we're always there to keep her protected from the real world she will never mature and lead her own life.

We need her to understand that. Desperately. I need to know that while it may not be pleasant, I want to know that if something happened to my wife and I that our daughter isn't going to be unable to sustain herself in "the real world".

I need her to understand that we will not raise her children for her because she wanted to experiment with her boyfriend because who will raise them if we die? Is it just another generation tossed aside unwanted after we pass away because we're too old to adequately care for her children?

She needs to understand that there comes a time when she needs to face the world and reality. We need to transition from careless teens to parents to grandparents...not perpetual parents. Just as my son and daughter can choose to do.

My wife and I don't want to look back on our lives after sixty or seventy years, just having the last grandchild moving to college from our home, wondering what we could have been doing had we not been raising our children's children or worrying about what is going to happen to our great-grandchildren. What if we had set firmer boundries? Or forced our daughter to take responsibility for her actions?

Of course this is all just one possible scenario. It's a worry, one of many that parents have to face. And like I said...as far as we know our daughter isn't active sexually, and she knows that abstinence is the only way to be sure she doesn't get pregnant, but that she is fully allowed to do whatever she wants when she is of age and we won't judge her negatively for it because we support her living her own life once she is taking responsibility for (possible) consequences. As long as she's happy and making her own way we can die without worrying about how she's going to manage. I told her that no matter what she chooses to do at that point it's fine with us.

Others, no doubt, have different opinions on the matter...

Nostalgia and the Transformers

I was a big fan of The Transformers growing up. I remember it was a priority for me to get to a TV every afternoon back in 1984 to get my fix of the cartoon and later I would pore over the latest Transformers comics.

Non-fans may be surprised to know that the comic franchise continues today, published by IDW comics. Not bad for a 25 year old toy.

Today the live-action version of Transformers is reinvigorating the franchise; new toys, new fans, and reignition of nostalgia for old fans like me. Thanks to the new movie release apparently some of the license holders of the Transformers brand decided to release remastered cartoons of the first season of Transformers on DVD. My wife and son picked it up for me for Father's Day.

I knew there's going to be some inevitable nostalgia rot. I have fond memories of the stuff I liked...but as I grew up the cringing parts sort of disappeared. Now they're captured in detail on DVD for me to relive and wonder, "What the hell was I thinking?"

There were technical mistakes. Color mismatches. Characters that aren't supposed to be there right in the scene ("Where's Bumblebee?" He's standing three feet behind you. Suddenly he's driving up to the group. Whoops.) In the first episodes the Autobots fly. In the third episode, Optimus takes a rocket pack from Sideswipe to fly after escaping Decepticons. So...can you fly, or not?

There were obvious mistakes in science and logic. One episode had Decepticons getting energy by stealing it from some crystal from the Earth's core (Fire in the Sky). As they extracted it the Earth cooled...um...our planet surface isn't primarily heated from the heat in the core, I'm afraid. It would make it hard to stand outside. And how do you have a forty foot robot transform into a handgun?

There's the plain weird...in the first season of The Transformers, I think the easiest way to cripple an autobot in car or truck mode is to tip him over. Every time someone is blown down a hillside or onto their side, someone has to step in to put them back upright before they're asked if they can transform. I'm surprised they don't all transform into turtles.

There were philosophical errors. Optimus believes in sanctity of life and freedom. They made the dinobots, and on the first activation the three Dinobots go on a rampage and "destroy" equipment before being stopped. So naturally, believing in the inalienable rights of all beings, he orders them deactivated forever and stuck into a collapsed cavern. Naturally the Autobots get into trouble, Wheeljack enhances the intelligence of the Dinobots enough that they are sent out to save the day, and now that they're suddenly beneficial to them Optimus graciously allows them to join the Autobot ranks. That's a nice message to send kids...if you're useful, you can live. But we're the good guys.

Which segues into the error of stereotypical cliche's. There is no depth of character; the beings are either good or evil. It's pretty clear cut. The bad guy wants to rule the universe. Why? No one knows. The good guy is entirely consumed by just stopping the bad guy. What happens if the bad guy is stopped? No one knows. Cartoon Optimus would have no purpose if not for that one goal. They're robots...giant computers...yet apparently computers that can't aim since most of their shots miss wildly. If someone's shot, they're fixed within ten minutes if it's not vital to the storyline that the character is mortally wounded. They're apparently not very good with building weapons either since we lowly humans have weapons that will level a city, while these four-story mechanical beings with interstellar travel have weapons that make little pops and sparks and the guy hit grunts a little big before getting back up and declaring himself injured, but would be okay.

There's even the GI Joe cartoon cliche of specialization. Every Transformer has a weapon that does something special. Starscream has null-rays. Megatron's fusion cannon. Who is building these weapons, themselves? They're weapons specialists and manufacturers? Shouldn't they just have a generic gun that just blows the limbs off each other? GI Joe took it one step further...when the one guy on the whole force that specialized in cold-weather fighting has a cold or breaks a limb, apparently the Joes just have to sit back while COBRA executes their latest scheme in the arctic.

But I still loved it.

I think it comes from the cartoon being a platform on which to hitch dreams. The idea of giant robots from another planet that can shift and fold into everyday objects was just plain cool. What if we could transform? Or had friends that were giant robots that could take us places? Wouldn't it be handier than having Mom and Dad hauling us to the mall? Of course the reason for all the shortcomings becomes crystal clear when you realize that as far as the company behind Transformers was concerned, the cartoon and comics were vehicles to sales. Sales slump, they introduce new robots. When The Powers That Be wanted to push sales of a new line of revamped toys they released the 1986 animated movie where many of the key characters...including Optimus Prime...were killed off. Supposedly the execs behind the movie were bewildered at the ensuing backlash they received from fans (they had actual emotional ties to these characters? No way...) (see links here and here).

Transformers obviously struck a chord in many of us as the franchise made enough money that it is still around today. More importantly the initial wave of Transformers had an audience that was static; as we grew up, so did the series. Only not as cartoons. As comics. (Okay, once there was enough of a chasm that the audience of the original series were having their own series, there were inevitable "reimagines" of Transformers like Beast Wars and Transformers Animated...ugh...).

My wife is a big critic of the cartoons from the early years. She finds them shallow and silly with inane dialog that appeals to the most childish of the childish, and I can't say I don't entirely disagree while re-watching the series. But I also handed her a copy of the Transformers Spotlight comic centered on Cliffjumper; a little red transformer that was almost looked like a brother to Bumblebee on the series (the toys were just repaints of each other) and was voiced on the cartoon by Casey Kasem. In the comic, Cliffjumper was stranded on a planet when his ship "had trouble". He befriended a sister and brother left parentless, and he helped around their farm. Eventually some Decepticons appeared and he dispatches three of them before they call for reinforcements and take the native friends hostage; Cliffjumper gives himself up to spare his friends, but in a turn...let's just say that you don't cross Cliffjumper. My wife's height of compliment was to say that she thought it was okay...which for a story about a cartoon series robot, is saying quite a bit. There are nuances in the comic that show more development you'd never see in the cartoons, such as when the flesh-and-blood friends ask Cliffjumper if he hurt other people and he refused to answer...he was an assassin, and the television series would never even allow the phrase "I'm going to kill you" to be uttered. The line between pure good and pure evil is made murky in these stories and makes the story more real in the process.

There have been other comic storylines that flesh out actual characters of dimension; the Megatron Origins series depicts Megatron as becoming a defacto leader of the Decepticons after the Autobot government basically opresses segments of the people and Megatron was an energon miner who traveled down a road of rebellion; he accidentally kills someone during an uprising and escapes imprisonment to fight in the underground gladiatorial arena where his skills were admired and honed. After reading that one I could almost sympathize with Megatron and his desire to kill all the Autobots.

Now the entire franchise has been rebooted with the live-action movie. I wasn't a huge fan of the new movies at first; since then the background has gradually been augmented with more background information and backstory from comic prequels (Alliance and Defiance, as well as a Reign of Starscream from just after the first movie). I've come to enjoy the film franchise as it stands in its own right. I still miss seeing the Dinobots, though. In another way I'm glad not to see them in the film. I'm afraid of what they'd have done to them and I kind of liked the characters as they were in the comics.

Character

Character is what you do when you know no one is looking.

Most people at some point in their lives encounter a situation where something is going on that is ethically or morally wrong, but in speaking up you can put your job or friendships in danger, or at the very least make you unpopular with people that can make your life hell.

My wife was recently in that kind of situation. This isn't a post about what had happened; it isn't my place, despite how very hard it is for me not to try to get the word out there at how outrageous the situation was.

This is about choices we make in that kind of situation. She chose to speak out. She didn't scream it from the top of the hills but she did do something that could make her unpopular with certain people in a position to make her life more difficult.

She chose to do what is right.

She could have stayed quiet, she could have rationalized away what had happened to help her sleep at night. But she actually chose to do something to try to right a wrong.

And I couldn't be more proud of her for it.