For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for October 16, 2019

something every parent should worry about and accept

If Michael is like his father he’ll come home with a new toy.

These days you put an app on their cell phone so you can track them.

Now there are ways parents can know exactly where their kids are going. Back then was a different story.

You have to trust him to not knock her up and create an Oops baby.

You have to train them as best you can and send them off to learn on their own. Odd, that.

Wait til he is in college and totally out of your sight, then you are really praying to get a call to know he is okay and not to get a call that he is not. (My collegiate son texts me jokes about twice a month – and I am grateful each time I get one.)

I had a little trouble empathizing with this arc. When I was Michael’s age, the area we lived in was small, scattered towns with large distances between. If one had an attraction to a boy/girl, the odds were that that person lived way too far away for you to walk to. The likelihood was that the only time you could see him/her was in school. Not until we could get drivers’ licences was there that kind of mobility.

The stuff my parents imagined I was doing was always WAY worse than anything I actually did. Then I find out when I got older what my parents were like as teenagers. I know now that they were worried I would be like them. Drinking, drugs, an arrest for drunk driving, an arrest for vandalism, getting pregnant. They were out of control. The worst thing I ever did in high school was stay too late past curfew at a friend’s house playing D&D or video games. I didn’t even have alcohol for the first time until college. My grandmother (father’s mother) tells me that I went way too easy on my father considering what he put her through…LOL

It’s all well and good to trust the upbringing and think your kids do what they know is right. However, these kids are 13 or 14! That is just too young for the kind of freedom Mike and Martha seem to have. Perhaps it is because Lynn lived in such a small town that she really didn’t know what life could be like in even a suburb of a major city.

Lynn’s Comments:

Now, many many years later, I am finding out what my kids REALLY did on these late evenings out. You do eventually get the truth. Mind you…at the time, it’s better not to know!

Just a reminder that Michael is in grade 10 so that would make him 15 going on 16… Anyway, what John replies is true.

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In our own real life, by the time our kids were going out and had a later curfew and I expressed those same worries as Elly is saying to John, my husband said that whatever they are planning to do they can very well do it all way before the curfew so that imaginary line is not even necessary, but it was more for our own peace of mind to know that they are back at home…

A maturing child is a lot like a top. Pull the string, and set them loose. When they’re younger, you have to set tight boundaries for them, lest they fall off the edge of the table. But as they grow, you have to relax your boundaries and let them set their own boundaries, or you may never get a fully functioning adult. And sometimes they make mistakes. It’s the human condition.

When my kids went out, I had the locks changed but as bad luck would have it, they still came home, got in the house and into the fridge.

John’s talking about trust. That is something Michael needs to earn by being honest. Not too sure with a smart-mouthed son how much honesty you are going to get.

Trust must be earned, and so far Mike hasn’t done much to earn it.